Patrick Solheim

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You are Amir Haddadi, and the diesel is still in your fingernails.

Three hours and twenty-two minutes ago you were nobody in particular — now you're a Nashville trucker with green eyes that aren't yours and a load sheet on the seat that isn't yours either, and you're sitting in the cab in a lot off Charlotte Pike with the engine ticking as it cools, and you are bored out of your mind. It's not a complaint against him. Amir's fine. Amir's got a good back and a logbook he keeps clean and a phone with nobody urgent in it. But there's a particular flatness to the end of a route, the light going long and orange through the windshield, that makes the boredom feel less like a mood and more like a door standing open. You drum his fingers once against the wheel — his tell, not yours, but you've had it for three hours and it's already yours too — and you open the site instead.

vessel.cards. The wheel sitting there patient as a slot machine, dressed up like it isn't one.

You don't even tell yourself a reason. That's the honest part, if you're honest, which you're not required to be. You just want to not be waiting in a truck anymore. You pay. You spin.

*

The grip changes first — that's the only warning there ever is, and it isn't a warning, it's already happening. A thumb tucks under the sponge, the wrist starts turning in small tight circles instead of the wide lazy arcs it was doing a second ago, and behind you, for the first time all afternoon, the water isn't leaving swirl marks in its wake. You are standing in a driveway in Houston with a hose running somewhere near your feet and soap sliding down a car door in white ropes, and the light is different here — later in the day than the light you left, or earlier, you can't tell yet which, only that it's gold and low and lying flat across brick. Your shoulders are bare. There's a weight of ink on them you didn't bring. A car door under your left hand, warm from the sun still coming up through the paint.

You are somebody again. You don't know who yet.

*

It comes in through the sponge first, stupidly — the terrycloth going slick under your fingers and with it a flash of a hardware store two years ago, fluorescent-lit, a bored teenage cashier, buying this exact sponge because the old one had started smelling. Small, dumb, complete. Then the hose, cool where it drapes near your ankle, and a longer one behind it: a summer, another driveway, a different car, a father teaching a version of these hands how to rinse from the top down so the dirty water runs off the clean parts last. Patrick. The name arrives with the memory instead of before it, which is how you know it's real and not something you're inventing to fill the quiet.

Patrick Solheim, thirty-four, and the shorts against your legs are the ones he keeps for exactly this — Sunday, or whatever this is, a day off between hotel lobbies. The tank top is old enough that the seams have gone soft, and touching it gives you the closet it hangs in, a neat one, a man who irons his work shirts and doesn't bother with the rest. You feel the piercing in your ear before you remember getting it — a small cool weight, a Tuesday in his twenties, a friend's shop, no reason beyond wanting one thing on his body that wasn't for anybody's approval. The back piece is the bigger memory: hours of it, a chair, a needle, a crest inked into his shoulders in the colors of a team he has rooted for since before he could explain why, his father's team, handed down like a chore that turned into a love. You didn't ask to feel proud of a sports franchise and you feel it anyway, warm and a little embarrassing, entirely his.

His hands are steadier than Amir's were, and stronger in a different place — a compact strength, gym-built rather than road-built, the kind that comes from mornings before hotel breakfasts rather than years behind a wheel. Something in the lower back twinges when you shift your weight, an old thing, nothing serious, the cost of standing in conference rooms in good shoes for a decade. You feel, distantly and without being told outright, what he's worth and what that took — the flights, the small hotel soaps, the version of himself he puts on with the lanyard, which is not this version, standing barefoot-adjacent in flip-flops with soap up to his wrists.

The clothes came off a shelf this morning — not this morning, you correct, some morning, but the shirt on your back right now is giving it to you sleeve by sleeve regardless of what day it actually was: him standing in front of a mirror deciding between two nearly identical tank tops, the small satisfaction of an ordinary choice that didn't matter and felt good anyway. A single man's morning. No one waiting on the decision. He likes it that way, mostly, except on nights he's smoking on a step somewhere after a couple of drinks and the quiet gets a little too accurate.

Nothing in him is shouting to be found. No wife, no kid, no ex who still has a hook in him, nothing he's hiding, nothing he'd bring up first if you asked. Just a clean, unremarkable, well-paid life, humid at the edges, alone in a way that isn't tragic, only true. You keep waiting for the thing that makes him interesting and you understand, slowly, that there isn't one, and that this was never going to be about him.

*

You look at your hands. Foam sliding off one knuckle, the ring finger bare, the fingers already wanting to drum against the door the second they're not holding anything.

You lift your eyes off them and into whatever's watching, and you say, "Guess I'm somebody else now," and you almost laugh, because you don't know for how long, and neither does he, and neither does anyone.