Eddie Marchesi

Nathan Farooqi's mop bucket is still against the wall where you left it, and the wax on the hallway floor is drying in fan-shaped streaks under the fluorescents, and your forearms — his forearms — ache the good kind of ache, twenty-three hours of ache, because he keeps this building clean the way some men keep a car. Bald head catching the light. Freckles across the bridge of a nose that's been broken once, badly reset. You are standing in the break room with a cooling cup of vending machine coffee and you are, for the fifty-third time since you started this, bored in a way that has nothing to do with him and everything to do with the fact that he is a good body, a strong one, a kind enough life if you wanted to keep living it — and that is exactly the problem. Nothing left to spend it on. Nothing left to find out. You wipe your hands on his coveralls, and somewhere in El Paso it's early afternoon, sun flat and white on the parking lot outside, and you take the phone out of his pocket, the one with the site already bookmarked, and you spin because a good life with nothing left to want from it is worse, today, than an unknown one.

The wheel turns and stops on somewhere else entirely — a stoplight town, an early evening, a bedroom with the curtains still doing their late gold thing against the glass.

His hand is flat on his own chest. That's the first thing — the ribs under your palm, narrower than Nathan's, no thickness to them, a nineteen-year-old's frame still deciding what it's going to be. The shirt is open to the sternum, buttoned crooked from three buttons down, and a tie hangs loose and unknotted around a thin neck with two small silver studs winking at each ear. You are mid-motion, his motion, hand rising toward the collar to fix what he'd botched, and you finish it — but not the way he would have. Your fingers move and the buttons come undone in one practiced-feeling pass and go back up straight, and the tie gets wound into a knot his hands have never tied, a knot this closet, this town, maybe this whole side of Ohio has never seen. He does not feel it happen. There is no moment where he notices the difference between his own hands and somebody else's want. There is only you, now, behind a face with a mole high on one cheek, looking at a window with the last of the daylight sliding down it.

The shirt against your back is what opens first — cheap cotton, small dots printed on it, a shirt he bought because his girlfriend said blue-grey brought out his eyes, and the memory comes with her voice already in it, warm and a little teasing, from a car outside a Kohl's in Zanesville. Marisol. Her name arrives with the collar still warm from the iron he never used, because he doesn't iron, he just hangs things in the bathroom while he showers and calls that good enough, and there's a whole year folded into that habit — the apartment he doesn't have yet, the plans they've made for one, the ring he's been pretending to save for while actually just not spending money on much of anything, which amounts to the same thing if you don't think about it too hard.

The tie is next, and it drags a different year up with it, an older ache — a girl named Priya he dated for eight months at community college before she transferred to Columbus and it just, stopped, the way things stop when nobody does anything wrong and there's just distance instead, and even now, buttoning a shirt for a shift he doesn't want, some part of him still runs the tape of what would have happened if he'd gone with her. He never tells Marisol that. He barely tells himself.

The floor under his sock feet gives him the trailer — thin carpet over particleboard, a landlord who won't fix the give near the closet — and that gives him the job: line cook three nights a week at the diner-that-isn't-closed-yet, the one on Main under the town's one stoplight, plus days that are supposed to be for class but mostly aren't, an associate's degree in something he chose because it sounded practical, and a laptop that lives in the navy backpack slung over one shoulder of a green hoodie he is not wearing right now but that his hands ache faintly for anyway, the strap-groove worn into a shoulder that carries it every day across a lawn that's more mud than grass this time of year.

His father's rosary is looped over the bedpost — you didn't touch it, but it's in the frame of the room, and that alone gives back church on Sundays with his mother, half-attention, whispered jokes with his younger brother during the homily, the particular guilt of a Catholic boy who drinks maybe four times a year and still somehow feels every one of them the next morning like it's a mortal sin.

Under the clothes, under the memory of them, the body itself keeps talking: five-nine and average, no meat on him yet in the way a grown man has meat, a beard that won't come in past a scatter of black hairs on a jaw still finishing its argument with itself, shoulders that know how to carry a tray of dishes at a run and don't yet know how to carry much else. Nineteen feels, from inside, like waiting — waiting for the beard, waiting for the ring money, waiting for whichever version of his life is going to be the real one, Marisol's or the ghost of Priya's or some third one nobody's told him about yet.

You look down. His hands, on the ends of your arms now, are turning the last button through its hole, steady, certain, wrong in a way no mirror in this room could show anybody. You lift your eyes off them into the window's reflection instead of a mirror, his own face looking back thin and unfinished and not yet afraid of anything.

"Little early to be dressed so neat," you say, in his voice, to no one, and you almost laugh at how easy the knot came, and you do not think about El Paso, or the mop bucket, or how long is long enough before the wanting starts again.