Karim Haddadi

Vincent Santangelo's knees are the reason. You are kneeling on a plywood deck in a half-framed house in Philadelphia, and the left one has been telling you since seven that it is finished. He is fifty-two, heavy, and his back runs a bill every time he lifts a sheet of subfloor. Forty minutes of that is all you have wanted of him. The gray beard itches. The tape measure on his belt is the one he has had since before you. You thumb the site open on his phone behind a stack of drywall, and you pay, and the wheel goes round, and what sent you is not worth saying out loud.

The wheel slows. You are standing.

Fluorescent light, flat and cool. A desk edge under your left fingertips. In your right arm, a stack of folders held against the ribs. Your weight is light and narrow after the last one, and your knees feel like nothing at all. For half a second the hand on the desk sets a sheet down wrong, crooked across the pile. You straighten it. Then you do it again, slowly, correctly. Ten more motions follow, and you check each one, as if it were new.

Then the desk gives you something. The laminate under your fingers is worn pale where a wrist rests, and with it comes a Tuesday: a woman across from this desk, crying over a lapsed policy, and his chest tight because the fault was a form he had filed himself. He paid the premium out of his own pocket. Nobody knows. It was most of a month's margin.

The folder in your arm is soft at the corners, and it gives you the evening before. A small girl on a couch, her feet in his lap, reading him a book upside down and getting every word wrong. His laughter comes through you like a stranger's, warm, and you hold still until it passes.

The shirt against your back is pale blue cotton, ironed by him, badly, at the collar. This morning he buttoned it at the bathroom mirror, cuff, then cuff, thumb catching the little button as it always does. He is trying to quit thinking about cigarettes. He has not smoked in three years, and his fingers still go looking for the pocket where the pack used to sit. They find the jacket pocket, the lining, nothing. Your own mouth wants it for a second, and it isn't yours.

The floor is cold through thin dress soles. Rain ticks on the glass door. The room smells of toner, wet carpet, and coffee gone old. A girlfriend's text is waiting on his phone. You know this the way you know a tooth.

You lift your hand and look at it. The fingers are slender, the skin dry from paper, and the knuckles are quick. You turn it over. Nothing hurts. You lift your eyes to the glass, where a stranger looks back at you, and you say, quietly, "Well. Hello, Karim."

The knee is still in Philadelphia, and somewhere in you the wanting is already stirring. An hour, a year? You do not know.