Dave Lindqvist

You are Kevin Marsh for the last few seconds, and you are already tired of his knees. The warehouse picker's body, heavy through the middle, carries a dull ache in the lower back from a shift you are not going to finish. The Vegas morning is white at the blinds. His coffee has gone cold in a mug that says something about Reno. You were him for less than a minute before this, and nothing is wrong with him. He works. He lifts. He is fine.

But a man who is fine does not need to be someone else, and you know what is wrong. It is a small thing, and you will not say it. You paid the first time for the strangeness of it, the stepping in. You have stood in this kitchen long enough to learn that the strangeness wears off and the kitchen is still there. Your thumb is already on the wheel.

Then the floor is wet under you, and the hallway is long and smells of pine cleaner and old radiator dust.

You are standing, mid-stroke, with a mop handle in your right hand and your left hand on top of it. The motion goes wrong. Your wrist turns the wrong way for half a breath, because it is not yet yours. Then you do it again slowly, and correctly, and the mop head slides in its figure eight across the vinyl. You do ten more strokes and check each one, though this body has not needed checking in years.

Rain streaks the tall windows on your left. Beyond the glass a coffee shop glows amber across the wet street, and the lockers to your right are dark steel. It is the dead middle of someone's night. He works nights, so the hospital is quiet around you, and he is mid-shift while your own morning is still bright and far away.

The shirt comes first. It is gray cotton, soft at the cuffs from washing, and the sleeves are rolled twice to the forearm. Against your back it has a slight damp. With it comes a morning: his hands doing the buttons in a dark bedroom, bottom to top, while a woman asleep turned over and said his name, Dave, into the pillow. A child's drawing was taped to the closet door. He was careful not to wake anyone. He is a man who is careful. The nameplate over the pocket, DAVE, is stitched in white thread, and when your thumb finds it you feel his small private pride in it, the pride of a man who is reliable and knows it.

The keys at his hip jangle as you shift. Touching the ring brings the front door of a rented house, the swollen lock he has to lift and jiggle, and two small voices behind it shouting that he is home. That is the best one. You let it run. A boy launches himself at his shins and a girl hangs back, pretending she does not care, and his chest goes so wide and warm that it hurts, and it is not yours at all.

The mop handle is smooth plastic, worn pale where his palm always sits. Under it comes something older: a girl he used to love, years back, laughing on a stairwell with her shoes in her hand. It is a clean sorrow with no blame in it. He still thinks of her sometimes on long nights. Then the other thing, the Catholic thing: a pew, a cold wooden kneeler, his knees on it at nine years old, and later, at twenty, a needle in his forearm while he held very still. The cross and the praying hands. He chose them sober and has never regretted them.

Under it all the body is good. It is thirty-one, a little over six feet of lean, easy weight, with shoulders that ache pleasantly from the mop and a spine that bends without complaint. Your eyes are sharp. The hair on top is a little long, and when you push it back it is cool and silver. Your jaw is smooth, freshly shaved. A thin line cuts your eyebrow, and your finger finds it without being sent. A fall off a bike, maybe, or a fight. It does not come, and you let it go.

You let go of the mop. It stays upright against the bucket. You lift your hands in the lamplight and turn them over. They are broad and clean and a little chapped, with a cross inked on one forearm and the folded hands on the other. They are not yours.

You look up. In the dark window your reflection stares back out of his blue eyes.

"Hello, Dave," you say, and your voice comes out lower than you expected, and strange.

Somewhere past the glass the rain keeps falling, and you do not know how long this one lasts.