Dale Whitehorse

The paramedic's radio crackles somewhere past the bunk curtain, but you're not listening to it. You're listening to the sound Manuel Osorio's voicemail left in your ear less than a minute ago, in a body that isn't this one anymore, on a phone that isn't this one either — Owen's hands, forty-five years old, cracked at the knuckle from a decade of hauling gurneys, dialing a number that used to matter to somebody else. You spent your sixty seconds as Manuel calling a man who never picked up. That's the whole reason. Not grief, not really — you don't get to keep grief between spins — just an itch, a debt unpaid, the small ugly curiosity of *what does he look like from the other side of that silence.* You set Owen's phone down on a nightstand that isn't yours, in a station that isn't yours, and you go back to the wheel still tasting someone else's failed phone call.

You spin. Coastal Maine keeps sleeping without you.

The room that arrives is not a room, not yet — it's dark, blue-lit, the particular gray-blue that comes off a phone six inches from a face at an hour nobody should be awake. Your thumb is already moving. It was stopped, mid-scroll, on something forgettable, and now it isn't stopped, and the scroll goes fast and even, the rhythm of someone else's habit wearing your finger like a glove. The mattress under you tips a little, a low bed, unfamiliar softness in a shoulder you didn't have a second ago. There's a weight along your jaw that Owen's face never had — a beard, close-cropped, and under your ear, cold and small, a hoop of metal that clicks faintly against your neck when you turn your head into the pillow's dark.

The phone case is the first thing that gives you anything: a hairline crack along the bottom edge, and touching it brings back the day it happened — dropped on the cleanroom floor outside a bay door, catching itself on the toe of a boot before it hit tile, Dale laughing about it with Priya from propulsion, *man, that would've been a bad Tuesday.* The name arrives with the memory, easy, the way his own name always is to a man who's never had to think about it: Dale Whitehorse. Chicago. Twenty-eight years on this frame.

The T-shirt against your back is soft gray cotton gone thin at the shoulders from washing, and it opens the morning he put it on — not this morning, some morning, all the mornings, because it's the shirt he reaches for when he doesn't feel like deciding anything. Sleeve over one arm, then the other, the small stretch through a chest that never quite firmed up the way the gym app told him it would, a softness at the middle he's stopped fighting and mostly stopped noticing. His hands know a torque wrench, a multimeter, the particular careful weight of carrying a satellite panel between two people who cannot afford to trust each other's grip and do anyway. His hands do not know, particularly, what to do with themselves in the dark like this, so they crack knuckles one by one, an old tic older than the earring, older than the beard.

The earring itself gives you a night in a friend's kitchen, a needle sterilized over a lighter, somebody's older sister doing it because the mall place wanted ID. And from that kitchen the memory widens the way they do, unbidden, into a name — Manuel — small, quick, always laughing before the joke landed, a beauty mark under one eye that Dale used to tease him about relentlessly. Best friends since a summer job at nineteen, since a car that overheated on I-55 outside Springfield and left them stranded four hours, since Manuel moved to New Orleans and swore it wasn't goodbye and it mostly hasn't been, except for the year it kind of was. Dale still thinks about calling him some nights and doesn't, the way you don't call people you love out of a bad habit of thinking there's time.

There's more, cracking open with each fresh contact — the phone's lock screen, a photo of two kids who aren't his by blood but call him uncle anyway, his ex's kids, the ex who still shows up in his chest sideways sometimes, no ring, no custody, just history that doesn't let go clean. The cleanroom smell that isn't here but arrives anyway through the shirt's memory of it: ozone and nitrile gloves and the particular hush of a room built to keep dust off something that's going to space. A drink most nights, never more than two, poured the same way at the same counter. Faith he doesn't name out loud but carries anyway, something about the size of the universe he helps put pieces into.

The scroll under your thumb slows. Whatever he was looking at before doesn't matter to you now.

You look at the hand holding the phone — his hand, wide-knuckled, a callus at the base of the thumb from tools that aren't in this room — and you turn it over once in the blue light like you're checking it's real.

"Manuel," you say, quiet, to no one, to the dark, to a name that isn't going to answer tonight either, "I'm gonna call you tomorrow."

You don't know if that's true. You don't know how long tomorrow is yours to keep.