Dennis Okamura

The site loads slow on a phone at the end of a Saturday that never had shape to it — work, then nothing, then the blue rectangle and the scroll that goes nowhere. You have wanted this since before you had a word for it, since the first movie where somebody wakes up behind a stranger's eyes. Years of it, quietly, a locked room in you that nothing ever opened. Then a wheel on a page called vessel.cards, and a price, and you pay it before you can talk yourself out of believing it will work.

It spins. It stops.

Weight comes down on you all at once, low and wide and warm, a chest pressed into a mattress that smells like someone else's sweat and someone else's detergent. Ragged breath goes even in the space of one inhale. An arm that was hanging off the edge of the bed draws itself up without your asking — his body knows the motion before you do — and rolls you onto your back, hands folding at the chest like a man laid out for a viewing. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtain and lies flat across the ceiling. Outside, wherever outside is, it is not the middle of the night. There is a last gray light behind the curtain that has no business next to how tired this body is. Friday evening, somewhere. Saturday night, nowhere, which is where you were.

You lie still in him because he is heavy and the heaviness is new, a solid gut and a thick chest, and because the fabric under your palms is asking to be understood. A worn cotton t-shirt, soft at the collar from a hundred washes — and it gives you a room, all at once: a bathroom mirror fogged at the edges, this shirt coming off over his head after a day in the field, tired in the shoulders in a way that is specific, familiar, his. A morning that isn't this one. Denim shirt, sleeves rolled twice because rolling them three times pinched at the tattoo. Jeans stiff with old mud that softened by noon. Boots that go on sitting on the edge of a truck tailgate, the leather cool, the laces doubled because the left one frays. Every motion of it lands in his hands, not yours, muscle memory older than you are borrowing.

The ring on the left hand is warm from his own skin and it opens wider than the shirt did — a whole marriage arrives at once, unruly, not in order. A kitchen with the radio on low. An argument about money that ended in her laughing despite herself. Her hand flat on his back at four in the morning when his blood pressure had him up and pacing, not saying anything, just there. And under that, further down, a woman who isn't his wife — a name that surfaces without permission, a summer that ended on a porch, a decision he made and has quietly, privately regretted at odd hours for twenty years without ever once saying so out loud. He does not think of her often. He thinks of her now, because you are holding what he held.

The tattoos on the forearm are next: script under his fingers when he absently rubs at his own wrist, the way he always has, a name and a date that mean a single delivery room, a single terrified joy, a child now grown and mostly gone from the house, calling on Sundays if calling happens at all. A dragon on the other arm from a version of himself twenty-five years younger and stupider, a bar in another city, a dare. He is not sorry about the dragon.

There is a field somewhere behind all of it — not under your feet now, but present anyway, in the calluses, in the permanent stoop-ready set of the lower back, in the ache that lives in both knees whether he's standing or not. Work that never once felt like enough money for what it took out of him. A cigar on the porch step most nights, the one on his own time nobody gets to ration. A drink before that, sometimes several, the taste of it already phantom in a mouth that isn't yours yet either.

His hands twitch at his sides — nails already bitten short, a habit that isn't yours and that you feel the ghost-urge of anyway, some borrowed nervous system reaching for a habit before you've decided to want it.

You sit up in the dark of his bedroom. The wife's side of the bed is empty — a late shift somewhere, a fact arriving thin and unattached, no memory behind it yet, just a fact. You bring both hands up in front of your face, broad and thick-knuckled and brown, a wedding band catching the thin light, and you turn them over slowly, like you're checking they're real.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to no one, in a voice that is not the one you don't have. "Okay."

Somewhere behind your eyes, small and constant, the wheel is still spinning, waiting on nothing, waiting on nobody, waiting on you.