Sound

So what is this? he asks, and I just smile because I don’t really have the answer. I had a weakness for him immediately but that is beside the point. He was quick to smile—an easy soul—and he held on to his Tiger beer with a hand that had forged. Hands not just to hold tickets and pass money and grasp steering wheels—but hands that have plunged and burned and smoothed. During our conversation I caught him caressing the bar top, unaware that he was pressing his palms into the grooves of the wood as if anointing it with linseed oil. His hair was shorter than I had remembered. The night should have struggled—I had expected it to—like a solitary swimmer whose arms tire out while only half way across the channel—but instead we sat shoulder to shoulder amidst younger, louder couples and we were alone with ourselves and a plate full of noodles. He wanted to discuss books and I wondered about his name—whether he had been named after a sound his mother had heard as she lay recovering in a bed composed of starched white sheets; the ricochet of an axe, a wheel separating from it’s axle, the sudden flight of a thousand Starlings in tandem? His name must be the synthesis of a sound—hot and gnarled—being plunged like ore into something placid and temperate. We caught noodles with our chopsticks, slick and salty—and I realized that the answer to his question was Now. This is now. As I slurped and swallowed a noodle he wished me a long life—as is the tradition with noodles—and said that he liked Now.