Ask about the eyes anyway

The microwave said 9:52 and then it said 9:53 and Reed was still sitting because his knees had made the decision and his mouth had not caught up yet.

Vesh was on the counter. Heel hooked on the drawer pull. Apple in the long fingers, already bitten, juice on the joint that bent a little wrong. The uneaten one stayed in the center of the table with its sticker facing Reed like a name tag. The apartment had shrunk around the height of him. Hot dust. Old metal. The pothos hanging dramatic and useless on the sill.

Reed heard himself say it again, because the first time had come out before he decided and this time he wanted the sentence to belong to him.

"The eyes. Tell me the whole thing."

Vesh stopped chewing. That was worse than the smile. The borrowed mouth went still around a piece of fruit and the finished eyes went more finished, as if a lamp had been turned up behind them.

"You are still shaking," he said.

"I know."

"Then you are not ready to pay."

"I didn't say I was paying. I said tell me."

Vesh looked at him for a long moment the way Maya looked at a call number written wrong, except Maya did not have a face that had been assembled from a description. He took the last bite, stem and all, and the click of the not-quite-teeth went through the quiet kitchen. He wiped his fingers on his own thigh. Whatever he wore was not cloth so much as the idea of dark, and it did not show the juice.

"Half," he said. "Half of what you have left. Not half of a number you like. Half of the actual remainder. I can see it. You cannot. That is the point of the trade and also the insult of it. You hand me years you have not counted and I put the sight in you and the years go where years go when a thing like me is fed. I do not get taller. I get less bored. You get a face that tells the truth when you look at it."

Reed's thumb cracked itself. He put the hand flat on the table so it would stop.

"What does the truth look like."

"A name. The real one, the one the book will take, not the one on a badge if the badge is a lie. Under the name, the hunger. Not a mood. The standing want. Who it points at, if it points. How much of them is still unspent. Some people are almost empty and do not know it. Some people are so full it leaks at the edges and they call it personality. You would have looked at Lena Marsh eleven months ago, in the vestibule, with the dropped mail in both your hands, and you would have seen MARSH, LENA, and a want that was not you. A want that was sleep, and a dog that did not die on her table, and a man in the surgery who laughs too loud. You would have seen that the want for you was a small thing then. A neighbor. A slot. You wrote a blank line and you made yourself the largest object in the room. The eyes would have shown you the room before you rearranged it."

Reed looked at the dark window. He could not see her. Vesh could. That was already a kind of eyes and Reed hated that he had not had them first.

"And now."

"Now if you paid and looked across that glass you would see her name and a want that has your mouth in it. You would see the inventory failing. You would see how much of the night she is keeping and how much the book is keeping for her. You would also see the other wants still under it. The dog. The loud man. Sleep. They did not get erased. They got crowded. That is what a blank line does. It does not replace a person. It sits on them."

The radiator ticked. Somewhere on the block a car took the corner too fast and was gone. Reed tried to file the information and the file would not close.

"How much do I have left."

Vesh's mouth did the thing that was not a smile. "That is the part you want and the part I do not give before the ink. If I tell you the number you will do arithmetic. You will decide whether half of seventy-one is acceptable or half of forty-four is not. You will make it a shelf measurement. The trade is not a shelf measurement. You look at me and you say yes and the years leave and the sight arrives and then you know what you paid, which is the only honest order. Men who know the number first spend the rest of their lives checking it against the calendar. I find that dull."

"So I buy a knife without knowing the length."

"You already bought a knife. It is under the rubber bands. The eyes are a better handle." Vesh shifted on the counter. The drawer pull creaked. "There are other costs. Smaller. I mention them because you are the kind of animal that asks and then pretends the asking was caution. You cannot see your own name. You cannot see mine. You cannot see the dead. A photograph is a maybe, and only if the person is still walking around somewhere with a pulse. A child under a certain age shows you a name and almost no hunger, which bores everyone who has ever paid. You will see it on strangers in the street whether you want to. The bus. The break room. Your sister, if she drives up with a cucumber. You do not get to turn it off in rooms you like. That is the part that ruins men faster than the years. They look at a person they meant to keep ordinary and the ordinary is gone."

Reed thought of Claire's face on a video call, the tomato plant behind her, the way she said eat a vegetable like it was a spell against the hospital corridor. He thought of Maya's silver tooth and the pencil in her bun. He thought of Mrs. DiNardo tying a bag and saying you look like work.

"Claire."

"Would have a name and a want. I will not tell you the want. That is yours to steal or not steal. I can tell you she is not empty. Most sisters are not empty. They are full of the wrong decade."

"Don't."

"Then don't pay." Vesh picked up nothing and somehow had another apple. The sticker was different. Honeycrisp, if Reed was still filing produce codes like a man who needed a job. "I am not selling you a mercy. I am telling you the instrument. You asked before you were ready because ready is a story you tell after. Light wanted the number. You want the number. The number is the last door between you and a yes you have already leaned on."

Reed stood. The chair did not bark this time. He went to the sink and ran the water and did not drink it. His reflection in the dark glass over the airshaft was his own face, twenty-six, uncut hair, the button-down from work still on because he had not had the patience to be a person who changed. Behind the reflection, if he let his eyes unfocus, was the shape of Lena's kitchen. Kettle. Towel. No lamp.

"If I say yes tonight."

"You say it to me. You do not write it. The book is for them. The eyes are between us. I put a hand on you. It is not pleasant. Half the years go out through the place I touch. The sight comes in through the same place. You will be sick. Most of them are sick. Then you will look at the apple on the table and it will still be an apple, because fruit does not have a name the book can use. Then you will look at the window. Then you will know what you did to her in a way the notebook only implied. And I will be less bored, which is the only receipt I keep."

"And if I say no."

"I stay anyway. The book stays. The bite on your shoulder stays until it yellows. Lena stays crowded. You go to work and stamp Eisenhower and feel the rubber bands fail one name at a time. No is available. No is not a cleaning."

Reed turned the tap off. The drip after was loud. He could feel Vesh watching the back of his neck the way a person watches a page that might get written on.

"Show me your hand," Reed said.

Vesh did not move for a second. Then he held it out, palm up, over the counter. The fingers were too long. The palm had lines, but the lines did not match a life. They looked drawn. There was apple on the pad of the thumb.

"This is not the yes," Vesh said. "This is you touching the counter to see if it is wood."

Reed crossed the kitchen. Three steps. The smell of hot dust got stronger. He did not take the hand. He looked at it. He thought about the hospital corridor and the wanting he had put down there and picked up again when his mother stopped, which was a thing Vesh had said and which Reed had not corrected because correcting it would have made it truer. He thought about Lena's heel hooked behind his thigh. He thought about a name he did not know yet, on a bus, on a hymnal, in a visitor sticker, waiting for a glance that would not require a blank line.

He put his own hand next to Vesh's. Not on it. Next to it. The difference in length was stupid. His scar from the box cutter looked like a child's drawing beside those lines.

"If I pay," he said, "I want to know the rule about undoing it."

"There isn't one."

"Say it plain."

"There isn't one. You do not get the years back. You do not get the ordinary back. If you give the book away after, you forget me and you forget the book and you keep the eyes, because the eyes are not in the book. They are in you. You will walk around Philadelphia seeing names and hungers and you will not remember why. That version is funny to me and unkind to you. I mention it so you do not build an exit where there is a wall."

Reed's hand stayed next to the long one. His pulse was in his wrist. Across the alley a pipe knocked, or a chair, or a woman turning over in a bed that still had the shape of a sentence she had not meant to say.

"Half," he said.

"Half."

"Of a number you won't give me."

"Of a number you will understand after, which is the only time a number has ever helped anyone in a kitchen like this."

Reed pulled his hand back. The air where it had been felt cold, which was probably nothing, which was probably the drip from the tap and the September still sitting in the brick and his own body trying to invent a sign.

"Not tonight," he said.

Vesh closed the long fingers. The almost-smile came back, smaller. "There. You asked before you could pay. That is a kind of honesty. Most of them pay in the same breath as the question so they do not have to hear themselves. You heard yourself. I will be on this counter when the hearing wears off. The apple on the table is still yours. The one in my hand is not."

He bit. The sound was ordinary. Fruit. Teeth that were not teeth. Reed sat down again because the standing had cost him something he did not have a stamp for. The notebook was in the drawer. Lena was on her back in the dark with his name where an inventory used to be. The eyes were a door with no handle on the inside.

He looked at his own hands. Library dust was gone. The scar remained. He could write under her name and call it a mercy and Vesh would watch and the years would stay his. He could go down the stairs and stand in the vestibule and find out if Vesh had been telling the truth about her door. He could say yes in an hour, when the shaking had a better story. He could say yes now and hate that he had said not tonight.

The microwave turned over to 10:06. The same green as the night he had written her. Vesh ate. The pothos did nothing. Reed sat with the price in his mouth and did not swallow it and did not spit it out.