Chris Delvecchio

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The field is dry and endless and it is a Monday noon in Los Angeles, and you have been Adrián Solórzano for one minute, which is not long enough to want anything about him except out. His knees ache in a way that surprises you — twenty-one and already something wrong in the joints, a lifetime of stoop labor stacked up before you ever arrived to make use of it. Sun flat and white on rows of something green. Hands that already know the weight of a crate before you tell them to lift it. You stand there a minute inside a stranger's ache, in a field that isn't yours, holding a body that works fine but wants nothing you want, and you think: not this. Not again, not this one. There was no decision in it, really — just the itch under the itch, the thing that has driven all sixty of the ones before this, the simple fact that the wheel still has more men on it than you have been, and being someone is never as interesting as becoming someone next. You find the phone in Adrián's pocket, the site loaded from some other man's history, some other afternoon. You spin.

—

The room is dark and smells like unwashed sheets and the particular mustiness of a mattress with no frame under it, and the light is blue and close and it is coming from a phone six inches off your face. Your thumb is already moving before you've finished arriving, scrolling fast, faster than whoever was steering it a half-second ago, and somewhere behind the motion a body settles into itself around you — heavy through the shoulders and gut, warm, faintly sore in the lower back the specific way that means a day of kneeling on concrete. Bare feet tangled in a blanket gone half off the bed. Afternoon outside a window with the shade pulled, though it feels like deep night in here, feels like a body that has learned to sleep whenever the job lets it. You lie still except for the thumb. That's the only motion for a second. Then the eyes blink, on schedule now instead of off it, and nobody in this room notices the half-second where nobody was in it at all.

—

The T-shirt is what starts it — worn thin at the collar, an old gray one, and it comes with the memory of pulling it on this morning, one arm and then the other, half-asleep, the smell of laundry detergent his mother still buys in bulk and drops off every few weeks like he's nineteen instead of twenty-nine. Chris. The name arrives with the shirt somehow, stitched into the memory the way it used to be stitched onto the pocket of his actual work shirts, block letters, CHRIS, over the left side where the pens go.

The sweatpants next — soft, worn through at one knee — and with them a whole evening: him on this exact bed three nights ago, phone held the same six inches off his face, texting a girl named Katelyn who used to answer faster than this. She left in the spring. Not dramatically. She just started wanting somebody who wasn't tired all the time, and he was tired all the time, four ten-hour days a week running conduit through ceiling joists in the crawl space above the new dentist's office on Main, boots and knees and a low ache across the shoulders that fifteen years of this trade have already carved into a twenty-nine-year-old's body like it belongs to someone twice his age.

The phone itself gives the most — his thumb has done this motion ten thousand times, this exact scroll, and under it comes the calluses, thick and yellow-white at the base of each finger, the burn scar he doesn't have because there isn't one, only the ordinary furrowed skin of a man who works with his hands and does not think about them until they find their own way to his face, worrying at the stubble along his jaw the way they're doing right now without him. Freckles under his own fingertips when they get there, scattered warm across the nose, across cheeks gone a little soft with the weight he carries easily, comfortably, the weight of a man who eats what he wants after a ten-hour day and has earned the right not to apologize for it.

The bed under him — a mattress with no frame, bought secondhand two winters ago when he finally moved out of his dad's house and into this rental on the edge of town, the one with the closed diner two blocks down that used to do a Tuesday meatloaf special before it shut for good. The stack of paperback thrillers on the nightstand, half-read, bought at the grocery store because there's no bookstore left in forty miles. The charger cord snaking up to the lamp. All of it his, all of it ordinary, all of it worth — you understand this now, in the loose accounting the memories bring with them — considerably more than the room would suggest, numbers sitting quiet in an account he doesn't spend much out of, because there isn't much here to spend it on and he hasn't figured out yet what else a life could hold.

He believes, in his own vague way, that something is out there watching, though he wouldn't call it God and wouldn't go to a building to say so. He vapes on the porch some Fridays with the guys from the crew. He has not told anyone that Katelyn leaving hollowed something out that the overtime hasn't filled back in.

—

You bring the hand up off the phone and hold it in front of your face, turning it in the blue light — thick fingers, a white scatter of drywall dust still ground into one knuckle from a job three days gone, the freckles running up onto the back of the hand where the sun's gotten at it through rolled sleeves. Not your hand. His, and now the same thing.

"Yeah," you say to the empty room, quiet, like you're agreeing with something nobody asked. "Okay."

The thumb rests on the dark screen. Outside, two towns over from the one this body has spent its whole life in, the diner sign nobody's lit in three years catches the last flat light of the afternoon, and here, in the dark, you are already wondering how long the wheel will let you sit still in a man who has nowhere he needs to be.