Curtis Vandermeer

It is a dull evening, the kind with nothing in it. You have scrolled until the thumb moves by itself. You have always loved this one idea: waking up as somebody else, the films, the threads at two in the morning, the private hunger that never had anywhere to go. Then a page with a wheel on it, and a price, and you pay, because you do not believe it. You spin.

He is face-down. The sheet is rough against your cheek, and the room is dark except for a thin white blade of streetlight through the curtains. Your breath is ragged and wet in a mouth that is not yours. It is the middle of the night here, everyone asleep, while where you were it was barely dinner. One arm hangs off the mattress and the blood has pooled in it. You draw it up. The body rolls onto its back and the hands fold on your chest, a posture he has never slept in.

Then the room starts giving him to you through whatever touches. The cotton shirt, soft and sour with a day's sweat, brings the morning before: his arms through these sleeves, the gray thermal under a navy work shirt because the plant runs cold on the line, buttons done bottom to top without looking. He is tired in the memory in a way that is only habit. The sheet under your calves holds a woman's side of the bed, cooler, and a flash comes of a wife turning toward the wall with a laugh in her breath. The wedding band is warm against the other palm, a plain thing, and you feel the thumb worry it, a thing he does when he is thinking about money. There is some, a little, put away, and he is proud of it in a quiet way. Through the carpet under his heel comes a child small enough to be carried, a weight on this shoulder, and an ex-wife's voice on a phone saying his name flatly, still mattering. The studs in the earlobes: you feel the cool of them, a decision made years ago and never regretted. The body is long, six-one, with a lean athletic ache in the lower back, and the hands already know the torque of a drill, the shape of a door panel coming down, the click of a fastener seating. They twitch with it, working a station that is not here.

You lift both hands into the streetlight and turn them over. Rough, nicked, the ring catching the blade of white. You look up and say, soft, in his low voice, "Hello." Under it the wheel is already waiting. Maybe years, maybe four minutes.