Night Shift

At 3 a.m. on the eleventh floor
my name is Kevin,
and it is late afternoon in Ohio.

A woman there is angry about her router.
I tell her I understand.
I do. Somewhere a light
that should be green is blinking amber
and nobody can say why.

Below the glass, Cyberabad
is a circuit board left switched on —
the flyover empty, one water tanker
crawling home along it
like a thought that won’t let you sleep.

My mother rang at nine to ask if I’d eaten.
I said yes. The vending machine
gave me a Five Star and kept my ten rupees,
which is also a kind of eating.

Between calls the headset hums
the sound of a sea I have never seen.
The boy at the next desk prays quietly
into his muted mic. The girl beyond him
is learning Korean on her phone.
We are all going somewhere
from chairs that do not move.

At six the cab will take us home
through a city just waking,
the milkman passing us the other way,
and I will sleep with the curtains taped shut
while the day happens to other people.

But now the line clicks.
Thank you for calling, I say,
in a voice I keep in a drawer,
and a stranger half a world away
is, for one minute, not alone —
and neither, it turns out, am I.