Dakota Whitehorse

Amit Sarraf's shop smells like steam and starch, and you have been him for one minute, standing at the counter with a bald head that isn't sweating enough for how bright the Ohio morning is coming through the glass. The gap in his front teeth catches your tongue when you think about talking. A customer's slacks are folded over your — his — forearm, and somewhere under that arm is a whole quiet life: the mortgage paid down slow, a nephew's confirmation suit hemmed for free, a woman two towns over he calls on Sundays and has for six years without asking her anything. It is a fine life. It is not why you came back. Forty-three men and not one of them has made your hands stop wanting to move, and Amit's don't move at all — he stitches like a monk, still as a held breath — and something in you that has worn forty-three other men's boredoms is already bored of his stillness before the minute is even up. You set the slacks down. You go to the site. You spin.

The bar is two inches wider under your palms than it has been all year, and you don't know that yet, you only know the weight of it dropping into your shoulders like it belongs there, and a body that is not the tailor's — shorter, denser, wired tight everywhere at once — takes the first rep down and up before you have caught what's happened. Fluorescent tube light overhead, cold and steady. A rack around you like a cage you're glad of. Your — his — chest is heaving in a rhythm that was already moving before you arrived, and you ride it rather than start it, breath cutting through his teeth on the way down, held on the way up, second rep, third, the muscle doing what it was told to do a full minute before you got here and not noticing yet that the one giving the orders has changed.

The mole is high on the cheek, you know that without a mirror, you know it from the photograph before you spun, and your face — his face — does none of the things a last hard rep should do: no grimace holding, no eyes screwed shut, just a flatness that is unnerving from outside and, from in here, is only how little this costs him. Fourth rep. The bar is heavier than a body this size should move and moves anyway, because this body has been built for exactly this in a garage under a bay window that isn't visible from here, in a life you haven't touched yet.

Then you touch it. The bar itself, cold-knurled steel biting the meat of your palm, and it opens like a door: hours of this, thousands, a rented rack in a gym six blocks from the garage because the garage ceiling is too low for the bar to clear overhead on press day, a coach two years back who told him he'd never scale past a certain frame and the way that sat in his stomach like a dare instead of a verdict. Five-foot-three of him and every plate on this bar an argument he's been winning since he was seventeen. The chronic ache low in the back arrives with it, dull, familiar, something he stretches around every morning without complaint because complaining is not what he does with his mouth on camera, or off it.

Fifth rep, and the shirt — no, there's no shirt on this body right now, just skin and sweat and the memory arriving anyway through the cotton waiting for him on the bench: a gray tee, a metal band's logo half-cracked from washing, tucked and rolled the way he always rolls it so the tattoo shows at the collar on stream, a black-and-gray face inked into his own chest that he chose because the man in it mattered to him once and he has never once explained to seventeen thousand strangers who. Pulling that shirt on this morning — no, not morning where he is, deep dark early, streetlights still on outside the bay window, because his stream doesn't start until his followers on the other coast are done with dinner and his day runs backward from theirs — the memory comes sleeve by sleeve: the headphones already looped around his neck before the shirt's even over his head, a habit, a tell, a thing his hands do because his hands can't stand still and haven't been able to since he was a kid drumming on school desks. Setting up the RGB rig at 6pm his time so it's dark enough outside to matter, the ring light's cold white doubled by the garage's bare bulb, the driveway outside cut so steep his car scrapes the lip pulling in.

Sixth rep, water bottle sweating on the floor by his sneakers, its plastic skin giving you a flash of last night — no, his last night, hours ago by his clock — a sponsor email he read twice because the number in it would cover three months of a rent he's behind on twice a year, every year, the money always thinner than the audience thinks. Scraping by, and never once saying so on camera. A woman he almost had something with in the chat, a joke that went somewhere then didn't, no name that stays with him, no one who'd notice tonight if he didn't show up. Straight, single, nobody's ex sitting heavy anywhere in him. He drinks twice a month, hard, and regrets it exactly enough. He has never smoked anything in his life and the lungs on this body prove it — they take the rep's exhale clean, no drag, no history in them at all.

Seventh rep. The mole against your — his — cheek doesn't itch, has never itched, is just there, the one detail that made a casting director once tell him he was memorable and unbookable in the same sentence, which is most of why the garage and the ring light and not a stage somewhere. Eighth rep. His hair, the electric blue over brown, is plastered to his neck with sweat, and it opens nothing new — just the salon chair eight weeks ago, the girl who does it now doing the roots without being told, an appointment he never has to describe.

Ninth rep, tenth, and the face still does not break, and that's the tell if anyone were watching close enough to catch it, which nobody is, because it's five in the morning and the gym is empty and there is only you in here now, grinding a body's last rep with none of the strain a last rep should carry on a face that used to be entirely someone else's.

You set the bar down into the rack. Your hands — small, corded, scarred faint across two knuckles from a deadlift years back that this body remembers and you don't — come up in front of your eyes, and you turn them over once, palm and back, like you're checking they're really yours now, which they are, until they aren't.

"Two more reps than I had in me," you say, out loud, to the empty gym, in a voice pitched higher and rougher than Amit's ever was, "and I don't even know why."