Vijay Nambiar

You are standing at a window in Manhattan, in a body that has been yours for less than a minute, and already the wheel is warm in your mind. Stephen Kvarnstrom's phone is in his hand. It has just buzzed with a calendar reminder, the quarterly review, forty minutes of slides he would be good at. His knees are fine and his coffee is the right temperature. He can do everything, and you do not want any of it. You wanted something and you got a name on a badge, a beauty mark you keep checking in the glass, and a morning with no room in it. You press the page open with his thumb. The wheel turns and you let it.

Water. It is on your face before you have a face, cold and steady and straight down. Your hood is back, and you did not do that, he did, one beat before you came. Your chin is lifted into the rain, your eyes are half shut, and the runoff off the shelter roof is pouring past your shoulder onto the pavement where you stand. A bag hangs from your right hand. The board behind you says 3 MIN.

The jacket comes first. Nylon, slick, a zipper pull against your sternum. Your left hand finds the hem, and he is there. It is the morning, a closet door, the green one on the hook and the black one beside it, and he took the black one because the sky was the color of a nickel. He pushed his arms in one at a time, left, then right, the way he has since a job he left twenty years ago. The cuffs snap at the wrist. He zipped it to the breastbone and no higher, because a collar at his throat makes him think of cigarettes, of the porch roof in March, of the eleven years he put them down and the one night he nearly didn't.

The tote bag handle bites your fingers. Canvas, stained. Library books, two, due today. He reads about birds he never sees. He reads about stars. Spiritual, he'd say, if anyone asked, and no one in this town does, so it stays unsaid in the car, in the yard, in the dark. A woman once laughed at that, kindly, in a kitchen with yellow curtains. Her name comes and goes like a bus passing. Marian. She lives in Dayton now. He drives past the exit sometimes and does not take it.

You lift your right hand to wipe your eyes, and the thumbnail is bitten to the quick, the skin around it raw. Your teeth already know the edge they want. He has been doing it for sixty years, through every phone call, every ledger, every funeral. Your hand stops itself in the air. Underneath, the money: a quiet sum, an old sale, a business of small parts that he sold well and never mentioned. It sits in him like a stone in a pond, and he has spent almost none of it. A closed diner on Main stands behind him, where he ate eggs for thirty years and where the owner died. The one stoplight is turning over to red for nobody.

His knees ache in the wet. The left hip speaks in a dull note. His back is a rack of small hard locks, and his lungs are clean and slow. You breathe, and the air goes all the way down. Rain has found the dyed hair, flat and dark, and run it into your eyes. The shoes are soaked through. He stepped out to feel it, you know that now. He has not been cold in a long time and wanted to be, just once, honestly.

You bring your hand down in front of you. Brown, wet, a stranger's knuckles, and you turn it over and look at the palm filling with rain. Then you lift your eyes and say, to nobody, "It's cold. Good." The bus is two minutes off, and you wonder how long he lasts, and when the wanting comes back.