Samer Haddad

Daniel Ferris has been mine for less than a minute, and already I know what's wrong with him. His knees are fine. His back is fine. He is fifty-seven and freckled and pleasant, and the kitchen smells of the coffee he made, and across the table a pile of school forms waits for a signature that is not mine. Nobody here is asking me for anything I can't give. That is what sent me back. The whole room expects me to be a person, and I can feel how easy it would be to say yes. So I open the laptop with his red-haired hands, and the wheel is already there, turning like a patient animal. This is the 1526th time. I pay. I spin.

Cold. That is first: air that tastes of wet leaves and silt, going in through the nose and out as a white rope in front of my face. My right foot is already in the air. Two steps, and my weight comes down on the wrong leg, then finds the other. Something small and electronic buzzes against the inside of my left wrist. The canal is on my left, flat and pewter, and the sky is the color of a bruise going yellow. Music in both ears, a bass line I didn't choose. I am running. I did not start.

The first thing I touch is the zipper pull at my throat, cold metal under a thumb that knows exactly where it is. It opens him like a door. The morning, in his hands: sitting on the edge of a bed in a dark room, pulling the black T-shirt over his head, careful not to wake the small shape curled at the far side. Then the jacket from its hook, one sleeve and the other, and the sweatpants with the drawstring he never ties right. Under the bed, the shoes. He put them on in the hallway, sitting on the stairs, listening to three children breathe behind three doors. He does this because the day will be a vest and a price gun and eight hours of straightening boxes, and this hour is the only one that is his.

The ring is warm against my finger. I turn it with my thumb and he comes up whole: a wife laughing with her mouth full at some kitchen table, her hand over his. Then a night, a long one, a fever, a small hot forehead against his collarbone. His fear is in my chest like a swallowed stone. He loves them with a plain, tired, total love, and it is not mine, and it hurts to hold.

The body is heavy and willing. Soft at the middle, strong in the thighs, lungs burning in a way he has decided to like. Four miles, and the burn is a kind of honesty. My knuckles want to crack. I curl my fingers and they go, one after another, a habit with no thought behind it. Under the feet, gravel and frozen mud. Along the right side, the scar through his eyebrow tugs when I squint. A fall off a bike, a boy of nine, his father laughing and then not laughing, driving too fast with a towel pressed to his face.

The watch buzzes again. A split. I lift my wrist and the face glows green, a number I have apparently never run, in a stride that is already mine.

I slow. I stop. Steam pours off me. I open my hands, the ring, the dark hair on the backs of the fingers, the knuckles still ticking, and turn them over in the blue light. Then I look up at the lane of mist ahead, and say, quietly, in a voice that is deeper than I expected:

"All right, Samer. Show me what you've got."

How long will he last? I don't know. Already, somewhere under the breath, the wanting is turning over, patient as the wheel.