Kareem Nabil Saadeh

You are standing in Atlanta, in the dark, in a kitchen that belongs to Andrés Gil Navarro, and the refrigerator hums like it knows you. He has been yours for less than a minute. In that minute you have found the freckles on your forearms, the goatee under your thumb, and a fridge door covered in a stranger's schedules. All of it works. The knees are good. The lungs are wide. And still you are holding the phone with its bright wheel on the screen, because something in you has gone sour. Nine spins ago you were a nineteen-year-old sailor in Phoenix, and what you did to his life is still on you like smoke. The man you are about to take is his rival. You have known that all night and have not said it aloud. Andrés is not the trouble. The trouble is that you want to see what the other side of the quarrel feels like from inside. You press the glass. Atlanta lets go.

The first thing is weight. It lies on you like a hand, and the mattress is under your whole front. Your cheek is in a pillow gone damp. One arm hangs off the bed into the cold, and a thin streetlight comes through the gap in the curtains and lies across your knuckles. Your breath is ragged and thick with drink. Then it evens out, and you are the one doing it. You draw the arm up, roll onto your back, and fold your hands at your chest. Something in the body flinches at that, a small old reflex, because he has never once slept this way.

The sheet under you is cotton worn thin, and it opens a door. He was on this bed hours ago, sitting on the edge with a glass, turning the ring on his finger round and round. He wasn't thinking of anything. He was thinking of everything. The ring is warm and a little loose, and when your thumb finds it, a night comes up in his feeling and not yours. A wedding in a rented hall, his wife's hand shaking in his, and the plain gold going on and sticking at the knuckle, and her laughing. The joy is so clean that it hurts the back of your throat.

The T-shirt clings under your arms. The morning he put it on comes sleeve by sleeve: the left arm first, because the right shoulder aches, the cotton dragging on the dark geometry inked at his collarbone. He stood in the closet door looking at the lanyard on its hook, the headset, the cubicle row waiting, a thousand strangers' complaints in a day, and he said "good morning, thank you for calling" to the mirror in a voice like a clean plate. He hated it. He was good at it.

Your tongue finds the beard's edge on your jaw, and then the nose. Your fingers go to the crooked bridge. A flash: a fist, a parking lot, a boy's sneering face, the crack inside his skull and the bright salt of blood. He was seventeen. He never told his wife the whole of it. There is a girl in it too, the old girlfriend, who watched from a car. She still matters, and he knows it, and he is ashamed that he knows.

Under the shame there is a child. A small weight on his chest asleep, one hot fist in his collar, the smell of a head. You breathe and can't tell whose breath it is.

The body hums under all of it: a heavy, muscled thing, forty-two years old, sore in the lower back, the mouth sour with liquor. Each night he drinks a little more than the one before and calls it unwinding. In the dark, the savings account glows in his mind like a night-light, a modest sum, held onto like a rope.

You lift your hands into the streetlight. The wedding band catches it. You turn them over, palms, backs, the scarred knuckles, the fingers that already want to twist the ring. They are not yours. They are warm and awfully ready.

You look up at the dark ceiling and say, low, so as not to wake her: "Hello, Kareem." Then, quieter: how long do I get you? Until morning? Until the wanting comes back? Your thumb is already turning the ring.