Vernon Telesco

You are standing in Mahmoud Hargrove's kitchen in El Paso, and the refrigerator is the only thing awake. Sixty years old, bad at the knees, a software engineer's soft middle under a T-shirt that smells of someone else's detergent. You came down for water and stayed to stare at the screen on the counter. He has a good life. A mortgage nearly done, a wife asleep upstairs who says his name in her sleep, three monitors, a dog. All of it works. What sends you back is small: you have spent ninety minutes in him and you still cannot make yourself care whether the build passes. Everything of his arrives as a chore. You want to want something. You open the page. The wheel is already turning, and you let it.

It is a plain bedroom, and the dark is the heavy Houston kind. You are face-down. One arm hangs off the mattress, the fingers loose above the carpet, and a thin blade of streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across the sheet. His breathing is ragged, a smoker's catch. Then it evens out, in one breath, because you are in it. The arm draws itself up. The body rolls onto its back and the hands fold on the chest, a posture he has never once slept in. He does not know. There is nothing left of him to know.

You lie still and the body tells you things. Sixty-five years. A dry rasp low in the lungs, a pack a day, the want for a cigarette sitting in the roof of the mouth. The left leg ends below the knee, and the socket is not on; the stump is warm and faintly sore, a ghost itch where the foot would be. He is small, five-three, and the mattress feels wide. The sheet under your fingers is cotton gone soft from a thousand washings, and it gives you something unasked: a woman's hand smoothing this same sheet flat, years back, saying *you'll wreck it again by morning*, and the feeling that comes with it, a tired, easy tenderness like a warm bath. The ring on the left hand is thin and worn, and when your thumb turns it you get a church, a heat, a borrowed suit, and the terror and joy of being twenty-six. Catholic, then. Your lips know the shape of a prayer before your head does.

You reach for the nightstand without looking and your hand finds the lighter, the pill bottles, the clock, in the dark, because it has done this ten thousand times. The lighter's knurled wheel under your thumb opens an afternoon on a loading dock, a younger man's voice, laughter, smoke, and under it something he never told anyone: a night on a wet road, headlights, the long quiet after, and waking to the shape of the blanket where the leg should be. He wasn't brave about it. He cried in a hospital bathroom with the faucet running so no one would hear. You feel it, the shame and the stubbornness, and the way he learned to walk again out of pure spite. The carbon-fiber leg is leaning against the bed, and when your hand touches its cool ribbed shaft you know the exact click it makes seating, and the first morning he stood on it and his wife was crying and pretending not to.

Money is in him as well, a quiet ease. Decades of work, a paid-off house, a number in an account that lets him sleep, and it still does not matter much to him. What matters is the breathing beside him, or the place where it is. The pillow smells of her.

You lift your hand into the streetlight and look at it. Short thick fingers, a pale band of skin under the ring, a tremor that is only age. You turn it over. Then you lift your eyes and whisper, in a voice with gravel in it:

"All right. Let's see what you were."

Somewhere under the wanting, already, the question starts: how long. An hour, a year, whether you wake here tomorrow, or whether the wheel calls you by morning.