Elian Carrizal

The window in Marco Villanueva's apartment is a black square with the city smeared behind it, and you have been looking at it for twenty minutes instead of at anything in the room. Two days and three hours in him and you already know the whole shape of this life: the squeegee callus going soft on his palm because you haven't worked, the ache in his shoulders from a harness he hasn't worn, a woman named Priya who texted twice and stopped. He is fine. He is a nice body, compact, quick, good hands. That is the trouble with him — you keep noticing that he's *fine*, the way you'd notice a hotel room is fine, and fine was never why you spun. There's a dried ring on the coffee table from his mug and you've been staring at it like it might tell you something, and it doesn't, because it's not yours, none of it is, and the wanting comes back the same way every time: quiet, then total. You open the site on his phone with his thumbprint, which is a strange small theft all its own, and you put in the number, and you spin without a reason you'd say out loud, only the old one, the one underneath all fifty-eight: *not this. Something else. Now.*

The wheel turns through men you'll never be and lands.

The television throws its light across a dark living room, blue-white, flickering, and you are sitting up straight before you know you're sitting, spine coming off the couch back like it was never slouched, remote already set down on the arm of the couch by a hand that is not yet fully yours but is already moving like it knows this furniture. For half a second there is only the show, too bright, laugh track rolling over a joke that already happened. You do not laugh at it. Somewhere behind your sternum, which is a wider sternum now, a stranger's heart finds a new gear and holds it.

Freckles. You feel them before you ever see a mirror — not a sensation exactly, but a kind of lightness across the bridge of a nose that isn't yours, something about the face that wants to be careless and isn't tonight. The couch under you is cheap and broken-in, the fabric worn pale at the armrest. A black T-shirt, loose and soft from washing, shifts against your back as you sit up, and that's the first door: a flash of this same shirt laid out on a barracks bed, folded square by someone else's hands years before this, a sergeant's voice saying something about pride you don't have time to hear in full before it's gone. Then it's just a shirt again, ordinary, a shirt a man wears to not think about anything.

Your feet are bare against a cold floor and that's a second door, wider — boots, always boots, boots laced tight before dawn, the smell of boot leather and gun oil that lives in the cuffs of pants hung on a chair, and under that the stiff weight of a uniform jacket going on sleeve by sleeve on some other morning, cotton-poly blend, name tape ironed flat, dog tags cool and then warm against his chest within a minute of being out from under the shirt. Elian. The name arrives with the tags, the way a man's own name always comes in sideways, attached to something he's touching rather than announced. Elian Carrizal, 2-12 Infantry, and with it the yard outside the barracks in grey early light, frost on the grass turning to nothing as the sun comes up, forty other guys in formation breathing steam, a sergeant counting cadence that lives in his body now like a second pulse.

The remote is still faintly warm from his hand, and that gives you the silence of the house — not his house, a rental he shares with two other guys currently elsewhere, both home on leave, the quiet he picked tonight on purpose because there's a particular kind of tired that wants dark and noise and nobody talking to it. He is twenty-four. He came off a long stretch of field exercises two days ago and has mostly slept and eaten and sat in this exact spot since, feet up on the ottoman, a mug gone cold on the coffee table beside a stack of unread magazines. His shoulders ache the honest way muscle aches, not an injury, just use. There's a tattoo at the crook of his left arm, an eagle with its wings spread that he got at nineteen the week before his first deployment, and touching your own forearm gives you that whole afternoon: the buzz of the needle, a buddy in the next chair getting something stupid and permanent, the two of them laughing about it on the walk back to base, the particular pride of being young and marked and sure for the first time that his life was going to be about something.

He has never married, never really come close, there's no one whose name would hurt to think and so none comes. What comes instead is smaller and stranger — a footbridge over a creek near where he grew up, cables swaying underfoot, green light through sycamore leaves, an age maybe eleven, the creek running brown and lazy below, and the specific feeling of being a kid who belonged somewhere simple before anybody asked him to belong to anything bigger. That one comes up through the soles of his bare feet on this floor, for no reason you can name except that his body keeps its oldest memories lowest down, closest to the ground, and you are standing on it now without meaning to.

The TV keeps running its joke into a second one. You don't laugh at that either. Somewhere in the house a clock you haven't looked at says it is deep in a night everyone else in this town is asleep through, and he is awake at this hour the way soldiers learn to be awake at any hour at all, on nobody's schedule but the Army's, and that unevenness sits in the room like a held breath, waiting for you to notice it and then letting you not.

You look down at your hand — broader than the hand you had twenty seconds and two bodies ago, a fresh pale line already at the knuckle where a blade of grass or a rope has cut him sometime and healed clean, freckles scattered faint across the back of it same as the face. You turn it over once, palm up, like you're checking it's real, like it might still belong to someone who's going to come back for it.

Then you lift your eyes to the dark window across the room, where for a second your own new face hangs faint in the glass over the blue flicker of the television, and you say, to no one, in a voice that isn't finished being yours yet:

"Didn't think that one was funny the first time either."