Dev Chaudhary

I work overnights answering chat tickets for a payments company. Eleven at night to seven in the morning, four days on, three off, and the three off are worse than the four on because there's nowhere to put them. By eleven in the morning I've been awake for thirteen hours and asleep for none, and the apartment has that used-up feeling a room gets when the daylight arrives and finds you still in it.

Thirty-one years old. Same face for all of them. That's the part I never know how to say without it sounding like complaining, because it isn't — there's nothing wrong with my face. It just never once surprised me. I have never walked past a window and had to look twice. Nobody has ever looked at me and then looked again. You can go a whole life in a body that works fine and that nobody argues with, and still never be *seen* in it, and there's no word for that, so people assume you mean you're ugly. I don't mean that. I mean I've been the same unremarkable weather every day since I was a kid and I got tired of the forecast.

That's the thing about the films. Everybody assumes it's the change — the flash, the falling-into, the body coming apart and reassembling. It isn't. For me it was always the scene after. Somebody says the new name and the man answers to it. That's the whole thing. Not being someone else. Being *addressed* as someone else and having it land, and watching the world reorganise itself around a person you invented that morning. I'd rewind those thirty seconds and watch them again with the sound off, like a catalogue for a shop that isn't real.

The server has about four hundred people in it and maybe eleven who talk. Morphoman is one of the eleven. Long posts, no punctuation to speak of, theories about the mechanics like he was working an engineering problem. Everybody thought it was a bit. I thought it was a bit.

Then the phone rang at eleven in the morning and it was a voice I had never heard using my name, and it told me to open a website I had never been to and press a button, and I did, because I had been awake for thirteen hours and there was nothing else in the room.

---

The first thing is the hands.

One of them is hanging off the side of a bed I've never seen, and the nails are bitten to nothing. I don't bite my nails. These have been doing it for years — you can see it in the skin, the little ridges where the beds have gone soft. I turn the hand over. There's a burn on the inside of the wrist, old, healed white. Something out of an oven, years ago, when he was small enough for it to scare him.

Eighteen. I can feel it before I can prove it. No ache anywhere, no click in the knee, nothing in the body asking anything of me at all.

The room is small and already hot. Flat white Los Angeles light coming in around a curtain that doesn't reach. Noise down the hall — two of them, a brother and a sister, though I couldn't tell you how I know that. A little brass figure on the dresser with a red thread tied round it and a dish set in front. I don't know what it is. He does. He knows it the way you know your own kitchen in the dark, and the knowing is just sitting there in me next to the not-knowing and neither one will move over. His mother's faith, from before his mother met the man whose name he carries and has used since he was six.

There's an alarm set for 3:40 tomorrow. Bread doesn't wait.

The mirror takes a long time.

Crew cut. Blue eyes. Dark brown hair he's never done anything to. Five foot eleven and built like it was handed to him, because it was — he's eighteen, he didn't earn this, he just woke up in it every day of his life the way I woke up in mine. And here's what got me, standing there: he's nothing special either. The card said so. *One thing you'd notice: nothing in particular.* Nobody looks twice at him on a street in Los Angeles. He is exactly as unremarkable as I am.

It's still the best thing I have ever seen.

I put a hand flat on my stomach and press and I laugh out loud in a stranger's bedroom.

---

The phone opens when it sees my face. That's what undoes me, more than the mirror — the machine looks at me and agrees.

Somebody's texted him good morning with two letters and a heart. A name from years back still sitting near the top of the thread list, the way people leave a door open. Half a pack of gum. A prescription reminder he's been swiping away since he was diagnosed last spring, twenty-three years later than he should have been.

I find the alias and I'm shouting before he even picks up.

He tells me numbers don't work anymore. He tells me they change.

And when I ask how I get back, he takes a second, and then he asks me whether I want to.

I'm looking in the mirror when he says it.

I think about the four nights on and the three nights off. I think about being weather.

I don't answer.