Connor Maslanka

The bouncer's stool creaks under weight that isn't his own preference of weight, and that's the first thing you notice tonight — how tired you are of a body you picked for its size, its usefulness at a door, and nothing else. Vikram Sondhi's knees ache the way a fifty-three-year-old's knees ache after eight hours standing on concrete. The scar through the eyebrow itches sometimes, phantom, though it was already healed when the wheel gave him to you. You have made him throw exactly one person out tonight, a kid too drunk to stand, and it satisfied you for about four minutes. The club noise is dying down. Everyone he knows is either asleep or three drinks past caring where he is. You go into the back office because it's quiet there, and you take out the phone that is technically his and open the site that is not.

vessel.cards loads slow on his cracked screen. The wheel sits there doing nothing, the way it always does until you feed it. You tell yourself this one's just to see. You've told yourself that both times before. It isn't boredom exactly — or it is, but boredom is doing a lot of work standing in for the actual thing, which is that Vikram, minute by minute, is turning into a man you've already used up. You paid for a spin. You are still forming the thought when your thumb finds the button.

The room changes without going anywhere.

You are on your side. There is weight under you that reads differently — leaner, longer, a body arranged on a mattress at an angle Vikram's never folded into. A phone, smaller and colder than the one you just put down, sits six inches from a face that is no longer the one you had. Blue light. The thumb that was scrolling — someone else's thumb, a second ago — keeps going, but faster now, steadier, flicking through things it had stopped on for reasons that aren't yours anymore. Somewhere outside this room, wind is doing something to a storm door. It is very dark and very quiet and everyone in whatever house this is is asleep.

The sheets are cheap cotton, worn soft in one long-used patch. That's the first thing that comes through, before anything else — the give of a mattress that's been slept in by exactly one person for exactly one motive: cheapest one at the store, size XL because he's six feet and doesn't want his feet hanging off. Then the T-shirt against your back gives you a Tuesday, an ordinary one, pulling it out of a laundry basket because it smelled fine and nothing else was clean, whoever, it doesn't matter, it's a shirt. Small return. The phone in your hand is bigger.

It arrives as a whole day, sleeve by sleeve, because the memory is wearing the same jeans it's remembering putting on. Waking at eleven. Hoodie over the black shirt, the gray one with the university's name faded almost to nothing, worn so many times the fleece inside has gone slick instead of soft. Zipping the backpack, the strap always sitting wrong on the left shoulder no matter how you adjust it. Walking across a lawn gone brown at the edges, laptop under one arm, the smell of cut grass losing its fight to cold. A seminar on something you already forgot the name of. A girl — Emily, it comes with her name attached like a label on a jar — laughing at something you said outside the library, her hand flat on your chest for one second like punctuation. You liked that. You've liked a lot of small things like that for eight months now and never once said the word love out loud, not because you don't, because you're twenty-five and it still feels like handing someone a key you can't get back.

Under the fear of forgetting all that sits the body's own memory, older than any of it: the ache in a jaw from grinding gum for six hours a day without noticing, the way your tongue automatically checks for the pouch tucked against your gum that isn't there right now because it's bedtime and you took it out already, sitting in the little tin on the nightstand your fingers already know is there without looking. Shoulders that carry a backpack in a slight permanent list. Hands that have never done anything harder than moving boxes into a dorm and out of one, calloused nowhere in particular, strong in the ordinary way strong happens to a twenty-five-year-old who walks everywhere and lifts nothing. A body that drinks big twice a month and regrets it exactly as much both times. Nothing wrong with it. Nothing remarkable about it either — you go looking for the one thing about him and there isn't one, and that itself sits strange in your throat, like reaching for a door handle that isn't where it should be.

You feel his mother's voice on the phone last Sunday, an unremarkable call, the low animal comfort of nothing being wrong. You feel Emily's laugh again, closer this time, unwilled, and understand without deciding to that you're going to have to be careful with that, later, if there is a later — that some things in a stranger's life come back sharper than you want them to.

The room is dark, cold coming through a window not quite shut. Your thumb has stopped scrolling. You turn the phone slightly and its light catches your hand — his hand — turning it over slow, one finger at a time like counting something.

You sit up. The storm door bangs faintly downstairs in wind that isn't even your weather yet.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to no one, your voice unfamiliar in your own ears and already less unfamiliar than it should be. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."