Daniel Nguyen

Correction on the name, since it must be new and fit: I'll go by the one below.

NAME: Calvin Truong

You have been Gordon Lindqvist for less than a minute, and already his knees are a complaint. The nose that was once broken whistles on the inhale. Houston is dark behind the blinds, the coffee maker ticking, and his gray hair is flat on one side from the pillow. You stand in his kitchen at the hour before anything starts and you know why you are going back to the wheel. He is a fine body. He has a job and a good watch. He also has a gray, tidy stillness, and when you reached for something in him, a want, there was only a ledger. You came to him hungry. He is already finished with that. So you open the page, the wheel is there, you pay, and you spin.

The ring light stutters. You are mid-word, mid-sentence, lips shaped around a sound not yours, and the sentence is somehow still going, so you slow it and take care with it. Your spine is in a cheap chair with a sagging seat. Your jaw is rough with a thin beard that has not filled in. The room is lit white on one side and gray window-light on the other, and the chat is running faster than anyone is typing: four viewers, a blur of names.

You lean in until the lens holds only the face. You do not read the chat.

Your sleeve is first. The hoodie's cuff, gone soft and gray, is under your thumb, and it opens like a door: this morning, or the morning he thinks of as this one, up before the light, hunting the floor for the hoodie among the clothes on the carpet, pulling it on over the gray shirt he slept in, one arm, then the other, the zipper catching at the bottom the way it always does. His mother's voice on the phone, Sunday, asking if he went to Mass. He did not. The guilt is small and old and warm, like a coin he carries.

Your hand drifts to the desk and finds the edge, and then the lanyard. A name card, a store, a belt that runs. Nine hours of beeping. Gallon of milk, gallon of milk, a woman who counts coins out loud. The calluses on his fingertips are from bagging, from the scanner's trigger. His feet ache in the canvas sneakers, a dull flat ache in both arches, twenty-two years old and already his feet know the shift. Under that, a vape in the hoodie pocket, mint, the little brick of it against his hip, and the craving for it arrives as a hand on the back of the neck.

Then the app. Someone sent it to him, a cousin, a friend from school. He is trying it because the apartment is quiet and the rent is too much and four strangers are better than none. He wants someone to say his name. He wants it so badly it is embarrassing, and the embarrassment is his, and you hold it carefully, like a cup too full.

The white streak at the front of his hair: you push the fringe aside, and a hundred mirrors of him, childhood, a barber saying it was always there.

You look at your hands. They are narrow, quick, and they are shaking very slightly, or you are. You turn them over.

You look up into the lens.

"Hi," you say. "Sorry. I'm here now."

Four people watch. You wonder how long this one lasts, and when the wanting comes back.