Yusuf Karam

The El Paso light comes through Roger Estrada's kitchen window low and orange, and you stand in it feeling how little this body has cost you to enjoy. Fifty-one years old, a gut that pulls at the belt, a scar through the eyebrow like punctuation on a face that has taken punches and given a few back. Less than a minute in him and already the itch is back — that specific hunger that has nothing to do with Roger's aching knees or his unpaid invoices on the counter. Two hundred and sixty-nine men behind you and this one already feels like a coat you tried on in a store you're not going to buy from. You don't hate him. You just remember, distantly, that there's a wheel, and that boredom is the one hunger none of them ever fill for long. You pull the laptop over, already gone from him in every way that matters, and you spin.

The kitchen light is wrong before you understand why — dimmer, warmer, west-coast dusk instead of desert glare — and the hand in front of your face is lifting a phone at the exact angle it was already lifting it, thumb coming off the glass mid-drag. You are short in this one, compact, a body wound tight with muscle under a plain navy shirt. The phone screen holds on a watch, a price with too many digits, and the hand — this hand — turns it face-down on the counter without you telling it to, some old reflex of shame finishing the motion you arrived inside of.

The counter under your forearm is cool laminate, and touching it gives you nothing, but the shirt against your back is a different matter — worn cotton, a little tight across the shoulders, and it comes to you in his hands, not yours: this morning, pulling it over his head in a bathroom with the fan broken and humming anyway, the mirror fogged at the edges. Yusuf. The name arrives with the shirt like a label sewn in. Yusuf Karam, forty-four, and every year of it sits differently in this frame than it did in Roger's — shorter, denser, a body that has spent two decades lifting boxes out of a van and knows exactly what that costs a lower back.

The phone is still warm under your palm and it gives you the last hour before this one: sitting on the closed lid of the toilet at four a.m. doing the blood check he does before every shift, the little prick on the pad of a finger already ruined from a thousand pricks before it, the number on the meter fine, always fine, because he is careful, because carefulness is the whole architecture of a life spent one skipped meal from trouble. Type 1 since he was nine. His mother in Anaheim used to sit with him at the kitchen table doing the math on orange juice like it was homework. He still does the math. He has done it every day for thirty-five years and told almost no one at work because Gary in dispatch made one joke about it in 2009 and Yusuf never forgot the shape of the joke.

The waistband of the shorts gives you the van — not this evening's van, all of them at once, a decade of them, the vinyl seat that burns in August, the hand scanner heavy on his hip like a sidearm he never asked to carry. His hands know the motion of the door track without being told: up, over, latch. He bites his nails down to nothing when a route runs long and dispatch keeps adding stops, and there is a rawness at the edge of the left thumb right now that is his and not yours, an old habit worn into the skin like the tattoo worn into his forearm — an eagle, banner, bold lines gone a little soft at the color's edges, done at twenty-two in Fullerton the week before he asked Dania to marry him, because he wanted, God knows why, to look like he had already decided things.

The wedding band is cold for a second and then it isn't, and it brings her whole — not the wedding, but three years ago, her hand flat on his chest at two in the morning telling him Amir's fever had broken, the relief of it passing between their palms like current. Three kids upstairs from a kitchen he doesn't have anymore, in an apartment he does, courtyard palms outside going dry and papery in a wind that never really cools. And under that, quieter, older: Sahar, the girlfriend before Dania, who he still thinks of on nights like this one for no reason he'd defend out loud, a version of a life he didn't choose that sometimes visits him uninvited the way this one has now.

He prays when he remembers to and skips it more than he'd admit at the mosque on Sawtelle. He has never had a drink in his life and the one time a coworker offered him a cigarette outside a warehouse in 2015 he said no the way you'd decline a fight. None of that shows on him. Nothing about him shows on him — that is the whole disappointing fact of Yusuf Karam, a man built like he could do something about his life and instead spends his evenings pricing watches he will never buy, mortgaged three separate ways to a rent that eats every raise before it lands.

The phone is face-down now, screen dark, and the kitchen is dim around a body that is not yours and was never his to keep.

You lift your hand off the counter and look at it — blunt fingers, a torn thumbnail, the eagle riding the forearm in ink thirty years old and still bright at the wingtip — and you turn it over once like you're checking it's real, then you look up into the dark window over the sink where a face that isn't yours is looking back.

"Not yet," you say, to no one, to the glass, to whatever comes next.