Vincent Tran

Raymond Tallchief's body is tired in a way I did not choose and cannot fix. It is the middle of the night in Chicago, the whole house is asleep, and I am standing at a kitchen counter in a stranger's socks with a glass of water I have not drunk. His knees are good and his hazel eyes are fine. He argues for a living and sleeps like a man who has never lost an argument. I have been him for less than a minute, and I already know the problem: he is too clean. Nothing in him pulls. Everything in his life has a place already, a brief, a billing code, a mother who calls on Sundays. I wanted somebody with a weight on him that I could feel. I put the glass down. The phone is on the counter, and the page is already open, a wheel on it, the same as the other 1045 times.

I press it. The wheel spins.

The dark comes in blue. I am lying on my side with a phone six inches from my face, my thumb stopped mid-scroll, and the thumb starts again, faster and steadier than whatever was moving it before. A feed goes past, ten things he had paused on, and I flick them all away. My eyes feel dry. He had stopped blinking right, and I am the one who fixes that.

The mattress is soft and sunk in the middle. A sagging bed means a long marriage, and I know that without being told. The sheet is cool under my forearm. The room smells of dust and detergent, and underneath it of warm skin and the end of a long day.

I touch the fabric of the shirt, and it gives me a morning. It is brown, and he is buttoning it in a bathroom with the fan going. His fingers know the buttons in order. The cuff goes over the wrist. He combs the hair over to the hard side part with water and a black comb, the same stroke for twenty years, because his father did it that way. He looks at the wine-colored mark along his jaw, and what he feels is nothing at all. It has been his face for forty-five years. The feeling is a small private pride, as though he had made peace with it before anyone asked. Then the memory goes, and I am left with the gray pajama shirt, thin and soft at the collar, and a stomach that rests against my wrist.

The wedding band is cold against my thumb. Warmth comes up through it, a woman's laugh in a kitchen, a rice cooker clicking over. Her name is not given to me, only the shape of her turned away at the sink, and a love so settled it is like furniture. He has a habit of touching the ring to the edge of the van door when he closes it, twice, for luck. Under the other sleeve the ink on my right arm itches. A cross, and praying hands. The skin remembers the needle, a long afternoon, and a girl he used to know saying it would hurt. She is an old ex, and she is still somewhere in him. He prays to the Buddha at a small shelf at home and wears the cross anyway, and neither one has ever argued with the other in him.

My back aches low, at the belt line. It is the ache of lifting boxes up and swinging them down, ten thousand times, and it has a rhythm: bend, lift, turn, set. My hands already know it. They flex on their own. The knees are stiff. The feet are heavy, a driver's feet. He is not poor and he is not rich. He is comfortable, and he is tired.

I set the phone down on the dark blanket. I turn my right hand over in the blue light and look at the praying hands on the arm. The palm is broad, with a driver's calluses along the base of the fingers.

I look up at the room and say, quietly, "Okay. You."

The page is still open somewhere. The wanting has not come back yet, and I do not know how long this one lasts.