Anthony Marsala

You are standing behind a bar in Houston that isn't yours, in a body that isn't yours, and the bourbon bottle in your hand is sweating a ring onto the counter. Casey Whitlow's arms. Casey Whitlow's forearms, blond hair gone dark with old sweat, a rag looped over the shoulder like he's done it ten thousand times, because he has, and some of that muscle memory is already yours by default, freely given, no key required. It should be enough. Thirty-two, easy face, a body that pours drinks and gets tipped well for it. You have been him for less than a minute and you are already bored of him, the specific boredom of a body you didn't have to earn anything to understand. There was a woman down the bar, a regular, who called him "hon" and you felt nothing about it, and that nothing is the thing that sends you back. You set the bottle down mid-pour. You do not finish the thought in words. Your thumb finds the phone in the back pocket, the site loads like it always loads, patient, gray, a single wheel on a field of nothing, and you spin it the way you've spun it a hundred and sixty-two times before, already halfway gone before the animation stops.

Foil peels at the corner and a bar of white light lays itself across a face that is not the face you left. You turn from it — his turning, not yours, a sleeper's flinch — and then you turn back into it, and the eyes that open are brown, and they do not blink against the glare, and that stillness is the first thing that is entirely you.

The mattress under you has no give left in it, springs gone flat years ago, and it's colder than a bed should be for the middle of a day, this specific middle-of-the-day light that a body clenched into work trousers and boots-off socks should not be lying in. The shirt is still on you, day-old, sleep-creased across the gut, and touching it is what starts it — Anthony Marsala getting dressed at nine at night, standing in front of a scratched dresser mirror in the garage-under-the-house, one arm through the sleeve and thinking about nothing, the department shirt heavy and familiar the way a work shirt gets after twenty-six years, buttons that his fingers find without looking, the little hitch at the collar where the top button never wants to sit right over the throat. Belt cinched under a gut that used to be flatter and isn't anymore and he doesn't hate it, not really, just notices it the way he notices everything now, the way a man notices his own weather. Boots by the mattress, laced tight out of habit even for a body that's about to lie down, not stand up — muscle telling him they should be ready.

The window comes next, the foil taped crooked at one corner because he did it fast, at six in the morning, blinding-tired, the tape already peeling because it always peels, and every time he means to fix it and every time he just wants to lie down first. Under-house garage, steep driveway above it, a bay window's shadow falling wrong through the wall because his room used to be somebody's storage. His girlfriend's house, technically, though it's been years since technically mattered — Renata, upstairs right now doing whatever a Monday midday does to a person who isn't on his clock. He loves her in the unspectacular way of two people who have already stopped auditioning for each other. There is a woman before her, a name you get in a flash off nothing at all, off the plain fact of the ceiling — Diane, twenty-two years gone, the one who left San Jose for Denver and didn't ask him to come, and some nights, fewer now, he still runs the tape of what he would have said if she had.

The badge on the shirt across the room gives you the lot, all at once, heavier than the rest: twenty-six years, a partner who retired to Sacramento, three commendations he keeps in a drawer and never mentions, a jaw that clenches itself without him when the radio traffic turns bad, clenches now even in sleep, an old habit standing guard over an empty room. Diabetes lives in him quiet and constant, a thing he manages, testing strips in the glovebox of the cruiser, a level of tired underneath the regular tired that never fully lifts. Sunday Mass most weeks, less out of certainty than out of the shape it gives a week that otherwise has none. Somewhere in the last year, briefly, oddly, he wore a stranger's shape for under a minute and never knew it — a bus driver in Nevada, dark hair, a white streak — and you were that stranger too, once, on the other side of a door neither of you knew was there.

Your hand comes up in front of your face, freckled to the knuckle, a scar-less, plain, fifty-seven-year-old hand, and you turn it once like you're checking it's load-bearing.

"Little early for a nap," you say to the empty room, in his voice, and it comes out rough with sleep that was never yours to sleep, and you don't know yet if that's a joke he'd have made or the first thing that's only you.