Walter Pruss

You are standing in a kitchen in Rural Texas with Arjun Pillai's left ear throbbing, the cauliflowered one, the one that has never once let him lie on it. The guitar is on the table. You have played it for less than a minute, and it plays you back: the calluses know the frets, and you do not. That is the trouble. Your fingers are being polite to a song you never learned.

It is the middle of the morning and the light is flat on the linoleum, and you are bored in a way that has nothing to do with him. He is fine, and the body works. But you find you have been holding a note that wanted to go somewhere, and it cannot, because it is his note. So you open the page with the wheel on it and pay.

The wheel clicks and the kitchen is gone.

The razor is against your jaw. Water runs. You are leaning on one straight arm over a sink, and the foam is cool and thick on half your face. The other half is bare and tight. The room smells of menthol and wet tile and a cheap bar of soap. It is dark outside the little window, with a yellow light behind the glass. Your breath goes in through the nose, and the nose does not take it evenly. It was broken once and set a little crooked, and the left side whistles.

Your hand moves. The razor goes up the jaw against the grain, past the corner of the mouth without stopping, and you feel that something was supposed to stop there.

The towel on your shoulders is damp, and the damp opens something. A girlfriend's voice, sleepy, through a wall: *you smell like a hospital, I love it.* A hall with three coat hooks at three heights, and the smallest hook is empty because the smallest child took the coat. The towel is his and the memory is his, and it is warm and tired.

The flannel on your back is worn soft. Your fingers find the cuff, and the cuff hands you the morning: he buttoned the thermal first, with the left hand, then the flannel, because the air conditioning on the ward is cruel at four. He did it in the dark so the light would not wake her. Under the sleeve your forearms are thin and corded. The tendons stand out when the fingers close on the handle.

The razor handle is cold brass, and it gives you a bathroom in another year, another sink. A woman's hand over his, laughing, showing him how to angle it. The old ex. She is the reason he learned to shave with a blade, and he never told the girlfriend that. It is the one thing nobody knows about him. It is small, and he guards it like money.

Your feet are in heavy boots, and they remember a floor. Sixteen hours standing, the nurses' station, charting under light that hums. A patient's grip on his wrist at three in the morning, a man asking him please not to leave. He did not leave. His back aches from it and always will. He is forty-seven, six feet and not much weight, and he carries it like a coat rack.

The mustache is wet at its waxed ends. Your thumb touches one point, and it is vanity, simple and lovely, an hour of his life every week.

You set the razor down on the sink's edge. You turn the hand over, the knuckles lined and ordinary, and you lift your eyes to the mirror, to a face half foam and half stranger.

"Okay," you say, in a voice lower than you expected. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."

The water keeps running. You do not turn it off.