Farid Amrani

The evening has no shape to it worth telling. Screen light, a mug gone cold, the fortieth video in a row of somebody's face becoming somebody else's, the comments underneath saying *fake* and *how* in equal number. You have wanted this since before you knew to call it wanting — every story where a man closes his eyes as himself and opens them as someone else, every thread at two in the morning asking if it could work, if it was even a real thing to want. Vessel.cards loads slow, like it doesn't care if you wait. A wheel, plain as a raffle. You pay what it asks. You spin because the wanting has been sitting in you for years with nowhere to spend itself, and here, finally, is a register.

The wheel doesn't slow down so much as stop existing.

There is foam on your jaw and a razor already moving, already most of the way up through the second pass, and the hand doing it does not hesitate at the corner of the mouth the way it means to, every time, out of some old habit it doesn't remember teaching itself. It finishes clean. The water in the sink is running warm-then-cooling. A bulb behind a cage of tin buzzes very faintly to your left. You are leaning your weight onto a chipped porcelain lip with a hand that is not your hand, has never been your hand, and you stand there feeling the specific ordinary miracle of having a body at all, of having *this* one — its tiredness sitting low in the lower back, a dull furnace of a twelve-hour shift still cooling in the calves.

The flannel is against your shoulders before you've thought to notice it, and it gives first: a Tuesday, no — a Sunday, this Sunday, pulling it off a hook by the door before the shift, the collar smelling like the inside of a dryer and, underneath that, faintly like the restaurant, like scorched garlic and hand soap, a smell so lived-in it barely registers as a smell anymore, more like weather. Sleeve by sleeve, the memory of dressing arrives with the shirt still arriving on you now, the two folded into each other — an elbow through a cuff, a button done one-handed at a red light on the walk over, the apron already balled into the bag because the real shirt, the black one, the *floor* shirt, goes on at work, over a chair with three others just like it.

The mirror gives you nothing — it's too fogged, too old, silvering gone at the corners — but the sink gives you plenty. Fourteen years of leaning on this exact spot at this exact hour, home from a double, midnight nowhere near midnight in the body's own accounting, because the shift ends at eleven and the last table always overstays and by the time the chairs go up on their tables it's later than late. Sunday bleeding into Monday and none of it feeling like either. A whole life of closing shifts comes up through the porcelain: carrying four plates up the inside of one arm without thinking about it, a trick of balance the shoulder still knows though you have never asked a shoulder to know anything in your life. The mole on the cheek under your fingers when you check the missed spot along the jaw — his and only his, the one thing anyone ever says about his face, *you've got a — no, there,* said in a hundred voices over a hundred years, mostly fond.

The tattoos come up next, ink under wet fingertips as you rinse: a name, a date, the script gone a little soft at the edges the way skin does. A birth. A hospital corridor at four in the morning, someone's hand crushing his, the particular fear of it and then the particular unfear after, so total it rewrote what fear meant going forward. A kid somewhere in this city who has his eyes, maybe, or hers — the memory doesn't hand over which, only the fact of the getting-up in the night, over and over, glad every time. A woman's weight asleep on the other side of a door just past this one, breathing the unhurried breathing of someone who trusts the sound of him brushing his teeth. A version of prayer he does at odd hours because the shifts don't respect the times prayer is supposed to keep, done anyway, quieter, folded into whatever gap the night gives him.

The leg starts going before you've caught it — a bounce, small, automatic, the body's engine idling even at rest, even now, even leaning on a sink at whatever hour this actually is for it. Never a cigarette wanted, never a drink missed; the hands have never needed either, they've needed motion, they've needed a rag in one and a tray in the other, and lacking both they just go, tapping out a rhythm against the floor that has nothing to do with you.

You look down. The razor is still in the hand, foam-flecked, ordinary, heavier than you expected a razor to be. You turn the hand over slowly, watching it not obey any memory you own, watching the tattoo shift under the tendons as the fingers open.

You lift your eyes to the fogged glass, to the shape of him looking back out of it.

"Okay," you say, to no one, in his voice, and it comes out steadier than you feel, "okay — let's see."