Samer Haddadin

HIS LAST NAME IS Haddadin. He is Rami Haddadin's brother, and they share it — give him a first name that does not. HOOK: He charted ten thousand times without looking; now he checks everything.

The body I'm leaving is a retail associate's, six-one, soft in the middle, with a scar through the eyebrow that I have been touching with my thumb for under a minute. I stand in his kitchen before the day has started, the window still dark, and the coffee he would have made is not made. The twenty-two-year-old electrician in Honolulu was eight spins back. I left him five minutes ago and I can still feel his short legs and the stubble under my palm. The brother I never met was in that house, in photographs on a refrigerator. His name was Rami. I looked at it a long time. Something in me wanted to see what that family looked like from the other side of a different door. So I pay, and the wheel turns.

It lands, and I am standing, and a pen is in my right hand. The light is flat and white overhead, and my feet hurt in the good, earned way. My left hand is flat on a stack of folders. The first motion comes out wrong, a tick in the rhythm, and I do it again slowly and correctly. Then ten more, each one checked, a job that has not needed checking in years.

The scrubs are the first thing that talks. The cotton is washed thin, and against my shoulder it hands me a morning: a brownstone stoop, the street wet, sodium light going gray as it fades. His hands pull the drawstring twice because the first knot never holds. A pocket gets his badge, and the reel clicks. He thinks, without words, of Rami, the younger one, and the feeling is a clenched kindness, not an argument. There is a phone call he did not return. I don't have the rest.

The pen is cheap, and it knows him. His thumb finds the dent worn into the barrel, and I get a night shift from years ago, a patient's hand going cold in his, and a vow he made in the hallway afterward to never stop checking. That is why the checking. The folders are paper and slightly damp from the radiator. My other hand is already picking at a cuticle at the edge of the thumbnail, a habit that has a raw place there. He does it when he is afraid. He has been afraid today.

My body is a thing I did not choose and could easily love. Five-seven, light on the balls of the feet, the shoulders strong from lifting people who cannot lift themselves. The nose has an old break, and when I breathe in, one side runs clearer than the other. The jaw is smooth, freshly shaved, and the hair brushes my neck and ears. A faith lives in him too, folded small and ordinary, a prayer said without kneeling, over the sink. Savings, the number he checks and does not spend. A Thursday. Windows full of brick and gray weather.

I lift the hand. It is brown, with short nails and a ragged thumb. I turn it over. Then I look up.

"Okay," I say, in a voice that is deeper than I expected. "Let's see how long you last."