Vikram Sethna

Dale Ostroff's knees ache in a way that has nothing to do with anything you did to earn it, and that's the trouble. Three minutes standing in this man's boots on a concrete floor under sodium light, and already the lower back is talking, already the left knee has that grinding thing it does, and somewhere behind the sternum there's a dull chemical hum that you understand, with a kind of insulted clarity, is a blood pressure medication wearing off schedule. You picked up a box of something — bathroom fixtures, the packing slip says — and your hand, his hand, gray hairs on the knuckles, moved to set it on the cart, and you thought: I did not sign up to be tired. You spun for a body, not a body's whole medical history. Three minutes was enough to know you weren't going to like the taste of this one. So you go back to the wheel in your coat pocket, get the phone out — his phone, cracked case, a photo of a grandchild on the lock screen that you didn't ask for and don't want — and you spin again standing right there in the aisle, cart handle still warm from his grip.

It takes him mid-motion, the way it always does. A hand — younger, no gray in it, olive-toned, thin-wristed — is resting flat on the cover of a fat, water-stained hardcover atlas, in the act of laying it down on a desk that isn't yours yet. The light through the window behind you is the flat white kind that has weight to it, and it is throwing a long rectangle across a floor tiled the color of old chewing gum. Empty desks. A lanyard swings once against a collarbone that is not the collarbone you had four seconds ago. The motion that was carrying the book down goes wrong — overshoots, taps the desk's edge instead of the flat — and then corrects, slow, deliberate, the fingers walking the spine flat like a man reading braille. Ten more books come off the shelf behind you and each one gets set down checked, watched, though this hand has done this exact motion ten thousand times and has never once needed to look.

The shirt is what opens first. Chambray, thin from washing, warm across the shoulder blades from a window that has been beating on this room all day, and it comes with the morning — not this morning, a composite of mornings, sleeve over a wrist bone in a bedroom with blinds instead of curtains, a full-length mirror propped against a closet door because he never got around to hanging it, and a mother's voice from a kitchen two decades gone saying tuck it in, Vikram, and him not tucking it in, not once, not since he was nine. The rolled cuffs are a decision made every single morning without being a decision — cooler that way, and it hides that the sleeves run a half-inch long on him no matter what size he buys, because the arms are long for the rest of him. Skinny in a way that used to embarrass him at fourteen and that he has simply stopped noticing at thirty-two, the way you stop noticing a room's wallpaper. The lanyard around the neck is light as nothing, the laminate ID card ticking once against a shirt button, and touching it gives you a hallway smell, floor wax and orange peel and the particular institutional quiet of a building that has just emptied of children.

The book under the hand is a world atlas older than some of the kids he teaches, spine cracked white along the fold where South America gives way to Africa, and holding it brings back a whole unit — three weeks in March, a girl named Priya who has his coloring and none of his last name, asking him if the equator is a real line you could stand on, and him saying something about longitude that made her laugh, actually laugh, at a geography joke, which felt like the best thing that happened to him that whole spring. The desk under his other palm is cool laminate over cheap pressboard, and it gives back grading — stacks of it, a red pen worn down to the plastic, the particular fatigue of caring more about the essays than the students who wrote them seem to. There's a chair that rolls unevenly and a coffee mug he refuses to replace because it was a gift, and touching the mug's memory — not the mug itself, just the edge of the desk near where it sits — brings her all the way up: Andrea, eight months gone now, her name still catching on something in the chest like a shirt snagging on a nail, the two of them at a kitchen table that wasn't this one, an argument that was really about a hundred smaller arguments, the door, her car, the quiet after that never really finished being quiet.

His body does the rest without needing memory to explain it: the low ache across the shoulders from being on his feet most of a day in front of a whiteboard, the callus at the base of the middle finger from a decade of chalk and dry-erase markers, the particular economical strength in the forearms that comes from carrying boxes of books up two flights every August and not from anything you'd call exercise. Nothing hurts the way the last one hurt. That's almost the whole appeal, standing here — the knee that doesn't grind, the chest that doesn't hum with medication, thirty-two instead of sixty-one, and under it, quieter, something that isn't about comfort at all: a curiosity about a life that has a woman missing from it recently enough to still ache, a room with cacti standing outside the glass like sentries, a name he answers to that isn't yours and has never been anyone else's either.

You set the atlas down flat, finally, correctly, and your hand — his hand — comes up on its own the way it must do fifty times a day, palm scraping once over the scalp, dark hair falling back into the part on either side, an old habit doing exactly what it always does with no idea anything in the house has changed. You look down at the fingers. Thin. Olive over pale. A little chalk dust ground into the whorls of the right thumb. You turn the hand over once, like checking it for a tremor, then lift your eyes to the window, to the glare, to the saguaros standing black against all that white light, and you say, to no one, in a voice you have never used before and already like better than the last one —

"Okay. Let's see what you had going on."