Owen Lindqvist

You are Nicolás Barrientos for less than a minute, and it is already too much. The skinny arms, the moustache you keep touching with your tongue, the brown eyes that wanted the chair at the back of the lecture hall. You sat down at the screen and the wheel was already there. Nothing was wrong with him. That is the part you would not say aloud. He was nineteen and everything in him was still arriving, and you wanted a man who was already finished. Someone who stood like he had been paid to.

You pay. You spin.

The wheel lands, and the lounge is gone. It is a wet Brooklyn street, sodium light going orange on the pavement, rain ticking on the stoop rail beside you. Your left hand is on the pull handle of a suitcase. Your right is holding a laptop open in the air, flat like a tray. There is a small white weight in one ear, a voice in it, midsentence. You are six-one. The ground is much farther down than it was a minute ago.

You do not move yet. His weight sits low in the hips, easy, athletic.

The laptop first. The aluminum edge is cold and slightly damp against your fingers, and something comes up unbidden: a Sunday evening, this same laptop on a kitchen counter, a small girl's drawing of a horse taped to the lid, taken off again before a client call. Three children. Three drawings. He peeled them off carefully every time so the tape wouldn't leave a mark. He felt a little ashamed of that, and loved doing it.

The handle of the suitcase is worn smooth where his thumb rides. Airports. A lounge at dawn, a cup of hot water with nothing in it, because he does not drink coffee. He doesn't drink anything. A hotel bar in Denver, colleagues laughing, and his club soda with lime that nobody noticed was just a choice. Sunday meetings in a carpeted chapel, a baby's shoe against his knee, his own hand resting on a hymnbook. Peace was in that, and so was the tiredness.

The jacket pulls across your shoulders when you shift. That morning comes in through the sleeves: a girlfriend asleep in the gray light, her breath against the pillow. He stood in the dark closet and put his arms into the white shirt one at a time, buttoned from the bottom up, because he always had. The cuffs, the collar, the long press of the belt. Combing the pompadour up and back with water and a little wax, ten patient seconds at the mirror, because his own father had worn his hair flat and he had decided early not to. A smooth jaw, razored twice to be sure. Then the stoop, the cab not yet come.

Your right hand wants something. The fingers curl and flick against the thumb, a small spin of metal in a pocket that is empty, a habit left over from a lighter he has never once lit. He keeps it for the sound. His father's, he thinks. Maybe. The memory won't open all the way.

The rain is cold on the back of your neck. Your knees are good. Your lungs are wide and clean. Nothing in this body hurts, and you notice how strange that is.

You lift the hand off the laptop and turn it over. Long fingers, square nails, a pale line of cuff. A stranger's. Yours.

You look up, and say it low, to the street, to whoever is watching:

"Okay. Let's see how long you last."

Somewhere under the words, the wanting is already a small sound, not yet awake.