Gerald Whitlock

The site loads slow on a bad connection, and you sit there in the blue light not quite believing a wheel on a webpage can do what it says it does. Vessel.cards. You've wanted this since you were a kid watching movies where two people swap and scream in each other's mirrors, since every forum thread you ever read at two in the morning about what it would feel like to not be you for a while. Nothing else has ever offered it for real. You have the money loaded before you've finished deciding. Friday, early, nothing started yet where you are, the room around you not worth describing because it isn't the point. You click spin before you can talk yourself out of it.

There is no falling, no tunnel, none of the things you imagined. There is a sink, tilted up at you at an angle, foam under your nose, a razor pressed flat against a jaw that isn't cold anymore because it's yours now, and the hand holding it just — finishes the stroke. Up, against the grain, smooth, no hesitation at the corner of the mouth. Half the face already bare. You didn't do that. He did, a half-second before you got here, and you rode in on the tail of his own motion like stepping onto a moving sidewalk.

You are standing bent at the waist, weight low and heavy, gut resting against the lip of the counter, and the fluorescent bar over the mirror hums at a pitch you can feel more than hear. It's afternoon here — you can tell by the flat, tired quality of the light through the little window, not the gold of morning — and something in that wrongness needles at you before you let it go. It's Thursday. It's afternoon. None of that has to make sense yet.

Then the razor's handle warms in your palm — not literally, but something in you reads it — and it comes: Gerald, at a Walgreens counter eleven years ago, holding this exact model of blade against a hundred identical ones, deciding on it because it was what his father used, and never switching brands since out of a loyalty he's never once examined. A whole small history sitting in four ounces of plastic and steel.

You set it down on the edge of the sink and your fingers — his fingers, blunt-nailed, bitten down past where nails should end — brush the damp cotton of the t-shirt he had on before he stripped it, hanging over the towel bar, and it opens wider: the office, two monitors, the low drone of a building that never quite gets the temperature right, spreadsheets that used to be satisfying and are now just Thursday. Twenty-two years in the same firm. A promotion he didn't want because it meant more people, not more numbers. He likes numbers. Numbers don't leave.

The tan line on his ring finger burns a little under the tap water when you turn the faucet, an old ghost of a weight that isn't there. Linda. Eleven years married, four before that dating, and the divorce four years back that he still turns over sometimes without meaning to — not bitterly, mostly just puzzled, the way you'd be puzzled by a math error you can't relocate. No kids. He'd wanted them and never said so loud enough for it to matter, and that not-saying is its own small ache riding along in the memory, hers now yours, yours now his.

The shirt on the doorknob — plaid, buttoned, laid out for after — gives you the whole ritual of this morning that was his: sliding one arm into gingham sleeve, then the other, buttoning from the collar down out of some habit from a father who did it that way, the cardigan folded over the chair for later because the building runs cold near his desk. Boring, ordinary, his. You take it the way you'd take a photograph, whole and uncommented on, and it sits warm somewhere behind your borrowed ribs.

The body itself keeps talking, under all of it. Sixty years old and it says so in the knees when you shift weight, in the low tired pull across the lower back from decades hunched at a keyboard, in the soft heaviness of a gut he's stopped fighting. Strong hands anyway, competent ones, used to a keyboard, a pen, a razor at this same forty-five-degree angle every day of adult life. Blue eyes tired around the edges. A body that has never smoked and never had a drink and has still, somehow, ended up with cholesterol numbers his doctor frowns at every spring — a small, quiet unfairness Gerald has made peace with the way he's made peace with most things: by not talking about it.

You straighten up at the sink. Water beading off his jaw on the shaved side, foam still clinging to the other. You catch your reflection — his reflection, both true now — and you lift one hand out of the water and look at it: thick fingers, the raw pink edges where he's bitten the nails to nothing, that pale stripe of untanned skin where a ring used to sit.

You turn it over once, like checking whether it's really attached.

"Okay," you say, to no one, to the mirror, to a bathroom in Dallas on a Thursday afternoon that has no business being your first one. "Okay. Hi."

Somewhere behind your eyes there's a wheel still spinning, not yet stopped, not yet asking again — and you don't know if that's in an hour or a year. For now there's just foam going cold on one cheek, and a stranger's whole life sitting in your hands like something you picked up off a counter.