Samer Nasrallah

You are standing at a dark window in Queens, in a body that is twenty-five, five-four and heavy, and you have been in it for less than a minute. Imran's reflection looks back at you with a short black beard and eyes that don't know yet what they are for. His roommate sleeps behind a door. The radiator ticks. His laptop is open on the sill, and on the screen is the wheel.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is what you cannot say out loud. His knees don't hurt, his lungs are fine, and he has a whole life lined up on his phone. But the first thing he did with his legs was walk them to the window, and his stomach already feels like a locked drawer. You have been so many men. Each one is a room you stand in until you don't want to. The wanting does not ask whether the room is good. You press the key with his thumb.

Then you are sitting at the foot of a bed with your own weight pushing the mattress down, and the room is amber and hushed. Beyond the window, neon is bleeding over a black desert sky. Your hand is flat on your chest, and under the cotton you feel ribs rising and falling, long and even. There is more of him than there was a second ago. The sitting height alone, the knees up at an angle, tells you: tall.

The shirt is wrong by one button. Your fingers go to it, and they are already working. They undo and redo, and the tie around your neck, loose and black, slides into a knot your fingers know and you don't.

The cotton on your back is thin and soft from washing, and it gives you the first thing. Sleeves. He rolled them once, then unrolled them, because the church wants no tattoos and he has none, but a man at a casino door still gets looked at, and he likes to look finished. The shirt is a gift, and a sister's voice comes up behind it, saying *at least iron it, Samer*. He did. The smell of hot starch. It was Sunday, and the apartment was quiet, and he sang half a hymn under his breath while the iron hissed.

Your fingers are drumming on your knee. Tap, tap-tap, tap. A habit that is older than you. It carries him in: the hangar floor at night, cold concrete through boot soles, and the cowling of a jet engine lifted like a jaw. He is under it up to the shoulder. The turbine blades are cold and exact, and each one has to be read with a light and a thumb. You feel what he feels there, and it is the one place in his life that never asks him to explain himself. The pay is steady. He has put away a little, more than anyone knows, in an account with no name on it but his own. He wants something with it and has never said what.

The carpet is rough under your socks. Beneath it, sudden: a different carpet, a chapel, folding chairs, a bishop's hand on his shoulder, and the thin pride of saying no to the cup when it was offered at a wedding and letting the laugh go past. Everyone drinks in this city. He does not. Nobody has ever asked him why, and he has never once wanted to be asked.

The tie is silk against your throat. Someone taught him that knot, a man at the first job, patient, who is gone now. It is the only gift of that kind he ever got. It tastes like loneliness, and it tastes like gratitude. Your throat tightens and it is not yours.

His body is good. Hips loose, back tight from years under engines, a dull ache at the base of the spine that he stopped noticing and now you notice. Thighs strong. Forearms thick with work. Calluses on the pads of the fingers, hard ridges that know torque.

You lift your hands into the lamplight and turn them over. Palms, creases, grease worked in so deep it will outlast soap. Then you look up, at the dark glass and the lights beyond, and you say, quietly, in a voice lower than any you have had:

"Well. Let's see what you were going to do."

You wonder how long it is until the drawer in your stomach locks again. You wonder whether you will still be him when the sun comes up.