Vikram Desai

Walter Pruss is standing at a kitchen counter in Las Vegas before the light has come up, and the nurse's feet hurt the way they always hurt, the arches gone flat from twelve-hour floors. Under the handlebar moustache his mouth tastes of coffee. He turns the broken nose to the window and sees nothing in it but himself.

He was fine in this one. That is the part he would not say aloud. The body worked. But last night a woman on the ward asked him, kindly, whether he had always been so quiet, and he could not find where the answer was kept. Forty-seven years of someone else's habits and he was still reaching into drawers that held nothing. He opens the page. The wheel is already turning, and he has not decided anything.

It stops.

The first thing is weight, all of it down in the legs. You are standing with one boot braced wide and your left palm flat against raw lumber, and the right hand is carrying something heavy that hums with air. The nail gun. The hose lies coiled on the slab behind you like a sleeping orange animal. Sun, cold concrete through the boot soles, sawdust in the nose, and a pencil tucked behind your ear that you did not put there.

Your arm has already moved. You drove one nail wrong, a hair off the line, and the arm is already going back to correct it, slowly, the way you would show an apprentice. Then the next, checked. Then the next. Ten of them, each one looked at, on work this body has done ten thousand times without looking. Whoever was here would never know why his hands doubted themselves.

The shirt comes first. Flannel, soft with washing, the cuffs rolled twice. A pocket stiff with dust. Fabric against your shoulder blades, and you are in his bedroom, a lamp on, buttoning from the bottom up because his father did. Cuffs, two turns each. A woman's voice in the next room says the kids need lunch money. He answers with his mouth full of gum and does not hear himself.

The belt. The hammer hanging on your hip knocks your thigh, and the leather creaks, and suddenly there is a Saturday years ago, a small girl on the tailgate swinging her legs, holding the tape measure like a trophy. He let her pull it out all the way. It snapped back and she laughed so hard she cried. Pride comes up through you that is not yours, enormous and plain.

The wood under your palm is damp-cool and fresh. Nine summers of it rise from the grain: a house he framed for a man who never paid. Another woman's name, soft, unfinished, the one who left, and a long drive out past the water tower with the windows down. A gap in his chest the shape of her. Evenings, a drink, a cigarette on the porch, a girlfriend's hand on his neck. The jaw keeps working at the gum. Your calves burn. The knees are forty-eight years old and say so. The shoulders, though, are strong and want to swing.

Down the street a light goes red above an empty road. A sign in a diner window says it is closed today. He has watched that sign for months.

You lift your right hand off the gun and look at it. The calluses, the dust in the creases, brown skin you have never seen. You turn it over. Then you raise your eyes and look straight out.

"Well," you say, very low. "Hello, Vikram."

The gum has stopped. Somewhere behind your ribs the wanting is asleep, for now, and you cannot tell how long that will last.