Nabil Haddadin

You are Marco Ibarra, and your broken nose has started to whistle on the in-breath. You've spent the whole evening listening to it from the chair in front of the monitors. Thirty years of a man, less than a minute of him, and already you know the one thing he can't do. He can't sit still inside himself. The code scrolls and you feel nothing in the shoulders or the jaw. His body is a good one, strong in the thighs and soft over the belt, and it wants things you don't. It wants to go to bed. It wants to be asleep at midnight on a Wednesday like a person with a morning. You don't have a morning. You have the page with the wheel on it, glowing in the dark window, and your thumb already knows where to go. Somewhere in the building a pipe knocks. Marco's heart is steady. You are leaving it steady.

Spin.

The floor goes out from under you and comes back as concrete. You're low, crouched, thighs shaking a little, one heel lifted. A fluorescent tube hums above you, a tooth-grinding note, and the air is warm and smells of detergent and scorched lint. Your right hand holds a sock, black and still hot from the dryer. You are in the middle of reaching. The dryer door yawns open at your shoulder with its drum of heat. You were never anywhere else.

The body is lighter than Marco's and softer in the wrong places. It carries a little belly over a thin frame, and your knees complain at the crouch, a dull thirty-four-year-old ache. Your scalp is cool where the hair is buzzed. Something small and cold is in the rim of your ear.

You pull the load out in one armful. It is warm against your chest, and the warmth has a memory in it.

The hoodie on your back is a zip-front, thin at the elbows, and it gives you the morning first: the hand, his hand, working the zipper up past the apron strings of a different day. The kitchen. A steel table and a hundred containers of diced onion, carrot, celery, each one labeled in his block capitals. He likes the labels. He likes that a thing can be put exactly where it belongs. His mother's voice on the phone says he eats like a bachelor, and he hears it fondly, in a language that isn't quite the one he answers in.

The sock is the next key. Its mate is somewhere in the pile, and he has always hated the pile. Eight crumpled shirts lie in the drawer upstairs because he can't be bothered, and yet down here his hands do not crumple. They fold. Your fingers square a corner before you decide to, edge to edge, a crease pressed flat with the side of the palm, the fast tidy habit of a man who breaks down a case of peppers for a living. The knuckles crack on their own, one, two, three, and the sound is his comfort and not yours.

The cartilage in the ear catches on the hood. A flash: a bathroom mirror, a friend's needle, laughing, sixteen and certain, and under it a church bell and a mother's disapproval that melted into forgiveness by Sunday. The small cross in his wallet. A candle he lit last week and did not explain to anyone. He drinks hard twice a month and is sorry the next day in a quiet, orderly way. There are cigars on a windowsill upstairs, one at a time, never inside.

The money is a number in the back of his head, not large and not nothing, put away a little each month like folded laundry. He is single, and the quiet in the apartment is no tragedy to him. He has stopped listening for anyone. The weight of that sits just under the breastbone, ordinary and almost tender.

Then the lights buzz once and the flashes thin out. Nothing else of him is coming. You have what the cloth and the concrete could hold.

You look at your hands. They are brown, broad across the back, scarred in no way you were promised, the knuckles slightly red. You turn them over. The palms are warm from the dryer. They are somebody's, and now they are yours.

You lift your eyes to the dark of the dryer door, where a bleached head and a dark beard look back with a mole high on the cheek. You say, quietly, "Well. Hello."

Somewhere above you a floorboard settles. You wonder how long the warmth lasts, and whether tomorrow you will still be here to fold it.