Aaron Feldstein

The jobsite trailer smells like drywall dust and the coffee Dale's been reheating since six a.m., and you stand in his muscular fifty-three-year-old body at the little laminate desk with the laptop open to vessel.cards, and you feel, again, that particular itch that has nothing to do with Dale at all. Two minutes in him. That's all it took. Two minutes to know the crew doesn't need him today, that his back is fine, that his knees are fine, that there is nothing wrong with this life except that it is not new. You have learned that the wanting doesn't come from anything broken in the body. It comes from you. It always has. You tell yourself this is the last one for a while, the way you have told yourself six hundred times, and your thumb — his thumb, blunt-nailed, calloused along the first knuckle — finds the wheel and gives it a lazy spin, already bored of Houston, already halfway gone.

It lands, and there is no falling, no travel, just a different weight arriving around you all at once — heavier through the middle, softer, younger — and a phone six inches from a face that is now yours, thumb moving over the screen faster than the boy lying here a half-second ago had been moving it. Sheets. A twin mattress that dips too much in the middle. The room is dark except for the screen, and somewhere outside a Monday afternoon is happening without you, because this body's Monday is your Monday's midnight, elsewhere, upside down. He should be at the end of a route, hand on the fare box, calling out a cross street. Instead he's here, off shift, off the clock, on nights this month, asleep now for four hours before he has to be back at the depot — except he isn't asleep. He's you now, thumb still moving out of habit, and the habit is the first thing that comes through: the phone itself, warm, a spiderweb crack in the corner he keeps meaning to get fixed.

The crack brings a flash — dropping it on the subway platform, Talia laughing at him, not unkindly, saying you're a Sasquatch, Aaron, you don't need to also break your phone — and then more of her arrives, unbidden, the whole shape of eight months: her voice over the intercom static when he calls her from the depot break room, her hand flat on his chest like she's checking he's still solid, the specific ease of a girl who never once made him feel like the extra weight he carries was a thing to apologize for. He loves her in the plain unglamorous way you love someone you haven't had to fight for yet.

The T-shirt against your back gives you the depot itself — the particular vinyl smell of the driver's seat, forty minutes of a Bed-Stuy route memorized so deep it's in the muscles of his forearms, the mirror adjustment he makes without looking, the old woman on the B44 who always says thank you sweetheart and never anyone else's name. It gives you the badge shirt too, though it's not on him now, just remembered: buttoning it that morning — his morning, hours and hours behind this one — over the undershirt, tucking it in over the belly he stopped hating around nineteen, the belt cinched at the notch that means today's a fine day, a manageable day. It gives you his hands doing what they do without him noticing, rising to touch his own face, jaw, the place below his ear, a small tic from some anxious understory that a doctor and a little orange bottle have mostly quieted down. It gives you the shul on Eastern Parkway at fifteen, his father's hand on his shoulder, the size of him already outgrowing the other boys and the shame of that folding, slowly, over years, into something closer to just his. It gives you dip tucked in his lip on slow nights at the wheel, the tin worn smooth in his back pocket, a vice so small and so private he's never told Talia, only ever done it parked at the last stop with the doors shut.

None of it is a life you wanted. All of it is a life you're standing in, uninvited, complete.

You look down. His hands — pale, wide, a callus riding the base of each thumb from the wheel he grips forty hours a week — turn over in the blue light like they belong to someone you're meeting for the first time, which they do, which they always do. You lift your eyes off them, into the dark of the room, into whatever is out there past the glow of the screen, and you say, quietly, to no one who can hear it and wouldn't know what it meant if they could —

"Okay. Let's see what you've got."