Omar Haddad

You are Hector Villanueva, and you have been Hector Villanueva for less than a minute, and already you know you cannot stand him.

It is not his fault. His knees are the problem, and the soft weight that hangs over his belt, and the way the whole body announces itself in the dark of a stranger's kitchen in Queens, where you are standing at the sink with a glass of water you do not want. The freckles on the backs of your hands. The goatee, which you keep touching, as if it might come off. Forty-three years of other people's mornings sit in this chest, and you have not let a single one of them in. You can feel them waiting. You wanted something lean. You wanted to be young again, and the wheel gave you a man who sighs when he sits down.

That is the whole reason, and you would not say it out loud. You spin.

The sheets are the first thing: warm, tangled, a ridge of them under your hip. Then the breath, ragged, wet at the back of the throat, and you make it go even in a single pull. Your face is in a pillow. Your arm hangs off the edge of the mattress, and the blood has gone out of it, and you draw it up and roll, and the body rolls with you, heavy and loose and easy, so much lighter than Hector. Your hands fold on your chest. Streetlight lies in a thin stripe across the ceiling through a gap in the curtains.

Then the memories start, because everything touches him.

The shirt against your back is black cotton, thin from washing, and it gives you the morning before: his arms through the sleeves of a green flight suit, the zipper climbing his sternum, the reflective belt cinched, the hearing protection hung around his neck like a collar. Dusk on a flight line. The cargo plane's ramp down like a mouth, and a sergeant yelling a name that is his, and you don't catch it. Jet fuel and warm concrete. He was proud of how fast he could do the straps.

The sheet under your fingers is cheap, and the ache behind your eyes is whiskey. Not tonight only. A shelf of it, a habit with a floor under it. He drinks to get to sleep, and he drinks because of a boy whose side of this bed is cold: a laugh in a doorway, a toothbrush still in the cup, a fight on a stairwell about nothing, which was about everything. You feel it land in the sternum, a particular bruised shame, and you do not know the boy's name yet.

Your right hand drifts to your left arm without asking, and your thumbnail finds the edge of a cuticle and worries it. It knows how. It has done this in a thousand briefings. Under your fingertips the other sleeve runs warm and raised: script, a name, a date. The memory that comes is a chair, a needle's hum, his mother's name spelled in a language he reads slowly, and the date she died. He did not cry in the chair. He cried in the car.

Under it all is money, a number with a minus in front of it, the size of a small car, and the ceiling he stares at doing the arithmetic. And the floor in Philadelphia, and white marble steps worn hollow by a hundred years of feet, the rowhouse door, the first sun coming down the block. He liked being the first one awake on the street.

You lift your hands into the stripe of streetlight. Younger. Broad across the knuckles, a ragged thumbnail, ink climbing the forearm. Yours, and nobody has ever slept like this in them. You turn the right hand over, then lift your eyes.

"Okay," you say, and his voice is lower than Hector's, and sweeter. "Hello, you."

Neither of you knows how long. The wanting is quiet tonight. It could be years. It could already be stirring.