Peter Lindqvist

Daniel Haddad's knees ache from a day of kneeling in other people's flower beds, and the ache is the reason I'm here. I have been him for six minutes. In six minutes I've learned that his scar pulls when he frowns, that his truck keys are in the left pocket, and that his house is quiet on a Sunday night. The quiet is the trouble. I sit at his kitchen table with his phone lit in front of me. I know what he can do. He can trim a hedge to the millimeter. He can lift a hundred pounds of pavers. He cannot make me want to be him past the first cup of coffee. Something in me has gone thin and itchy, and I know the cure for it. I press the wheel.

White. No travel, no warning. I'm halfway across a car park with my arm up over my head and the air already blazing above me. Then the ground comes up and takes me flat. My shoes smoke. Rain lands in an open eye. And then the body sits up in one clean motion, the way no man sits up after that, and stands in the storm getting its balance.

It is a lot of body to be handed all at once. It is small, five-six, and light on its feet. Rain is running down a scalp where the hair has retreated at both temples. My jaw is smooth. The right leg is bouncing, and I did not tell it to. I put a hand against my chest and the sweatshirt is soaked and heavy, and the cotton gives me him.

Black crewneck. This morning he pulled it over his head in a dim bedroom, careful of a wife asleep beside him, and then the dark trousers, the left leg first. He's been tired for a month. Something at work will not compile, a service that falls over every night at three. He sat at a standing desk with two monitors and a coffee gone cold, and he felt a pride so private it was almost a shame, that he is good at this and well paid for it.

The wedding band is cold under my thumb. A flash: a hand turning it on the hotel balcony of a honeymoon, a woman laughing. Then two kids, one on each side of him in a church pew, and his singing voice lifting out of him without effort. He believes. He prays in the car before he goes in to work. He has never once had a drink, and for years he has not smoked. There is a ghost of the craving in his fingers even now, a pinch and a lift toward the mouth.

Another pocket gives me a different kind of memory. His first wife is still in his phone under her own name, and he still answers on the first ring when she calls about the kids. He doesn't tell his present wife how it hurts.

The sneakers are soaked through. The car park is slick, and the sky is going gold at its edge. Something in the knees is fine. Nothing aches. I flex the hand and it opens easily.

I look down at it, turn it over, and see the ring. I lift my eyes.

"Well," I say, in a voice that isn't mine. "Hello, Peter."

The leg keeps bouncing. I don't know how long you last, or when I'll want more.