Amir Haddadi

You are sitting on the edge of Vikram Sethna's bed in a Phoenix rental at two in the afternoon, and the box fan is doing nothing to the heat. School's out for the summer, which is the whole problem. A day ago you were nobody, and now you are a substitute teacher on summer break with graded essays still in a tote bag by the door and nowhere to be and forty-one years left, probably, in a body that gets migraines and has a cleft chin you keep catching in the mirror like it belongs to somebody you're introducing yourself to. You liked him fine for a day. That's the trouble with liking something fine. Vikram's phone is face-down on the nightstand, silent, because nobody is texting a man on summer vacation with no plans. You pick it up anyway, open the browser, and there's the site in your history, still logged in, the wheel sitting there mid-spin from yesterday like it never really stopped turning. You do not think about it as leaving him. You think about it as Tuesday.

You spin.

—

The room is dark and smells like carpet cleaner and someone else's cigarettes, and you are lying face down across a bed with one arm hanging off the edge into cooler air, and the breath in your chest — his chest — goes from a ragged thing to something slow and even in the space of one inhale, and the arm rises on its own, and you feel your whole body roll over onto its back beneath a ceiling you have never seen, hands coming to rest folded on your chest like a man laid out at a viewing. A blade of white light comes through a gap in heavy curtains and lies across your throat. Nobody sleeps like this. You do now.

—

The sheets under you are cheap and overwashed, hotel-soft, and that alone gives you something — not a memory yet, just a fact arriving with a feeling stitched to it: *not home, never home, four hundred nights like this one.* Your ponytail is trapped under your own shoulder and when you shift to free it, the pull at your scalp opens a door: a rest stop outside Knoxville, a woman's voice on a country station fading in and out, gravel under the trailer tires, the particular ache of a lower back that has sat in a captain's chair for eleven hours and is only now admitting it. Amir. The name comes with the ache, the way a smell comes with a kitchen.

You are still not moving, still on your back in a stranger's bad posture, but your hand finds the hem of the gray t-shirt against your ribs and that's the second door — this exact shirt, this morning, hours ago by his clock though it doesn't feel like hours, it feels like right now: standing in the truck stop bathroom's fluorescent hum, pulling it over his head one-armed because the other hand was holding a nicotine pouch against his lower lip, tucking it in with his tongue before he even had the shirt all the way down, a small ritual, church-quiet, the same three seconds every morning of his adult life. The jeans came next, worn soft at the knee from getting in and out of the cab forty times a day, and he'd stood there a second with his thumb hooked in the belt loop just breathing, doing the thing his sponsor taught him — in for four, hold, out for four — because the anxiety doesn't announce itself anymore, it just sits under the ribs like a stowaway, and the medication takes the edge off but not the whole thing, never the whole thing.

His hand, which is your hand now, drifts up off his chest without asking permission and touches his own jaw, two fingers along the stubble there, an old unconscious tic, and it opens a wider door: his mother's kitchen in Nashville, years back, her thumb doing the same thing to his cheek before Mass, telling him in Arabic and then in English, for the benefit of nobody in the room, that he was still her handsome boy even gray at twenty-four, even if he never called enough, even if he was never home on a Sunday. Green eyes, hers. The gray came early on both sides and he made a joke out of it before anyone else could. He goes to Mass twice a year now and feels guilty exactly the appropriate amount.

There is a whole marriage-shaped absence in him that isn't a marriage — a girl in Knoxville he saw for two years between runs, who wanted a man home more nights than not, who is, as far as this body knows, doing fine without him, and the leaving didn't hurt as much as the fact that it didn't hurt more. There is a route he could drive with his eyes shut: I-40 east into a wall of taillights, the CB crackling with somebody's bad joke, the two big nights a month at a bar off Lower Broadway where he lets himself have three drinks and means it. There is money in an account he doesn't spend much of, more than people guess looking at the truck, and there is a body under you that is twenty-seven and strong through the shoulders in the specific way that comes from wrestling a fifth wheel into place in the rain, calloused first two fingers on the right hand from a coupling pin, a lower back that will ache worse at forty and already announces rain a day early.

You feel all of it land at once the way his breathing found its own rhythm — not summoned, just suddenly there, the way water is suddenly the shape of the glass.

—

You bring your hand up in front of your face, into the blade of light, and turn it over slowly, palm to knuckle, watching it like it belongs to someone you're about to be introduced to.

"Hey," you say, out loud, to the empty hotel room, to no one, in a voice with somebody else's accent sitting warm in your own mouth for the first time. "There you are."

Outside, a Wednesday is happening in Nashville that you have not lived one hour of, and somewhere a rig is parked with the keys still in it, and the wheel back in Phoenix has already stopped spinning, waiting, the way it always waits, for whenever you decide it hasn't been long enough.