Andrés Falcón

The kitchen at Delacroix's has been dark for an hour, chairs upended on every table like something evacuated, and you are still awake in Marco Villanueva's body because Marco Villanueva cannot sleep after a bad call. That's what sent you back tonight, if you're honest with yourself in a way you rarely bother to be: not boredom, not even the ring of ash-smell that never quite leaves this nose, but the fact that four hours ago you pulled a woman's dog out of a duplex fire and she screamed at you for not saving the sofa, and something in you — forty-one years old, muscular, scarred through one eyebrow, a whole unwanted memory of smoke — wanted very badly to not be anyone for a minute. The wheel doesn't care why. You've given it five hundred and forty reasons already and it has never once asked. You sit on the edge of his bed, phone light too bright in the dark room, and you spin.

You come up crouched. Fluorescent light instead of nightlight, concrete instead of hardwood, a sock damp and gray in your hand instead of a phone. The knees under you are younger — no ache in them, no old ladder-fall living in the left one. You are lower to the ground than you've been in years, lighter, a stranger's balance under you like a rented car. The dryer drum is warm against your forearm where you'd been reaching in. Somewhere above, a thunderhead is doing something to the light, though down here there's only the tube buzzing and the smell of fabric softener and rust.

The sock is the first key. It turns something over — not a memory yet, just a hum, the way a name feels before it arrives — and then you're standing in a bar six years ago, nineteen and lying about it, a girl named Priya laughing at something you said with your chin tucked down over a beer because you hated how your own chin looked in every photo anyone ever took of you, cleft and stubborn, your dad's chin, his dad's before that. She used to run her thumb along it like it was a scar. She's an old ex now, gone two years, and some nights — not this one, this one is just laundry — you still reach up out of habit like she's about to.

The shirt is next: a plain navy tee, and pulling its memory is like pulling a sleeve. You remember this exact morning, hours ago by his clock, put on in the gray dark of an apartment with one window, jeans first then this, because the shift starts before the sun and the dining room won't unlock its own chairs. Waiter's hands, is what they are — you feel it in the calluses along two fingers, the specific quick memory of a tray held flat and blind over a shoulder, the particular ache of standing eight hours on linoleum that isn't in your legs yet but is somewhere close, waiting to be earned again tomorrow. There's a heat behind the sternum too, low and familiar, that you recognize before he'd have named it: reflux, from coffee on an empty stomach, from a life where the good meal always happens at 2 a.m. after the shift, alone, standing at a counter.

The concrete under your knees gives you the basement itself — not one memory but a stack of them, doing this same crouch on a hundred other nights, the particular economy of a young man who has nothing and knows exactly where all of it is. Under $5,000 to his name and not one thing wasted. You feel, distantly, a ring — not on this hand, but the memory of turning one on a finger without thinking, an old habit from before it stopped fitting the story, some anniversary that ended.

And the boy himself comes up entire, finally, the way the last one always does: twenty-two, no religion, no craving for anything except maybe a night out once or twice a month where he lets himself be loud. Athletic under the thin shirt, quick on his feet from a floor job, hair he dyed on a dare a year ago and kept because it made his mother laugh the good kind of laugh. Straight, single, no kids, nothing owed to anyone, wheat country outside this basement running black and gold under a storm that hasn't broken yet. He works nights when the diner needs him to. Somewhere above ground it is almost noon and he is asleep for a graveyard shift nobody in his life quite understands, and here, now, it is the deep dark understood by exactly two people on the whole wheel — you, and no one else, because he is gone.

You pull the warm load out and drop it in the basket, and your hands — his hands — fold without you: fast, corners squared, a waiter's exactness that Marco's hands never had. You watch them do it like it's a magic trick performed on you rather than by you.

Then you stop. You look at the fingers, turn them once, palm up, like checking for a burn that isn't there.

"Okay," you say, to the empty laundry room, to no one. "Let's see what you've got."