Colin Wardwell

The dorm room smells like someone else's cologne and it is not yours, because none of it is yours — you have been Deven Sethi for six minutes and already the scar through his eyebrow itches like a costume. You caught his reflection in the dark laptop screen a minute ago, that unfamiliar young face, and felt nothing but the small dead click of already-done-this. He has a paper open, half-written, a girl who texted him twice tonight that he hasn't answered, an inhaler somewhere in this body's own life that you haven't found yet and don't care to. Six minutes was long enough. It is always long enough now. You open the laptop, and there it is, vessel.cards, sitting in a pinned tab like a vice you don't bother hiding anymore. The wheel loads. You do not think about Deven. You never do. You spin.

Weight arrives before thought does — more of it, taller, a slouch already built into the shoulders. Your hand is flat on your own chest, feeling ribs that are softer than the ones you just left, a body carrying its weight low and easy in the gut. The shirt under your palm is a pale blue oxford, buttoned wrong, one gap too low, and your fingers already know how to fix it before you've decided to: undone, redone, correct. A tie hangs against your collarbones, unknotted, cheap silk gone soft with age. A lamp is burning off to your left. The room smells like cold plaster and the sea, somehow, even inside.

The tie is the first thing that opens. Your hands loop it — four-in-hand, not the half-Windsor this closet has apparently never seen, some habit installed by a father in another bedroom decades ago — and behind it comes an image, quick and complete: a man, heavier through the middle than you, standing in front of a different mirror, saying *no, son, like this*, patient, smelling like drugstore aftershave, while a boy's hands fumbled the loop wrong three times. Warmth in that. Something like being younger and unafraid of failing at a small thing.

The shirt gives you more once it's settled right — the particular give of oxford cloth gone soft from a hundred washes, and under it, the memory of buying six of these at once at a Kohl's outside Portland because a listing agent had told him, kindly, that clients trust a man who looks the same every day. There's pride folded into that, and under the pride something rawer: the number on a laptop screen he checks at night and then closes fast, like slamming a trap on his own fingers. Deep water. He does the math anyway, always, the commissions that haven't come, the ones that fell through at the last inspection, a truck payment he is behind on for the third month.

The floorboards under your — his — feet are worn smooth in a path from bed to dresser, footsteps in wood laid down over twenty-some years in this house, and that gives you the house itself: shingles gone the color of a gull's back, traps stacked in the yard that his uncle still fishes, the particular gray Maine light that never quite commits to gray or blue. A whole childhood arrives sideways, unbidden — sledding on a hill behind the church, a Sunday school teacher with chalk dust on her sleeves, the asthma that kept him on the bench for two seasons of Little League while other boys ran outfield, an inhaler rattling in a jacket pocket that made him feel, at nine, like a mechanism with a flaw in it.

Your jaw finds a toothpick was there a second ago and isn't now — a phantom motion, teeth wanting something to worry, a habit worn into him by open houses where he stood alone on porches waiting for people who didn't come. That's this week, this month: a listing three towns over, a lockbox in his coat pocket right now probably, the sea light he stands in on porches feeling less like beauty and more like waiting.

You look down at your hands. Bigger than the ones you had six minutes ago, softer at the middle, a callus at the first knuckle where a pen sits for hours writing up offers nobody makes. The unibrow is not visible to you but you can feel its weight somehow, a thing his whole face has organized itself around since he was fourteen and self-conscious and never once reached for tweezers.

You say, out loud, to no one, in a voice that isn't the one you had a minute ago:

"Okay. Let's see what you've got."