Tomás Reyes Aguilar

You stand in a kitchen in Los Angeles, in the dark, in a body that is sixty-four years old, and the left eye drifts toward the window while the right one holds the refrigerator light. You have been him for less than a minute. You came in standing at a counter with a glass of water you had not asked for, and you will not finish it.

It is not that he is bad. His knees are fine. His mustache is a pleasure to touch. The trouble is the house: every drawer you opened, a life of someone else's small arrangements, a wife's handwriting on a jar of rice, a daughter's voice on a machine you did not mean to play. Everyone here is asleep and loves a man who is not you. You close the laptop on the wheel and then you open it again. The page is patient. You pay.

The wheel turns. His name, whatever it was, goes out of you like breath.

Then weight. Heavier than the engineer, lower to the earth, the mattress pushing up against your cheekbone, face down, one arm hanging into cool air. His breath is ragged and wet and then, in one pull, it is even, and that is you. The arm comes up by itself, dragged by your intention, and the body rolls onto its back and the hands fold at the chest like a man laid out. He has never slept like this. You can feel that the body doesn't know the posture. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across his stomach, a soft round hill rising and falling.

You touch the sheet and it gives you him. Not words. A sourness he feels about unmade beds: she would have made it. Not the girlfriend. Before. A woman with a cardigan and a laugh, years back, and a bed so tight you could bounce a coin. He still keeps one corner tucked out of habit, and tonight he didn't.

The shirt is cotton, soft at the collar, washed past its color. You press your fingers to the hem and the morning arrives in his hands: standing at the edge of this same bed, buttoning a work shirt from the bottom because his fingers prefer it, the sleeves rolled twice, the ponytail pulled low and snug with a black elastic he holds in his teeth. He shaves slowly, the jaw tilted to the light, because the girlfriend likes it smooth and because the sergeant in him, some boy in him, wants to arrive clean at a ball field where nobody is watching. That is what he loves: the stripes in the outfield before anyone has walked on them, the stands empty, the sprinklers ticking, a hundred and ten pounds of paint powder on his shoulder and no one asking him for anything.

The carpet is rough under your heel. It gives you Sundays: three children in a row on a church bench, a tie tugged loose, his palm flat on a small back to stop the fidgeting. A hymn he sings flat. Coffee he does not drink, a cigarette he does not light, eleven years, and still the right hand goes looking for the pocket when he is afraid. Beer he does not touch; a night he does not discuss; a promise made on his knees to a God he talks to like a foreman. There is a little money saved, in a place only he knows, and what it is for comes up warm: a roof, a tuition, a ring he has not bought. The old girlfriend's name sits behind it like a stone in a shoe, not love, not nothing.

The body underneath all this: back stiff from the mower, the low ache in both shoulders, calves like rope, a belly he carries with a kind of peace. Thick calloused fingers that already know the shape of a rake handle and want it.

You lift your hands into the streetlight and turn them over. Broad, brown, ridged across the palms. They are not yours; they are yours now. You look up, at nothing, at the dark ceiling of a man's whole life, and you say it softly in his low voice, trying it on.

"Okay. Okay, Tomás."

Somewhere under the breath the wanting is already a small animal, turning in its sleep.