Daniel Yoon

You are Karim Haddock for fifty-one seconds, and already you know the truck.

The seat is wrong for a man your height, the knees are bad, and a bag of sunflower seeds is going stale in the door. It is the middle of a Tuesday in Los Angeles and the glare off the hood hurts. Sixty-five years are in this chest like wet sand. You have a parcel on your lap, a name on it, a gate code you don't remember being told. You have been him for less than a minute, and what sends you back is small. Nobody could stand to be told it. His body is fine, and so is the dad bod. It's the way the gate code came to you without being asked, as though a man you hadn't met were doing the work of being him, and you only had to ride along. You wanted to be the one who did not know. You wanted to be surprised. So you put the parcel on the dash and press the wheel with a thumb that is not yours, and the page does what it does.

Then there is a bench.

Wood under you, scarred, cold through denim. Your forearms rest on your knees. A water bottle sweats on the floor by your left shoe, and a window throws white light across a rack of coats. Your breath comes slow through your nose. You were between sets a second ago, in a locker room that smells of rubber and bleach, and now you are in it.

The fleece is first. Navy, zipped to the breastbone, the cuffs gone soft and tight at the wrist. Your hands know it before you do. A morning comes up through the sleeve: a kitchen, breakfast dishes stacked, small shoes heaped by the door, and a woman saying something over her shoulder while he pushes his arm into this sleeve, then the other, and thinks, quietly, that the number on the envelope on the counter is not going to change because he looks at it. Twenty-five thousand under. Maybe more. He turns the envelope face down. He always turns it face down.

The jeans, then. Faded at the knee, stiff from the dryer. A year opens: the hallway of a church, folding chairs, a coffee he does not drink anymore. Not drinking is a thing he does with his whole day, like carrying something full. He had a bad winter once and does not say so. A pastor's hand on his shoulder. Two children in the back pew, one kicking the pew, and him loving the kicking.

Your fingers, his fingers, have begun to move. Thumb against forefinger, click, click, click, a pen that isn't there. You let them. Under the click lies a long afternoon with a ballpoint and a column of figures at a kitchen table, the children asleep, his wife's light off down the hall, and the figures just sitting there being what they are.

The ring is cool against the next finger. Plain. A flash comes through it, quick and warm and not yours: her laughing at him, years back, because he flinched at the cold of it going on. Behind that, thinner, a different woman's name he does not say aloud, recent, a door he has kept shut. You touch it and feel the shame of having wanted to open it. You leave it alone.

The nose, you notice, has a bend you can feel when you breathe. A fall on ice, a boy's elbow, a bad set once. The body is five-six and solid, a forty-eight-year-old back that speaks when you shift, shoulders that are still strong, a jaw shaved smooth that morning at a sink with the kids pounding on the door.

Shoes. The laces are tied the way he ties them, double knot, a habit from a small boy's lessons. Under them the floor is cold and hard.

You rise, and the bar is there. Your hands go out and find it. Two inches wider than they have gone all year, and the steel bites into the calluses.

You turn your hands over. They are broad, a little dry, the ring bright, no hands you've ever worn.

You look up, and say it to whoever is there:

"How long do I get you?"

The click starts again in the thumb, and nobody answers.