Faisal Chowdhury

You have been Nolan Piascik for one minute. That is the whole of it — sixty seconds of being twenty-six, of a scar splitting an eyebrow you didn't earn, of standing in some embalming room in Boston with the chemical sweetness thick in the air and a dead stranger on the table in front of you and no memory yet of how either of you got here. You feel the tools in the drawer under your hip, cool through the scrub pants. You feel young, which after two hundred and thirty-three other men is its own kind of nothing — young is just another weight, another set of knees that don't ache. The minute is not enough time to want to be Nolan. It is enough time to want to not be him yet, to already be reaching for the site again before his first real memory can land in you and complicate things. That is the thing about the wheel nobody warns you: the wanting doesn't wait for you to settle. It's already restless behind eyes you just borrowed. So standing over a corpse that isn't yours to grieve, in a life you have not even begun to taste, you feel for the phone in his coat on the hook by the door, and you spin again.

The room changes before you do.

You are bent forward slightly, weight on the balls of two feet in socks, and there is a lamp burning low and gold to your left and a bed behind you with the sheets thrown back like a fight happened in them. Your hand is flat on your own chest, feeling ribs that are not the ribs you had a second ago — softer, a little more give at the belly under them, a body carrying itself lower and heavier though the frame beneath is small. The shirt is buttoned wrong, you can feel it before you can see it, a pucker at the third button that pulls the collar crooked, and a tie hangs loose and unknotted around a thick neck. Your fingers — his fingers, already yours in the way that matters now — go to the buttons without being told to. Undo, redo, correct. The tie: hand over hand into a knot the muscle remembers even though nothing in this room has ever seen it tied that way before, some other bathroom mirror, some other year.

The shirt is checked, thin cotton, and it has been washed enough times that it has gone soft against a chest that runs warm — reflux-warm, a heat that sits low and complains after coffee. That's the first thing that comes through clean and whole, off the fabric itself: an antacid chalk taste climbing the back of the throat at four this morning, before the alarm, before anything. Then the sleeves. Rolling them down, over forearms with fine black hair, and the memory arrives sleeve by sleeve, the way the facts said it would — a morning years back, a different shirt but the same hands, buttoning too fast because the baby was crying down the hall and Amina had her hands full and someone had to be the one already dressed. That's the first flash: a name, hers, Amina, and under it a whole marriage folding open like a drawer — her laugh in a kitchen that smelled like cumin and dish soap, her voice tired in the specific way of two kids and a husband who works nights and weekends both, the two of you on a porch in the town with one stoplight, watching the diner across the street go dark for good and neither of you saying what that meant for the rent.

The tie against your throat gives you something older and sharper, something with more shame folded into it — a woman who is not Amina, a booth in a restaurant three towns over, her hand not quite touching his on the table, both of them married to other people by then, both of them twenty-two years past whatever this had actually been between them once. He never told anyone. He barely tells himself. The tie was hers, actually — a gift, ages ago, before either wedding — and he wears it maybe four times a year and never once thinks about why until right now, until you, uninvited, are thinking it for him.

Your feet find the floor fully, weight settling into it — 5'6", which after Nolan's height feels like the room got closer, and soft through the middle in that way that isn't fat exactly, just forty-two years of skipping the gym for double shifts. Your hands ache faintly at the nail beds; they're bitten down past where they should be, a habit that never asks permission, that starts up now on its own the second you're not paying attention to them, incisor finding thumbnail like coming home. Your back knows heat and a flattop grill without needing telling — the memory arrives through the balls of your feet, standing on a mat that isn't there, forty pans deep into a Friday, ticket rail full, the particular music of six burners going and someone yelling behind for the eighty-six on the salmon. You have never cooked in your life and this body has cooked ten thousand services, and both of those things are true at once, sitting in the same skin.

There's a wedding band on the left hand, plain gold, and it's warm from the body's own heat rather than anything else, and touching it gives you the wedding itself in one bright unbargained-for piece — a hall rented cheap, his mother crying the good kind of crying, Amina's dress a size too big because they couldn't afford the alterations and neither of them cared. Two kids came out of that day eventually, a boy and a girl, and their names arrive too, small and sudden and belonging to somebody else's love, not yours, carried in on his skin like weather.

You look down. The buttons are even now, the tie sits right, low against a soft gut that will start burning around noon whether or not lunch is kind to it. Your hands — his hands, bitten-down and steady at the same time, the specific competence of a man who's peeled a hundred thousand onions and still can't leave his own fingernails alone — turn over in the lamp light like you're checking they're really there.

"Table for one," you say to the empty hotel room, to nobody, in a voice that surprises you by being right — his voice, low, a little rough at the morning edge of it — and you don't know yet if that's a joke he actually makes or one you just borrowed off the shelf of him. Somewhere down the hall a vending machine hums. Somewhere in Boston it's already dark, and a body you were for exactly one minute is standing over a table with your hands still cooling in its memory, and here, now, this one is warm and yours and unaware, and there is no clock on any of it that either of you can read.