Gregory Pulaski

It is a Sunday where you are, flat and bright, the kind of day that doesn't ask anything of you, and you have been at the screen for an hour doing nothing in particular when you find the site again. You have found it before, in other idle hours, and closed it, not quite believing, the way you don't believe a lot of things until they're in front of you charging your card. Tonight you don't close it. You have wanted this since you were young enough to want things without being able to name why — waking up as somebody else, a stranger's weight, a stranger's weather — every story about it, every thread at two in the morning that you told yourself was just curiosity. Tonight it is a wheel on a page, spinning, and you pay before you can talk yourself out of it, and it stops on a man you have never seen.

The room arrives before you do — a cheap bed in a converted garage, a bay window somewhere above letting in no light that matters, a phone six inches from a face that is not asking to be looked at. You are on your side. His weight settles onto you all at once, not into you, already yours — the long legs bent up, the socked feet, the particular dumb ache of a body that has been lying in one position too long. The thumb was slowing on the glass, stopping on something, and now it does not stop. It moves faster than he was moving it, flicking past things he'd have read, and the blue light holds on a face that has quit blinking the way a tired man blinks.

The phone is the first thing. It is warm from his hand and it gives you nothing at first, just a case worn smooth at the corners, and then it gives you a Tuesday — him at a desk, two monitors, a spreadsheet that will not reconcile, the particular fluorescent flatness of an office that doesn't care if he's good at his job, which he is, carefully, without anyone noticing. Numbers that come easy to him and praise that doesn't. A manager's name you don't keep. The feeling under it: competence with nowhere to go.

The mattress under you next — thin, loud with its own shifting — and that opens wider, into the garage itself, the steep driveway outside cut into a hill, the cold white light that lands on the cement floor in the mornings when the door's up. Rent is cheaper down here. He tells people it's temporary, has told people that for three years, and under the telling is something like shame he's stopped bothering to feel sharply, just a low current, the math of what he's worth against what San Francisco costs, always coming up short by exactly enough to matter.

The t-shirt against your back gives you a morning — not this one, an ordinary one, shrugging it on one-handed, left arm first because the right shoulder's been tight since he slept on it wrong, and the dark cotton going over the pale patch on his collarbone the way it always does, no thought in it, just the small daily erasure of a thing nobody at the office has ever asked him about and he's grateful for that, mostly. The joggers are easier — pull, sit, done — and underneath them his legs know a treadmill at a gym he goes to on Tuesdays and Thursdays because routine is the only kind of discipline that's ever worked on him.

Your jaw is already tight, has been tight the whole time without you noticing, clenched the way his jaw clenches when he isn't thinking about it, and that, too, opens something — not an object this time but a habit, worn into the bone. A girl. Not a girl anymore, hasn't been in four years, but she is in the muscle anyway: an apartment in the Mission they almost signed a lease on, a fight about nothing that was about everything, her voice saying something he still hears sometimes at red lights. He prayed about it, the way he prays about most things, quietly and without telling anyone, in a church three blocks from here that knows him as reliable and nothing deeper than that. He has not let himself want anyone since the way he wanted her. It sits in his jaw like a held note.

The dip tin isn't in his hand but you know its weight anyway, the ghost of it, the shape of a habit he keeps meaning to quit and keeps not quitting, a vice small enough to let himself have. Beer with coworkers twice a month, never more than two. Careful, everywhere, the way a man is careful when he has decided early that nobody is going to rescue him and he'd better not need rescuing.

The height is the strangest part to sit in — 6'5" folded onto a twin-sized bed, knees that have to bend further than they want to, a body built for doorframes he's learned to duck without thinking. Average weight on that frame reads almost gaunt in places, wrists that are mostly bone, and the vitiligo on them pale under the phone's light, patches he stopped covering with long sleeves in summer around age twenty-six because he got tired of being hot for other people's comfort. Nobody at work has ever asked him outright. He has wondered, lying exactly like this, in exactly this bed, whether anyone ever will.

The thumb stops.

You look at the hand holding the phone — the pale patch across the back of it like a map of somewhere you've never been, the blond hair at the wrist, the slight tremor of a man who has had too much coffee and not enough dinner — and you turn it over once, slow, feeling the unfamiliar long bones of it answer you.

Then you lift your eyes to where a camera would be, if there were one, and you say, "Didn't know I had this many hands."