Gary Hollenbeck

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The suite is quiet the way only money can make a room quiet, and you stand at the window in the body you took last time — forty-five, soft through the middle now no matter what the trainer says, the shaved head catching the desert light wrong, blue eyes that were never yours doing the looking. Billionaire. Vegas. All of it works, technically. The account still refills itself. The girl from Thursday left before you woke, which was the plan.

You've had him less than a minute of felt time and you already know you're done with him. That's the thing nobody warns you about the wheel — it isn't the bad ones that send you back, it's the good ones, because good stops being interesting faster. He has everything and none of it required you. You didn't build the tower, you just moved into a man who owns it, and there is a particular flavor of nothing that comes from that. Boredom, if you want the word for it, though you wouldn't say that part out loud even to yourself. You open the site on his phone with his thumb, because that's still the fastest way in, and you spin.

—

The mower coughs, drops a note, catches again, and your hands are already on the bar before you have a name for whose hands they are. Grass clippings, wet-green, stuck to shins that are not the shins you had a second ago — leaner, harder, more used. One yellow earmuff has slid off an ear and the noise of the little engine comes in flat and close on that side. You don't decide to fix it. The hand goes up and settles the earmuff back down like it's done that a thousand times, because it has, and the next pass runs dead straight beside a run of crooked ones, and somewhere behind that straightness is thirty years of a man teaching his own body not to wander.

It's morning here too, but a different morning — the sun already high and hot in a way Sunday shouldn't be if this were a workday, and it isn't a workday, and that's the first wrongness the grip on the mower hands you before it hands you anything else. This is his day off. This is a man cutting grass on his day off, at an hour that should have found him asleep, because his other five mornings this week ended at dawn behind a lobby desk with his eyes on a bank of monitors nobody watches as closely as he does.

The bar under your palms is warm and vibrating and it opens first — the plastic grip worn smooth in two hand-shaped patches, and through it comes the courtyard, stucco going pink-gold in the kind of late light that means the day is closing rather than beginning back where you were, dry palms leaning over the wall, the smell of cut Bermuda grass and gasoline. Gary Hollenbeck has mowed this same ragged patch of common lawn eleven times because the HOA won't hire anyone and he's the only tenant who ever notices the grass got long. Nobody asked him to. He does it anyway, on the Sunday after five overnight shifts, because an idle morning feels worse to him than a tired one.

The t-shirt against your back gives you the closet it came out of — a stack of navy and gray shirts folded by nobody, a man who does his own laundry on Tuesdays because Tuesday is his real day off and this Sunday is borrowed from sleep. Pulling it on this morning: one arm, a pause to press two fingers into his own bicep out of habit, checking it's still there the way you check a wallet's still in your pocket, then the other arm, then a look in the mirror that wasn't vanity, just an accounting — *still holding*. Forty years old and the mirror gives back more than it takes, and there's a private, wordless satisfaction in that which isn't pride, exactly. It's relief. The gym is cheaper than most things a man his age spends on and it's the only receipt he keeps.

The boots on your feet know a floor eleven stories down from where his body actually spends its nights — a marble lobby, cold under fluorescents at three in the morning, a desk, a radio that mostly says nothing, and a folding chair he's not supposed to lean back in but does anyway around five a.m. when his eyes go heavy and his blood pressure meds make his ears ring faintly if he stands too fast. He takes the pill every morning before bed like it's the only appointment in his life he's never missed. There's a woman two years gone now who used to remind him, and the memory of her comes without heat, just a shape where a person used to be, filed and closed. No ring ever sat on this hand. Nobody is waiting on the other end of any of this.

The mower engine under your grip is the loudest thing here and the most honest — a machine that does exactly what it's told and nothing more, and there's something in that Gary has always liked better than people. Straight lines. A yard that looked bad and now, pass by pass, looks less bad. It isn't much of a life by the numbers — the check that clears is never large, the apartment courtyard is not his, the years ahead were never going to surprise anyone — but the strength in these forearms is real and came from nowhere but work, and the calm in these hands at three a.m. when someone's drunk and loud in the lobby is the only inheritance he ever gave himself.

—

The engine note stays even under your palms — you didn't let it die, you never even flinched — and grass keeps clipping off in a clean stripe while you stand there being someone else entirely inside a man's unbothered body. You lift one hand off the bar, just to see it do what you tell it, and turn it over: calloused at the base of the fingers, a scrape gone silver on one knuckle from a bad month you didn't live, no ring, no ink, nothing but forty years of ordinary use.

You look up into the low sun, past the dry palms, and say, to no one standing there, "Guess I'm mowing again."