Victor Hwang

You are standing in a half-built wall in Rural Texas, and the man you are wearing has a nail gun that keeps wanting to drift left. Sixty years of knees. The morning is already loud with compressors. For less than a minute he has been yours, and in that minute you have found out the thing he cannot do: he cannot stop being tired in the shoulders. It lives in him like a tenant. You wanted a body that did not argue. This one argues about every stair. You set the gun on a sawhorse, and you open the page with a wheel on it, and you spin.

Cold. The first thing is cold, then the weight of a handle in both gloved hands, a steering bar leaning into your palms. Your thumb has already found the throttle. Concrete hums up through the boots. Light stands in the open dock door, and a cul-de-sac sits out there in heavy air, brick houses, a gray car. Your hand did something wrong half a second ago, and you correct it slowly. Then again, to be sure. Then ten more times, each one checked, on a motion this body could do asleep.

The jacket comes first. Stiff nylon quilting, the zipper cold at your throat, and it gives you a morning: a bedroom with the curtains still shut, a wife's back turned toward him, her breathing. He sat on the edge of the bed and put on the thermal first, then the black pants with the knees gone pale, and he felt the old ache of wanting to say something to her and not saying it. The vest rasps against the jacket. Orange. He pulled it over his head in the hallway and she called out, *you forgot your lunch*, and he came back for it and stood a second too long in the kitchen light.

The gloves hold more. Left glove, the ring pressed through the leather against the bone of his finger. A different glove, years back, a different hand: a woman who is not his wife laughing in a car, a recent thing, an ending he did on a Sunday. He is ashamed, and it is quiet shame, the kind he carries to the temple shelf at home, where he lights one stick of incense and says nothing. The beanie holds his hair down. Under it, the hard side part he combs every morning in the mirror, wet, careful, as if neatness were a promise. His jaw is smooth and cold from the razor. His brow is heavy; his wife once kissed it and called it his roof.

Your gut sits soft over the belt. Your calves burn from standing. There is a craving for a cigarette, eight years quit, and it arrives as a taste in the back of the mouth. In the bank there is a little money, put away dollar by dollar, and the number comes to you with its worry attached.

You lift your right hand off the bar. You turn it over, glove and then bare when you peel it, a stranger's palm, creased and pale. The ring is there. You look up past the pallets into the light and the wide, bright, ordinary street.

"Well," you say, in his voice, low and level. "Let's see how long you last."

And already underneath it, the question: how long are you him?