Adrián Mercado

You are standing in Sami Haddad's kitchen at the hour when the coffee maker is still gurgling and the window over the sink is just barely giving up the dark, and you are thinking about how a good body can still be a small one. Twenty-eight, black hair, brown eyes, a runner's economy to him — you have had worse. You have had much worse. But Sami teaches seventh grade, and Sami has a staff meeting at seven-forty, and Sami's whole existence this morning is a laminated seating chart and a text from a woman named Priya asking if he's free Thursday, and you have been him one single day and already the day is closing over you like water over a dropped coin. It isn't hatred. It's just that you can feel the whole shape of the week already, the parent-teacher conferences, the grading, the smallness of it, and you are the kind of person — thirty-one bodies deep now, though you don't think of it in numbers, you think of it as *lives*, plural, none of them finished — who has never once in any of them let a Monday actually arrive. You open the laptop on his counter, still in his boxers, coffee not even poured, and you go to the page with the wheel on it, because the wheel doesn't ask why, and you don't owe it one.

You spin.

There is no falling, no tunnel, none of the things people would guess at if they knew this existed. There is just an amen that isn't finished — a breath drawn in to close a prayer that was barely a prayer at all — and then it is your breath, mid-draw, in a body already halfway off its knees. Weight rocks forward onto the balls of two feet planted on carpet that smells like a hundred other people's cigarettes even though no one's allowed to smoke in here. A hand — his hand, suddenly the only hand there is — brushes a bedspread rough with pilling. The smile that was on this face a half-second ago is still technically arranged on it, dying at the edges. You feel the knees change their mind and fold back down, both at once, obedient to something that isn't you yet. Forehead comes down onto the bedspread like it planned to all along.

And then the room starts talking to you through his skin.

The carpet under your knees: cheap, the pattern swirled like a headache, and it gives you — before you've asked for anything — the flash of a hundred rooms exactly like it, extended-stay hotels off Boulder Highway and Flamingo and out past the beltway, six weeks here, ten weeks there, because Adrián Mercado does not have a lease, has never had a lease, has had a truck and a tool belt and whatever room the framing crew's per diem could reach. The nightstand clock: brass-cornered, ugly, wound by hand because the batteries died in some other room in some other month and he never replaced them, and it hands you 2:53, and it hands you the reason a nineteen-year-old is on his knees at 2:53 on a Monday — because the crew calls this graveyard, they frame the casino's back-of-house additions at night so the guests upstairs never hear a nail gun, and he has been awake since eight last evening and will be awake until the sun is ugly and high, and the "morning" everyone else gets is just the hour before his shift when his body insists on something like devotion whether or not his heart's in it.

The t-shirt against your back — his back, this back, 5'10" and built like the framing crew built him, shoulders that know how to carry a stack of two-by-sixes and forearms that ache in a specific low way from a nail gun's kickback — gives you the morning he put it on: not this morning, some morning weeks back, laughing with Beto over the tailgate about a foreman who couldn't read a level, tugging the shirt over his head one-armed the way he always does because the other hand's already reaching for his boots. The tattoo on the inner forearm — cross, praying hands, done cheap at nineteen in somebody's garage in North Las Vegas — carries not faith but his mother, who has faith enough for both of them and asked him for exactly this on his birthday, and he got it because it cost him nothing to give her that, even though he hasn't been inside a church except for a funeral in four years. The little hoop in his ear was Beto's idea and a six-pack's worth of nerve.

You feel how his praying works, now, because his hands are still loosely folded and the memory is right there in the folding: it isn't belief. It's the clock. It's that some nights on the site are bad — a guy fell two floors down at a job in Henderson last spring, walked away, which is the only reason Adrián still gets on his knees at all, a kind of low continuous bribe to a God he doesn't believe is listening, offered mostly out of habit and the two beers or the dip that make three a.m. feel less like three a.m. His body wants a cigarette that isn't a cigarette; his cheek knows the shape of a pouch of chew he isn't holding right now and misses it anyway, a small animal ache. His nails — you feel this without being told, the ragged edges of them against his own folded fingers — are bitten down past where they should be, a nineteen-year-old's nervous, private habit, the only tell that underneath the vest and the tool belt and the easy laugh on the site he is scared of more things than he'd say out loud, starting with being alone in rooms like this one, permanently, forever, no one's name on the lease but his.

There was a boy on the crew, once, Marcus, who Adrián thought about too much and said nothing about to anyone, because the crew is not a place you say that, and that not-saying sits in this body too, a whole unlit room of it, felt rather than told. There is a mother in North Las Vegas who thinks he still goes to Mass. There is a bank account that empties every two weeks like clockwork and a body that is nineteen years old and already knows what its knees will feel like at fifty if this is the work he keeps doing.

And there is this: the strange mercy of an empty room where no one is watching him fail at praying. He was laughing at his own hurry, at getting to amen early like God was going to dock him for lateness. That's the last thing he felt, all his, alone: relief at almost being done.

You lift your forehead off the bedspread.

You look at the hand nearest the nightstand — bitten nails, a working scar or two, the tattoo starting its climb up the inside of the arm — and you turn it over slowly in the lamp light like it's a tool you haven't used before, testing its balance.

"Bendito," you say, and laugh once, short, at the wrongness of the word coming easy in a mouth that isn't asking permission from anyone anymore, and you don't know yet if you're a man who prays now or a man wearing one who used to.