Adrián Quintero

You are at the screen, and the evening is nothing. Work is behind you, the scrolling is behind you, and the hour is late enough that nobody will ask what you are looking at. You have wanted this for as long as you can remember: the films where a stranger's eyes open in a different face, the threads at two in the morning, the old private habit of imagining the first look in a mirror. Everyone writes about it and no one sells it. Then the page with the wheel is there, and you pay, and you do not believe it. You spin.

The wheel clicks down and you are standing.

Fluorescent hum. A pallet wrapped in plastic against your thigh. A box cutter is in your right hand, mid-stroke, and your left is flat on cardboard. Your weight is on the balls of your feet. The stroke is wrong, the blade angled badly, so you stop and draw it again slowly. Then ten more cuts, each one checked, on a job that has not needed checking in years. He would never have known why. You do.

The keys on his belt loop shift against your hip, and the metal is cold through the pocket. A flash comes: a brass key, a back door, a hand that is not yours turning it before dawn. It carries a feeling of being the one trusted with the lock, and a tired pride in it.

The shirt is damp at the small of your back. The morning arrives through the cotton, sleeve by sleeve. Pale blue, ironed on the kitchen counter while someone else's coffee ran. Left cuff, then right, buttoned with thick fingers. The tie is the hard part, the knot he has tied so many times that his hands do it while his mind is elsewhere. A boyfriend's voice from the other room says you're going to be late, and there is a laugh in it. The tie is looped, pulled, and settled with two fingers under the collar. The warmth of that goes through your ribs like swallowed tea.

The coiled cord of the earpiece tickles your neck. A radio crackles somewhere behind it. Under the static is the memory of a long Sunday, a white shirt, a chapel with cold air-conditioning, a hymn he knows by heart and has never once needed a drink to get through. Then a different year, an old girlfriend on a stairwell, the two of them laughing until it stopped being funny. He still thinks of her sometimes, kindly and without wanting anything.

Your hand wants to click something. Your thumb finds nothing, and the habit goes on in the air, the ghost of a pen. Behind it is the weight of the numbers, a debt that sits in his chest like a swallowed stone. He carries it standing very straight.

The body is steady. It is five foot seven and solid, with a little ache low in the back from hauling, and the beard is thick and warm on your jaw. The nose ring is a thin cold point at one nostril. Your feet are tired in shoes that have been resoled twice. Through the glass the courtyard has gone blue, the palms are black against the last light, and the lamps are coming on across the way, your own side of the street. A neighbor. You have walked past this man. You never knew he was this.

You lift your hands and turn them over. They are broad, scarred by nothing, and not yours.

"Okay," you say, and his voice comes out lower than you expected. "Okay. Hi."

Somewhere you already want the wheel again, a small hum under the ribs. You do not know whether you will still be him tomorrow.