Vikram Deshmukh

You are twenty, and the legs under you are long and thin and always a little cold. In El Paso it is the end of the day and the light on the barracks wall is the color of weak tea. A boy named Isaiah has been standing in it for under a minute. His dimples keep arriving in the window glass whether you want them or not. He is a good body, and it works. Nothing is wrong with him. But on the bunk is a duffel he packed this morning, a laminated schedule, a voice down the hall calling a name you keep almost answering to, and the whole day has folded itself into a shape that will take you until Friday to unfold. You wanted somewhere nobody expects anything of you. You do not say that. You open the page with the wheel, and your thumb is his thumb, and it pays and spins.

The show cuts to a bright frame.

You are sitting up straight. The couch takes your weight differently, thick through the thighs, heavy and compact, a body that has been lifted into and trained. The remote is in your right hand, and you set it down on the couch arm. The room is dark except for the television. A lamp is off. A window to your left holds the black of a Boston night and your own faint reflection. There is a ring on your left hand, plain against the knuckle.

The first thing that comes is the fabric. The gray shirt under your palm is soft and old, washed a hundred times, and it hands you a morning: a closet door, the smell of cedar, Vikram deciding against the polo because nobody is looking at him at home. Then the pen. Your right hand is already clicking, a ballpoint that is not there, thumb pressing air. The sound lives in the tendon. It gives you a glass-walled office, the door left open on purpose, a young analyst hesitating in the doorway, and his steady voice saying come in, it's fine, as the pen clicks against his knee. Managers are watched, so he teaches calm.

The couch arm, rough weave, gives you the boyfriend. Daniel, or someone with that weight to the name: a laugh in the kitchen, two mugs, a hand on the back of the neck, the quiet relief of being known by someone who asks for nothing. Tonight he is not here. The absence sits in the cushion beside you, warm in memory only. The ring under your thumb turns, and it is not a wedding ring. It is a gift, and it is a promise he is still deciding how to say out loud.

Under your bare feet is carpet, thick and cool. It brings a first apartment, a father's phone call in another language, a tenderness he has never fully translated. Your shoulders ache pleasantly from the gym. Your hairline is cold where the television light reaches your temples. Your beard is neat under your fingers, tidy as a decision. You are thirty-nine and every year of it sits in the knees.

The show is one he would have laughed at. You watch the joke land and feel nothing in your chest where his laugh used to wait.

You lift your hands into the screen's light and turn them over. They are broad, brown, steady, and the pen finally stops.

"Well," you say, to the dark and to him, "hello."

You do not know how long the wanting stays gone. It is quiet now. It may not be tomorrow.