Liam Brandt Kessler

You have been Samir Haddad for fourteen minutes, and already you are tired of how well he works. He is standing in the lot behind the club with the door propped on a cinder block. The Friday line is loosening down Broadway, and his knees tell you what sixty-one years of standing have cost. You checked the door twice tonight. A man you carded came back and thanked you, and Samir's chest filled with something warm and slow that you could not use. That is the trouble with him. Everything he has is finished. His beard is gray, his back is settled, and his life is a good chair that somebody else has already sat in. You wanted something that did not know how it would end. So you go to the page with the wheel on it, you pay, and your thumb is steady on the glass. The wheel turns, and Nashville goes out like a pulled plug.

Then you are sitting at the foot of a bed, and your hand is flat on a chest.

Ribs. Young ribs, hard and quick under the palm, breath going in easily and all the way down. You were reaching for a button. The shirt is wrong by one, a buttonhole riding high at the collar, and a black tie hangs loose around your neck. The window is full of low gold light with rain on the glass. The carpet is cheap under your socks. Two suitcases lie open on the floor like mouths.

The body is a lot to take in. The legs are strong and want to move. The shoulders are heavy with muscle he built on purpose. The scalp is cool, buzzed to a stubble you can feel without touching. Your nose draws air a little off center, and the crooked bridge whistles faintly.

You touch the shirt cuff first. Cotton, pressed stiff, and it gives you a morning. He stands in this room and presses it on the corner of the dresser because the iron is broken. He is humming something without words. He is happy in a careful way, the way you are before an interview. He tells himself the shirt will do.

The tie slides cool through your fingers. A woman knotted it for him once, in a different room. She stood close and smelled of oranges, and she said, *like this, you're strangling it.* Her hands were quick. He let her. He did not know then that it was the last easy thing. The feeling floods you: she was leaving, she had been leaving for months, and he had not wanted to see it. Your throat tightens with his grief and not yours. Now your hands lift on their own and the tie goes up into a knot he never learned. You give him nothing, and you do not feel the difference.

The bedspread is rough under your palm, and it gives you a smell of dust and old cigarettes that were not his. A cheap room. He is not here for long. The suitcases mean something, a move or a leaving or a start, and the feeling is not fear. It is the held breath of a man who has bet on himself and has not yet seen the cards.

Under your arm the sleeve rides up, and the fine-line ink wakes. Geometry wraps your forearm. He sat for it eight hours and talked the whole time to keep from flinching. Every line was chosen. Under his shirt, on his skin, there is his plan for who he is going to be.

Your thumb finds the bump on your nose. A fist, a parking lot, years back, and a friend who set it badly on the hood of a car, laughing and apologizing. That comes up warm.

You turn your hands over. They are broad and scarred across the knuckles, and the veins are close under the skin. Nothing in them is finished.

You look up into the room and say, to nobody, in a voice younger than any you have worn, "Okay."

It sounds like a question. You wait to feel how long this will last, and the wanting is already stirring somewhere behind the ribs.