Zayd Halabi

Three minutes is nothing, you think, pressing Marcus Lindqvist-Orozco's thick fingers flat against the lab bench, feeling the unfamiliar give of a gut he never asked for. The building's fluorescents hum. Somewhere down the hall a centrifuge whines through its cycle. You spun into this El Paso biologist a hundred and thirty-one heartbeats ago, and already the body's boredom is your boredom — a mind that wants to talk about gene assays, a back that aches from a chair not built for a man this size, and under all of it a life you never lived pressing at the glass from outside. Three minutes of that is enough. You didn't take him for this. You never do. The wanting is already elsewhere, already reaching for the wheel before your borrowed hand finds the phone.

The power drops for two seconds. When it comes back, the arm under the needle has stopped flinching.

You are sitting on a tattoo bench in a room that smells of green soap and machine oil, and the light through the window is going long and copper the way it only does at the far end of a day. Your forearm is braced on a padded rest, someone's gloved hand steady over a half-finished line of black, and the buzz of the machine is a live wire running up into your teeth. A second ago — someone else's second — this hurt. Now you watch the needle go in and out of the skin like it's happening to a piece of furniture you're minding for a friend.

The jaw is loose. The head is turned toward the window, cold gray Atlantic light flattening everything outside to pewter, and that's the first thing that comes in — not a memory yet, just weather, just this coast, just a body that already knows this cold without being told.

Then the flannel against your shoulders gives you a morning: standing in front of the bedroom mirror in the shingled house, curly hair still wet, choosing this shirt because Rosalind said the green brought out something in his eyes, and laughing at her for saying a thing like that about a forty-dollar flannel from the hardware store's own rack. The chinos are gone now, jeans instead, worn-soft at the knee, and they bring back a whole autumn — hauling traps with his cousin's crew for one strange, aching week the year he turned twenty-six, deciding money didn't have to mean softness, and finding out three days in that it did, that his hands blistered where a lobsterman's don't, and being quietly, permanently grateful he never had to do it again.

The boots. Laced tight, leather gone dark at the toe from salt puddles in the dooryard. They remember standing at the porch rail at six this morning — his evening's early edge, this far north in winter — coffee going cold, the paper folded under one arm, thinking today's the day, finally, for the tattoo he's wanted since he was twenty and never had the nerve for. Rosalind's ring is not on this hand; it's a wedding band, plain gold, worn smooth, and touching it drags up a wedding on a bright September lawn, her father crying more than either of them, and eleven years since of a marriage that is, in the ledger where it counts, a good one — quiet, funny, unfussed, a woman who reads at the other end of the couch and doesn't need him to talk.

The money that let him spend a Thursday afternoon getting his forearm inked instead of going anywhere at all comes through the wallet in his jacket, left on a hook by the door — not memory exactly, just a low, permanent hum of ease, decisions made young and never revisited, a portfolio he checks the way other men check the weather. Millimeters under the machine, the green soap stings faintly for the first time, and you understand dimly that his body has decided you're worth flinching for again, a beat behind you, like a nerve catching up to news.

The crooked nose isn't in a memory. It's just there when you breathe, a small permanent deviation of air, from some fight or fall decades gone that never made it into anything you've been given. The stubble along the jaw itches where the strap of a mask should be and isn't. He is thirty-one and Catholic and has had two drinks already today and will want a third the second this needle lifts, and none of that is a story, it's just Thursday, it's just him, and it is settling onto you the way a coat settles once you stop holding the collar.

The artist says something you don't catch. The machine lifts.

You look down at the arm — his arm, wet with soap and blood-flecked ink, a line of black only half finished, going nowhere either of you chose yet — and you turn the hand over slowly, palm up, like you're checking it's really attached.

"Sorry," you say, to the man with the gun in his fist, in a voice that isn't the one that grew up here, though nobody in the room could ever tell you that. "Lost my nerve for a second there."