Gary Prentiss

The visor lifts and the light in the pod is the color of nothing, a clean white square overhead, and your hand — his hand, thick-fingered, the wedding band catching — is already reaching for the receipt before you've decided to reach.

The attendant holds it by the edge like it might smear. You take it. You read the name printed at the top, the way you always do, just to confirm the transaction, just to see whose Tuesday you bought.

Gary Prentiss.

You read it again because the first time didn't take. It should say your name — the renter's name, the account holder, the one who paid — and it does. It says Gary Prentiss. You are Gary Prentiss. That was true yesterday too, before you ever put a visor on your own face in some other clean white room, before you paid to feel what it was like to be someone else for a day. You paid to be a stranger. The receipt is telling you the stranger is you.

You stand there a second too long. The attendant's hand is still hovering near the frame edge like she expects you to hand the visor back, and thick fingers — your fingers, always yours, that's the joke of it — set the paper down on the counter instead. You look at the wedding band. You have never seen it before and you have worn it eleven years.

Outside the clinic the heat comes down flat and total, and the gravel yard behind your house is already blinding by the time you get there, saguaros standing black-green against a white sky. A dog barks two yards over. None of it asks to be understood. You just have the day, however long the day is, and you have him, all the way down — the scar through the eyebrow when you touch your own face in the hall mirror, pale and thin like something drawn with a ruler, older than you can remember getting it because you can't remember getting it at all.

At the pharmacy the fluorescent hum is exactly as loud as you'd have guessed and no louder. The wall behind the counter is amber glass, hundreds of identical bottles catching the afternoon that comes low and gold through the front window, and you find your hands doing the count-and-pour without you, fifteen years of muscle answering a question you never asked. A woman at the counter says your name back to you — Gary, thanks so much, Gary — and it lands strange and correct at once, like a coat that fits someone else's shoulders and somehow also yours.

You think about the two children whose names you don't have yet, whose faces will arrive at dinner uninvited and be exactly right. You think about the wife who will kiss the corner of your mouth like it's a habit older than any decision. You are a stranger wearing a man who is also, now, unaccountably, filling out your own paperwork.

The receipt sits folded in your — his — shirt pocket the rest of the shift, and every so often your hand goes to it, presses it flat through the cotton, checking that the name hasn't changed back into someone easier to leave.