Yusuf Haddad

The operations manager's office smells like drip coffee gone bitter on a warmer, and you know this smell the way you know your own name in a body that isn't yours. Thursday evening, New Orleans, and you are sitting at his desk in his skin — black hair, stubble that itches when you're bored, brown eyes that have looked at these same walls eight hundred and eighty times removed from other faces before this one — and you are bored. Not unhappy. Bored the specific way that only comes from a life that fits fine and asks nothing of you. There's a stack of shift reports you could sign. Your girlfriend — his girlfriend, whoever she was to him before she became a fact you inherited — texted something about dinner an hour ago and you haven't answered. You built this man's competence into a rut in less than a season of nights, and tonight the rut is the only thing you can feel, so you open the laptop, you go to the page with the wheel on it, and you pay, and the coffee smell is still in your nose when the wheel stops.

The television cuts to a bright frame and your spine straightens before you've decided to straighten it. The remote is already down on the couch arm, set there by a hand that isn't asking your permission yet, because it isn't fully yours yet either. Weight settles into you all at once and it's a different weight — shorter, softer through the middle in the way that doesn't show as fat so much as absence of anything else, feet bare and cool against a rug that is not the rug you knew a second ago. A beard scratches at your jaw where there was only stubble. Somewhere behind you a hallway holds two sleeping kids you have not met and will not meet tonight, and in front of you a screen throws its light and you watch the rest of whatever this is without laughing, because the part that found it funny is gone now, evaporated in the half-second the wheel took him.

The hoodie is what gives you the first of it — worn thin at the cuffs, cotton gone soft as skin, and it comes back sleeve by sleeve the way it went on this morning: him standing in a bathroom with the fan rattling, pulling it over his head before the smell of turpentine and hot metal from the line had a chance to leave his hair, because he never fully washes it out anymore, ten years on the door-panel station will do that. His hands know a torque gun the way your tongue knows your own teeth — muscle memory, not thought, the rivet gun cocked and fired and cocked and fired eight hours a day, wrist absorbing a punch it stopped registering as pain around year three. There's an ache low in his back that is always there, a permanent tenant, and knees that complain going down stairs. He is thirty-seven and his body has already decided what it will cost him to keep working, and it has settled on this: the ache, the wrist, the hairline retreating at both temples like tide going out and never coming back in, which he minds more than he'd ever say out loud to anyone, even to Layla.

Layla. The name arrives with the couch cushion under you, with its particular give, molded over two years of exactly this — the two of them on this exact couch on off-nights, her feet tucked under his thigh, her laugh loud enough that the neighbors banged the wall once and they'd laughed harder. Her kids are down the hall, not his by blood but his in the mornings, in the packed lunches, in the small ordinary weight of two backpacks he checks are zipped before the bus. He loves them without the word ever needing saying. And underneath that, older, quieter — Amina, the ex, and the two that are his, actually his, two states away with a mother who married someone stable and boring and good, and Yusuf sends money on time every month and calls on Sundays and something in his chest still catches, small and constant, like a stone in a shoe he's stopped bothering to remove.

The remote in your palm remembers being held for three straight hours most nights, thumb finding the volume without looking. He doesn't drink — hasn't since he was young enough that it still felt like a temptation instead of a habit skipped — and the tin of dip in his sweatpants pocket is a ghost weight against your hip, the shape of a thing he'll want again in twenty minutes, jaw already anticipating it. Your nails — his nails — are bitten close on every finger, a habit from the floor, from waiting on the line for the next panel to descend, hands needing something to do between motions. Freckles scatter warm across the bridge of his nose, across cheekbones going soft with the beard grown in around them, and you feel them without being able to see them, the way you feel a birthmark you've had since childhood: proof of something, evidence he'd point to if a stranger asked what he looked like.

The prayer mat is rolled in the closet behind you, unused tonight, and a small guilt moves through you that is entirely his — Isha not yet prayed, still time, but the guilt of a man who knows exactly how the evening will go and prays anyway most nights, and skips it some nights, and forgives himself for both in roughly equal measure.

You look down. The hand holding nothing now, the remote already set aside by the body before you fully arrived in it, fingers short and calloused and chewed at the tips, freckled across the back where the wrist meets the cuff of the hoodie. You turn it over once, slow, the way a man checks a tool he's about to use for the first time.

"Not laughing at this part," you say, to the empty room, to the blue light on the wall, and it comes out in his voice, low and a little rough, and somewhere down the hall a kid who isn't his turns over in sleep and doesn't wake, and you have no idea yet how long you get to sit in this particular quiet before the wanting turns over too.