Farid Nassar Haddadin

You are still Anthony Joe Redcloud when you decide, and his knees are the reason. Thirty-four years old, and the left one has started to click on the stairs like a pen being pressed. The goatee itches. The beauty mark by your eye is something you keep touching in the dark window of the laundromat across the street. You have had him for less than a minute of your own time and you already know his shoulders are too heavy to sit well, that the muscle was built for hauling and does nothing else. You wanted something quieter. Something that did not feel like a job.

On the screen the wheel turns, and you let it. You do not look at the price. Your thumb is Anthony's thumb, thick and cracked at the nail, and it lands without hesitation.

Then the dark, and the dark has weight.

You are face-down. Your cheek is in a pillow gone damp with your own breath, and the breath is ragged, catching, a snore broken in half. Then it evens. You feel it happen: one long pull, and the ragged thing is gone. Your arm hangs off the mattress, the fingers brushing carpet. A line of streetlight comes through the curtain gap and lies across the back of your hand. You draw the arm up. The body rolls over on its own, onto its back, and the hands fold on the chest, one over the other, like something laid out. He has never once slept like this. You know it the way you know a word in a language you do not speak.

The sheet is cotton, old, softened. When your fingers close on it, a flash comes up that is not yours: a woman's laugh in another room, the sheet being snapped out over this same bed years ago, his irritation, then his gladness at the irritation. Small. Gone.

You press the ring with your thumb. The plain band is warm. It turns easily, worn thin on the inside, and with it comes an afternoon: a courthouse hallway, a cheap suit, hands shaking so badly he could not work the cap on the pen, and her taking the pen from him. Then, behind that, an older ring and a different woman, a different hallway, a shame like a stone he has carried so long it has the shape of his palm. The ex-wife. He still sends her the birthday message, every year, and never says why.

The pajama shirt is soft and thin at the cuffs. You push a sleeve up and see the portrait on the forearm, the black-and-gray face, a man with kind heavy eyes. Your thumb crosses it and you are in a chair in a shop that smells of green soap, flinching, twenty-six years old, his father's photograph propped against the machine. His father died in Amman and he did not go. The needle hurt less than the not going. Nobody in this house has asked who the man on the arm is. He liked that.

The moustache is stiff against your lip. You touch it and feel the cleft of the chin under your fingers, a deep dent. A child once fit a fingertip there and called it a thumbprint from God. He does not believe in God. He kept the joke anyway.

You know the shape of the day he is leaving behind: the long open office, the prints pinned along the wall, the two rolls he carries under one arm because he likes the weight of them. Tolerances. Other people's mistakes. A young engineer he was too hard on and then quietly apologized to by fixing her schedule. The cigarettes he gave up eleven years ago still sit in the roof of his mouth like a phone number he cannot forget. The hair at the temples is gray, the rest dyed flat dark, and he does a little shame each month in the bathroom mirror over the box of color, then does it anyway.

The body underneath: five-seven, thin as a rake, a dull ache in the lower back that has a name, and strong, stringy forearms. His hands know how to roll a print tight without thinking. His mouth is dry. The air is thick, summer-heavy, a window unit ticking somewhere.

You lift your hands into the streetlight and turn them over. The wedding band catches. The skin is dry, the knuckles knotted, the veins standing. They are not Anthony's. They are not yours either, and they are entirely here.

You look up at the dark ceiling and then, somehow, at someone. You say, in a voice rough with sleep and not your own, "Hello, Farid."

The ring is warm. Somewhere in you the wanting is already asleep, a small animal turned to the wall. You do not know how long it stays that way. You lie in him and wait to find out.