Connor Haldane

The apartment is doing the thing it does every night around this hour, which is nothing. Blue light off the ceiling. A tab open for six hours called vessel.cards that you have refreshed four times like it might apologize and close itself. You have wanted this since before you can date it — not a person, not a place, just the idea of being let into someone else's skin for a while, the oldest daydream you have, and for the first time in your life there is a button for it instead of a page in a book. The button says SPIN. Midweek, midmorning, nothing else scheduled. You pay. You spin. You do not expect it to take.

It takes between one heartbeat and the next, with no seam you can point to. You are upright. You are warm in a way that surprises you, a long day's heat still coming up off packed gravel through boot soles that are not — were not — yours. There's a brick in your left hand, rough and sharp-edged at the corner, and a trowel in your right, mortar on it gone tacky at the skin. Low worklight off to the side, going gold against a sky that's past orange now, dropping into that flat dusk blue. A line of string pulled taut along a brick course at hip height. Your weight is on a scaffold board that gives a half-inch of spring and then doesn't. Somewhere behind the hum in your ears is a radio playing a song you don't know, in a voice that isn't yours either, except it is, now, it's the only voice there is.

The first thing that comes isn't a memory, it's a correction — the brick goes down a half-inch off the line and your own hand, this hand, stops it, backs it up, sets it again clean, the way you've apparently done ten thousand times before you were ever you in here. Then the next ten come out slow and checked, like a man double-knotting a shoe he's tied a thousand times, because something in the motion jolted and the body noticed before the mind — your mind — had anything to notice with.

Then the shirt. It's been against your back this whole time, damp through with a day's sweat, and it gives you the morning before this evening in one long unbroken pull: a dresser drawer that doesn't close right, pulling this exact shirt — the gray one, cut-off sleeves showing the long-sleeve underneath, washed so many times the stains have become more true than the fabric — over his head in a one-room apartment off McDowell with the swamp cooler rattling, the taste of burnt coffee, a lock-screen photo he didn't swipe past fast enough of a kid, maybe three, caught laughing mid-spin in somebody's backyard, and the particular ache that comes with looking at that photo that isn't quite grief and isn't quite love and is mostly just missing. Her name arrives a half-second later, riding the same thread — Dana — not said out loud in years probably, but there, close, the kind of close that a man keeps a photo for. They don't talk much. He pays what he can. It is, underneath everything else today, the thing sitting at the bottom of him like sediment.

The trowel's handle gives you something older and cleaner: his father's hands around his, age maybe sixteen, showing him how to butter a brick without wasting the mix, how to read a wall going up true by eye before you trust the level. Years of that, stacked. Calluses along the first two fingers that were already there before you arrived, a body that knows exactly how much lean it can put into a motion before it costs something tomorrow. The jeans at the knee are stiff with old mortar dust, and they give you the particular tiredness of this — not injury, just twenty-three years old and already the knees know this job, already there's a dull ache behind the kneecaps from four hours on a board. The boots remember standing. The tattoo on the arm, half under the sleeve, surfaces last and thinnest — a flash of a shop on Van Buren, nineteen years old, picking the pattern because it meant nothing and he liked that it meant nothing, a cousin in the next chair getting something stupid.

It's evening here and it was morning where you were a second ago, and some back part of this body knows it's working later than it used to — a job added onto a day job, cash under the table, because custody costs money and so does everything else, and sleep is the thing that gets cut first. That tiredness is old and specific and it is already, immediately, the realest thing in the room besides the brick in your hand.

Your leg starts bouncing. You didn't start it. It's just going, heel tapping the scaffold board in a rhythm that was running before you got here and doesn't know you're new.

You look down at the hand holding the brick, turn it, mortar drying gray-white in the creases, a scar across one knuckle you don't have a story for yet and maybe never will. Freckles across the back of it in the fading light. Not your hand. Nobody's hand, anymore, but his, and now yours, for as long as this lasts and not one second longer than that.

You look up, past the half wall, toward the dark shapes of saguaros going black against the last blue, and you say, out loud, in his voice, to nobody —

"Who taught you that?"