Brett Halloran

You are Gerald for one minute, and one minute is enough to know it was a mistake.

The recliner is the wrong shape for wanting anything. Your feet don't reach the footrest right. The remote is too big for these fingers, the light through the blinds is the flat gray of a Monday that has already told you everything it's going to tell you, and somewhere down the hall a clock is doing the thing clocks do when there is nothing else happening in a house. You spun this old man up out of boredom twenty-eight bodies ago and you have been him for sixty seconds and that is already the whole of it — the chinstrap beard scratching at your jaw when you swallow, the hazel eyes that water for no reason, a skinniness that aches sitting still. You did not come back to the wheel because Gerald did anything to you. You came back because he did nothing at all, and you have found, twenty-eight times over, that nothing is the one thing you can't sit inside for long. You open the laptop on the arm of the chair. The page loads the way it always loads — plain, patient, the wheel sitting there like it's been waiting on you specifically. You pay. You spin.

The room changes before you do.

You are standing at the foot of an unmade bed with your hand flat against your own chest, feeling ribs that are not the ribs you had a second ago — closer together, tighter, wrapped in muscle instead of loose skin. The shirt under your palm is pale blue, half-buttoned, and your fingers are already moving without you, undoing three buttons and redoing them in the right order, climbing to the collar, and then they're at the tie, which is hanging loose and wrong, and they tie it in a four-in-hand knot your hands know and this closet has never seen tied that way before. There is early light coming through a window with a brick wall close outside it. There is a smell of fabric softener and old coffee. Your feet are bare on a mattress that gives under you, one sock somewhere near your ankle, colorful, mismatched to nothing.

The shirt gives it up first, sleeve by sleeve. This morning — his morning, and it is morning here even though wherever you just came from it was the flat middle of a Pittsburgh afternoon, because his clock and your clock have never once agreed and you've stopped expecting them to. He'd laid out these clothes the night before on the chair, because he closed last night and opens today, a double that ate his whole Sunday and half his sleep, and his girlfriend Danielle had texted are you dead and he'd texted back basically lol and fallen into bed still smelling like register receipt paper. The shirt remembers his father's hands tying a tie for him at fourteen, slow, patient, for a funeral neither of them wanted to be dressing for, and it remembers this morning too, his own hands doing it now without thinking, fast and a little wrong, because there is no father in this room, just a mirror on the closet door he isn't looking at.

The mattress under your feet gives you the shape of him lying awake at five a.m. rehearsing a conversation with a manager about a schedule that keeps stealing his Sundays, the ones that used to be church with his mother before the extra shifts ate those too, and a flicker of guilt so worn-in it barely registers as guilt anymore, just weather. The floor gives you six years of standing at a register — the barcode scanner's weight settling into your palm like it was grown there, the particular ache low in the back that comes from a job that wants you upright and smiling for nine hours, the strength in your arms that has nothing to do with any gym and everything to do with lifting cases of water and dog food onto belts since you were fifteen. You are twenty-one in this body and it knows things your last one forgot decades ago — how to catch a dropped can before it hits tile, how to make small talk with strangers stretch exactly as long as it needs to and no longer, how to smile at somebody rude enough to make you want to put your hand through the conveyor belt.

The tie gives you Danielle's hands straightening it at her apartment two nights ago, laughing at how bad you are at this, her fingers doing what yours are copying now. It gives you the sermon from three Sundays back that you actually caught, about faithfulness in small unglamorous places, and how you'd thought of the register when the pastor said it, and hadn't hated the thought. It gives you a pack of cigarettes you haven't bought in fourteen months, and the particular relief of that, still fresh enough to feel like a decision instead of a habit.

Nothing marks this body. No scar to read, no ink, nothing pierced. Just the ordinary wear of a young man who works with his hands and his feet all day — calluses starting at the base of the fingers, a jaw that's been shaved clean this morning with a drugstore razor, green eyes that are, right now, looking at nothing, aimed at a wall with unfocused wonder.

You look down. Your hands finish the knot on their own, then drop to your sides, and you turn them over, palms up, like you're checking them for something that isn't there — no chinstrap beard shadow to feel for, no age spots, no tremor. Just young hands, strong, a little chapped at the knuckles, already wanting to drum against your thigh out of habit that isn't yours yet but will be by noon.

You lift your eyes to find the window, the brick, the gray Houston morning waiting on the other side of it like a shift that hasn't started.

"Okay," you say, to the empty room, in a voice that isn't Gerald's and isn't quite yours either. "Okay. Let's go to work."