Samir Haddad

You are Warren Takeda for less than a minute, standing in the dark of his kitchen in Phoenix with the register-key calluses on his thumb and the scar through his eyebrow itching. The fridge hums. The window over his sink is still black. You have a body that works. It stands up straight and does what you ask.

What sent you back is small. You opened his closet and found eleven identical black polos folded the way someone folds who has never once been surprised. You pressed one to your face. It smelled of nothing at all. Forty-seven years of nothing at all, and you thought: that is what it is to be known completely. You put the shirt down and went to the page.

The wheel turns. You do not feel a hand leave you.

Now there is glass, and light coming off the water, and your right hand is by your ear, fingertips on a small plastic bud, and your left is flat on a laptop's warm edge. The rhythm of the last second is gone. Your hand started to do something wrong and you correct it, slowly, pressing the bud in properly. Then you check the laptop. Then the strap of the bag. Then the handle of the suitcase, which is there. Each one needs checking and each one is fine.

The grey jacket's cuff is rolled twice at the forearm. When your fingers pinch it, he comes: a morning in a bedroom with the blinds half open, a woman asleep, a child's sock on the floor. He rolled the sleeves in the hallway mirror so the ink would show, because his youngest likes to trace it with a finger and say *wave, wave*. He got it at nineteen, in a shop in Dearborn, for no reason except that it hurt and he wanted something that did. He is thirty-six and sort of embarrassed by it, and keeps it anyway.

The shirt against your back is cool cotton, buttoned to the second button. You feel his thumbs doing the buttons, bottom to top, the way his father did, in the dark so nobody wakes. You feel the tiredness of three kids and a flight at six, and under it something steady. Love, maybe. It is not yours. It sits in your chest like a coin in a pocket.

You lift the left hand to see the ring. A plain band, slightly loose in the cold air-conditioning. Your thumb turns it and you get a kitchen, a fight about money that was not about money, her laughing first. Twenty-five thousand put away, then more, quietly, in an account for a house with a yard. He never told her the number because he wanted it to be a surprise.

Your thumb goes to your mouth. You catch it. The nail is bitten to the quick, and the body wants to do it again. It is a lifetime of nerves under a calm face. You make it stop.

The floor is wet tile, the neon below the windows smeared pink and blue across it. Your calves are strong, your shoulders tight from a bag carried too often. His knees ache faintly. His breath goes in and out like a man who has long since stopped asking it for anything.

You turn your hand over. Palm, knuckles, ring. A stranger's, and yours.

You look up at the glass and the man in it, bearded, brown-eyed, and you say, quietly, "Okay. Hello."

Somewhere a wheel is waiting. You wonder how long this one lasts, whether the wanting comes back by lunch or by dark, and whether you will still be him when the light changes.