Omar Haddad

You are standing in a conference room in Denver with a marker in your hand, and the whiteboard says the quarter in a man's tidy block capitals. Suresh Venkataraman has been yours for less than a minute. Nobody has noticed. The body is small and quick and dry-handed, and you have done nothing with it but stand. The thing that sent you back is simple: he is nothing. He is a body that works. You wanted to arrive in a place where something was waiting, and nothing here is waiting. You put the marker down on the tray and open the page with the wheel on it. You pay. You spin.

It is a bed. Your knee is up under a linen sheet, and cold white light comes in from a window on the right, thin and early, the light of a day not yet started. A phone sits in both your hands, and the screen is full of notifications addressed to a name that is not yours. You are lying back against the pillow with your breath slow and a little sour from sleep. The phone reads your face and opens, and under the new wallpaper an older one surfaces. Your thumb is already moving down through a stranger's messages, quick, like a man catching up on his own life.

The T-shirt is soft and worn thin at the collar, and the first thing it gives you is not a morning but a laundromat. He is folding it warm out of a dryer with a girl's hands beside his, and he is embarrassed, because his own hands were shaking over something he could not afford. The feeling is shame, mild and old. It goes.

The phone is secondhand. Its edge has a nick, and your thumb finds it without being asked. This was a Craigslist handoff in a parking lot in the rain, $140 he did not have, a seller who would not look at him. The notifications belong to that seller's old life, a name he has never corrected. He is trying an app someone sent him. He wanted it to be the thing that helped. Under the wanting is the number that lives behind his ribs all day: the loans, a figure with a minus in front of it, never far from his tongue like a loose tooth.

His nails. Your right thumb lifts to your mouth and the edge is already ragged. He bites them when he is afraid, and he is afraid often and quietly. You taste the keratin and a little salt. Your mother, his mother, is in a church basement with a coffee urn, saying a grace with her eyes open, Presbyterian and unbothered, watching him eat.

The goatee is a joke he made at seventeen that stuck. Your fingers go to the chin and know its exact length. The earring is cold against the lobe; a friend pierced it with ice and a pin in a dorm bathroom, and the laughing hurts in your chest, the good kind. Your legs ache faintly, the long muscles of someone who walks hills, up and down the steep driveway every day. The bed is below a bay window in a garage that was never meant to be a room.

You lift your hands from the screen and turn them over. Bitten nails, freckled wrists, a stranger's good strong hands.

You look up and say, to nobody, low and amused, "Okay. Let's see how long you last." You are not sure whether you mean the phone, or him, or you.