Héctor Reyna

The tab has been open for three days. You keep closing it and opening it again, like a door you're not sure you want to walk through, and tonight there's nothing else to do — the day already spent, the scrolling already exhausted, the apartment quiet in that particular way evenings get when nobody is waiting on you for anything. You have wanted this since you were young enough to want things without being embarrassed about it: to wake up as someone else, to be let out of the one door you've had since birth. Every version of it you ever found was fiction. This is not fiction. This is a wheel on a page, and a button that says spin, and a price that means nothing to you compared to what it's for.

You pay. You spin. You do not get to brace.

The dark comes with weight in it — a mattress under you, a smell of laundry gone slightly stale, a stripe of white streetlight that has no business being called streetlight, because wherever this room actually is, it is the middle of the day. The arm that was hanging off the bed draws itself up like it was always going to. The body rolls onto its back. Hands fold at the chest, unasked, and the breathing that was ragged a half-second ago goes even, deliberate, someone else's rhythm laid down over the last one like a hand smoothing a sheet.

You are heavier than you have ever been anywhere, which is to say you are somewhere for the first time, and the weight sits low and soft over a frame that used to work harder than it does now. There's a tightness at the back of your throat, low-grade, chemical, waiting to become worse if this body lies flat too long — it doesn't yet know you're going to let it wake up before that happens. A small cold ring of metal is warm against skin at the earlobe. Skin at the crown of the head, still smooth, catching a slice of light through the gap in navy curtains.

Then the shirt. Just the shirt, the cotton of it dragging faintly against the small of the back where it's ridden up in sleep, and that's the key turning: a morning, ordinary, three days ago or three years, hard to say — Héctor Reyna standing in front of a dresser with his right arm already through one sleeve, the fabric snagging a half-second on the tattoo, an anchor and a rose gone soft-edged with twenty-some years, ink he got at nineteen with money he shouldn't have had and has never once regretted. Pulling the shirt down over a gut he makes peace with every morning and resents every night. The reflux catching him mid-button, that familiar burn low in the chest, and the thought — not tonight, don't eat like that tonight — that he has had a thousand times and kept anyway.

More comes; it comes through what's touching him, and everything is touching him. The sheets bring back a fight with Selene, the girlfriend, over nothing — over him falling asleep on the couch instead of the bed, over three years of small frictions that have never once threatened to end it. The pillow smells like her shampoo from two nights back and something in the chest that isn't yours aches briefly, fondly, before it's gone. The mattress against his shoulder blades brings back nights on call, the phone on the nightstand lighting up at 3 a.m., the particular exhaustion of a man who fixes bodies for a living and can't always fix the hours.

His hands — soft-knuckled, precise, a leg already beginning its restless bounce even in sleep, some nervous system habit that never asks permission — bring back the operating room. Not blood, not gore, just light: the cold brightness of it, the particular quiet under a mask, the doors swinging shut behind him not four hours ago in his own timeline, though here it is noon and he should not be asleep at all. A night shift, then — a long one, a bad one maybe, the kind that sends a fifty-one-year-old man face-down into his own bed at an hour decent people are at lunch. There is a daughter somewhere in this — one photograph's worth of feeling, a graduation, pride so plain it embarrasses him even in memory. There is a mother's rosary he does not pray with enough and a church he goes to on the holidays that matter and calls that enough. There is whiskey twice a month with men he's known since residency, and cigarettes he quit nine years ago and still, some nights, misses like a friend who moved away.

You lie there inside all of it a moment longer than you need to, the way you'd linger at a doorway before deciding to actually walk through.

Then you lift the folded hands off the chest and look at them — the wrong hands, someone else's hands, soft and sure and not remotely yours — turning the right one over slowly in the striped light, watching the tattoo shift at the edge of vision.

You say, to no one, in his voice, "Okay."

You don't know yet how long you get to keep saying that.