Everett Halloran

You are standing in Malik's dorm room at four in the morning, and Malik's hand — your hand, for the moment — is shaking so badly the phone won't unlock.

That's the thing nobody warns you about at spin two, spin twenty, spin seven hundred and eighty. The bodies get easier. The mornings after do not. You went to bed last night as him, twenty-five and skinny and buzzing with the particular electric relief of a kid who thinks he's about to ace a final he hasn't studied for, and you woke up in the same skin still tasting his stress-dream, his cheap dorm coffee, the white streak of hair falling into his eyes when he leans over the sink. You have been careful with Malik. You like him, in the distant way you like weather. But an hour ago his roommate knocked and called him by a name that wasn't his, laughing, already walking off, and something in you went cold and small and furious in a way that had nothing to do with Malik at all. You are not him. You have never been anyone long enough to be mistaken for staying. You told yourself, washing his face in the mirror, not tonight, not this one — and then you were already reaching for the laptop, already typing the address you know better than your own name, because you don't have one anymore, not really, and the only thing that has ever quieted that fact is the wheel turning.

You spin.

—

The clipboard is already tipping out of your grip when you arrive, and your hand — a different hand now, broader, a plain gold band catching the lamp light — closes on it wrong, fingers splayed, and you nearly drop it. You catch it against your hip. You are standing at a wide desk with papers fanned across it, a brass lamp throwing a warm circle onto a job you don't yet know the shape of, and beyond the glass the parking lot lights are on and the sky behind them is doing something strange — not evening, you realize a half-second later, but morning, that gray-blue Anchorage nothing-light that comes hours before the sun bothers. You check the clipboard again, slower. You initial a line you had already initialed once, in the wrong hand, and then again, correctly, and the next ten lines come out of you deliberate and re-checked, a caution that does not belong to whoever usually stands here.

The shirt is what opens first. White, soft with age, sleeve rolled to the forearm — and rolling it this morning, hours ago in the story his body is still telling, comes back whole: standing in a bathroom with the fan running so it wouldn't wake her, buttoning from the bottom because his fingers do it that way now, some old muscle habit from twenty years of hotel-room mirrors and 5 a.m. flights. Sarah still asleep behind him. The particular hush of the house at that hour, the heat vents ticking. He'd looked at himself doing up the second button and thought, briefly and without alarm, that his face had gotten old somewhere he hadn't been watching for it.

The watch gives you the boardroom — glass on three sides, the inlet gone violet at dusk, a room full of men waiting for him to say the number so they could stop pretending they weren't afraid of it. The ring gives you the wedding, cold outside, everyone's breath showing, Sarah's sister crying harder than Sarah. The ring gives you something else too, older, guiltier: a name that isn't Sarah's, a woman in Fairbanks he hasn't called in four years and still, God help him, sometimes almost does. The pocket where his glasses used to hang against his chest gives you two kids at a table doing homework badly, and how much he loved being bored by it.

The floor under your feet — thin office carpet over concrete, cold coming up through it even in shoes — gives you the whole plain fact of him: forty-six, an athletic build going a little effortful to maintain, a lower back that complains on long flights, hands that know a hundred small mechanical tasks without asking permission from him first, because this shift, whatever it is, is one he's done ten thousand times and could do asleep. He very nearly has been asleep. He runs this place on no sleep and too much scotch some nights, and never anything else, never smoke, never has, and somewhere under the ribs there is the specific dull ache of a man who drinks to turn a mind off that otherwise runs three ledgers at once. He clenches his jaw when he isn't thinking about it. You feel it clench now, on nothing, out of nowhere, an old tell with no thought behind it left to catch.

The snowmobile under the blue tarp by the window doesn't give you a memory so much as a want — Sunday, hasn't happened yet, might not, keeps getting pushed for the thing that's always more urgent than joy. Three million dollars of a life and the one soft thing in it is sitting under a tarp collecting frost.

You feel all of that arrive and settle into a man's actual weight, actual age, the particular tiredness of a body that has been standing at this desk since a shift began at some hour a normal person would call the middle of the night.

You look down at your hand — his hand, wedding band, clipboard, initials in two different pressures of pen — and you turn it over slowly, like you're checking it for damage that isn't there.

Then you lift your eyes to whatever's in front of you and say, quietly, mostly to yourself:

"Okay. Let's find out who you are."