Nabil Haddad

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It is the middle of the day where you are, a Thursday with nothing in it worth naming. You have been at this screen for an hour, maybe longer, in the loose unaccountable way that afternoons go when nobody is checking. The site loaded slow, the way cheap-looking things sometimes do right before they turn out to be real. Vessel.cards. A wheel, plain as a raffle. You have wanted this since before you had a word for it — every film where someone wakes up behind a face that isn't theirs, every thread at two in the morning that you read to the bottom of and then read again. It was always fiction. You did not expect the button to work. You press it anyway, because that is the whole of what you are right now: the wanting, and the thumb that finally gets to act on it.

The wheel spins. It does not ask you anything else.

The television cuts to a bright frame — some studio audience laughing at something that will never be funny again — and in the same half-second you are sitting up straight on a couch you did not choose, in a room you have never stood in, your hand setting a remote down on worn leather like it always meant to. There was no falling. There was no going anywhere. There was a middle of something, and now you are the middle of it, wearing a weight you didn't bring — a gut pressing soft against a gray t-shirt, sock feet, a body already tired in a way that has nothing to do with the last hour.

You do not laugh at the studio audience. He would have. You don't know that yet.

The couch is where it starts. Old leather, cool where your bare forearm rests on it, and the second your skin settles into its worn seat something comes up out of it that isn't yours — a Sunday two winters ago, this same cushion, a boy of nine or ten asleep against this same shoulder during a football game neither of them cared about, the boy's weight and the specific gratitude of it. Gone as fast as it came. The remote in your hand gives you almost nothing, just a hundred nights identical to this one, thumb finding the volume rocker without looking, muscle memory older than the device itself.

The t-shirt is where it opens up. Cotton gone soft from washing, a shape worn into the collar. Touching it — no, being it — pulls a whole morning back: buttoning a work shirt in a dressing room the size of a walk-in closet, cufflinks he stopped bothering with years ago, the particular defeat of watching the waistband of the trousers not quite lie flat the way it used to, and doing it anyway, every day, because the corner office does not care what your stomach looks like. That memory carries its own feeling with it, not yours — a kind of tired, practiced acceptance, the specific fatigue of a man who has made peace with disappointing a mirror every morning for a decade.

Underneath, sock feet on the coffee table's edge, and something else surfaces: the ring finger. It is bare now, pale where a band used to sit, and the moment it draws your attention — his attention, coming up through your hand like heat off a stove — you get the whole shape of it in one motion: a courtroom hallway, her coat already buttoned, the specific quiet of two people who used to fight and don't anymore because there's nothing left worth the noise. A son somewhere between them, twelve now, staying with her this week. Nabil misses him on Wednesdays specifically, for no reason he's ever nailed down except that Wednesday was always sitcom night, before.

The books on the shelf behind you, glimpsed rather than touched, still manage to give something — a decade of an industry that made him rich and exhausted him in equal measure, a boardroom he is good in and privately sick of, meetings that end in handshakes that mean nothing and numbers that mean everything. Comfortable is the word for what he's built. Comfortable and hollowed slightly, the way money can hollow a room out even while filling it.

Your mouth tastes faintly of the last cigarette, hours old now, a pack-a-day habit that put its groove into his fingers the same way the nail-biting did — you feel that too, an old tic surfacing the instant you're not paying attention to your own hand, the ridge of a thumbnail already bitten shorter than it should be. Big nights only once or twice a month, mostly he just sits like this, lights off, letting the television do the work of company.

The window behind you holds rain and sodium light, and it is not midnight where you came from but it is nearly midnight here, a Wednesday sliding into Thursday, and something in that mismatch feels correct in a way you can't name — like arriving late to a party that's already dying down, everyone else two drinks in and you just walking through the door.

You look down at your hands. Thick fingers, someone else's wedding-band ghost pressed pale into the skin, a thumbnail bitten to the quick without your permission.

You look up, into the dark glass of the television where your reflection sits doubled over the studio audience, and you say, out loud, to no one:

"Okay. Okay — who are you."