Martin Aldous

The man you are stops being him with a thumb on the edge of a drawer. It is the middle of the night in Los Angeles. The house is asleep around Fadi Haddad's body: the tiles cold under his heels, the refrigerator humming, and his knees complaining about a day of laying block that he did not feel until he sat down at the screen. The wheel is on the screen. It has been there for a minute and a half. You have had this body for less than a minute of that, and already you know what is wrong with it. It is not that he is too short or too old. You can't reach anything from inside him. His wife's light is off down the hall, and his shoes by the door are the shoes of a man who has a wife and a morning. You stand in the kitchen of a stranger's whole life and you do not want it. You couldn't tell anyone why. It is only that the beard feels like somebody else's hand on your jaw. You press the button.

Rain on glass. The bench light. A line of solder smoke going up.

You are standing, and you were standing already. Your weight is on the left foot and the right leg is bouncing on its own, a small steady jackhammer at the knee. The probe is between your fingers. The other hand steadies a board clamped in blue jaws. On the oscilloscope a sine wave rolls by in green, even and ordinary. You were mid-motion a second ago and so are you. The probe slips a hair, and your hand, his hand, catches it and does it again slowly, correctly, with a care that has no reason in it.

The blue strap on the wrist is tight and a little damp. Touch it and it opens: a Thursday, years ago, a new job and a manager who laughed when he wore the strap to the pub for a bet. He didn't mind being laughed at. The dimples come up with it, deep ones, you feel them in the cheeks even now with nothing to smile about.

The shirt is on your back, soft, washed gray, the pocket a little frayed. You get the morning it was chosen. Dark in the bedroom, a woman turning over, saying *the grey one, it's clean*. His thick fingers stiff on the buttons, bottom to top, the gut making the third one fight. He stood in the hall and a small girl in pajamas held on to his leg and would not let go until he'd promised something. A boy's trainers by the door, one on its side. He stepped over them the way you step over your own weather.

The ring on the left hand is warm. Press the thumb to it and it gives you a church hall, folding chairs, bad tea, a hymn he sang flat on purpose to make her laugh. Then a night at a kitchen table with a bank statement, adding the small savings again and again as though the sum would grow. It is enough. It is not much. He was proud of it and afraid of it at once.

The sleeve on the right arm itches under the short cuff of the shirt. You don't need to look. An eagle's talons, a banner, roses gone soft with time. A needle in a shop off the Holloway Road when he was nineteen, and the stupid joy of it. His mother had cried. Years later he had prayed about it anyway, sitting in the back pew with his arm folded under the other, and decided God had seen worse.

Underneath it all the body is a heavy, real thing. The back aches low from standing. The belly rests against the bench edge. His heart goes steady, a bit fast, the heart of a man who has not run in years. The knee keeps up its bounce, and you let it.

You lift the hand off the board. You turn it over. The knuckles are broad, the palm creased with solder burns that don't hurt anymore. It is a good hand. It will do anything you ask. You look up at the window, at the rain on the railings, at the faint reflection of a man's face with dimples at rest.

"Morning," you say, in a voice that is deeper than the last one, and softer.

Somewhere in you the question is already warming, small as a pilot light: how long, and when does it come back, the wanting.