Isaiah Marquez

David Amano's hallway smells like lemon polish and the particular silence of an apartment with no one else in it. You are standing in his front hall, in his cardigan, his reading glasses still pushed up into gray hair, and you have been him for one hundred and twenty seconds and it is already unbearable. Not the body — the body is fine, athletic even at fifty-nine, good knees, a retirement that means nothing gets asked of it. It's the quiet. It's that this man built a whole life and paid it off and there is nothing left in the rooms but the paying-off. You spun the wheel for reasons you didn't examine too hard — you never do — and got him, and thought, at the time, *finally, ease.* Two minutes taught you that ease is its own kind of nothing. You want friction. You want a body with something still owed on it. You go to the laptop in his study, because that's where the site lives now, bookmarked under a folder named nothing in particular, and you spin again before you can talk yourself into gratitude.

The mattress takes your weight before you've finished arriving. Bare, printed with faded flowers under a fitted sheet gone thin at the corner, springs that argue back. There's a phone six inches from your face, too close to focus, throwing blue light up into your own eye from underneath, and your thumb — already moving, already faster than it was a half-second ago, flicking past a paused video without watching it — feels twenty-three years old and calloused along the side from something you don't have the memory of yet. Cardboard boxes stand stacked against a wall to your left, taped, waiting on a decision nobody's made. Somewhere behind you, close, a swamp cooler ticks. You don't know his name. You don't know the room. You are lying on your side in a stranger's undershirt in air that still holds the day's heat against a window with the blinds down, and none of it announces itself — it just arrives, the way rented weight does, all at once and unearned.

The shirt gives you the first of it — thin cotton, a decal on the front cracked from washing, soft in the way only three years of a specific detergent can make cotton soft — and with it a flash: him pulling it over his head this morning in gray light, sniffing the collar first because laundry day is Sunday and this is Tuesday, deciding it'll do. That's Isaiah. The name comes with the shirt the way a smell comes with a room. Isaiah Marquez, and under it, fast, the whole shape of a Tuesday — up at six for a stats exam he half-slept through, the drive back out from campus on 95 with the AC blowing lukewarm because the compressor's dying and there's no five hundred dollars in the world right now to fix it, the trailer's front step ticking hot even at six p.m. because the desert doesn't cool the second the sun tips, it makes you wait for it.

Your left hand is folded under your jaw and the wedding band on it is warm from your own skin, and that's a bigger door than the shirt. It swings open onto a courthouse hallway eighteen months ago, Marisol in a dress she'd bought off clearance and altered herself, both of them twenty-two and certain in the particular way that has nothing to do with being right. You feel — not your feeling, his, arriving secondhand and total — the specific terror-joy of that morning, and under it, closer to now, the smaller quieter thing that's replaced it: her working the four-to-midnight at the Pilot travel plaza off the interstate so one of them has income while he finishes the degree neither of them can really afford, and the trailer being empty most nights the way it's empty right now, and how he doesn't say out loud that he minds.

The tattoo on your forearm sits against the pillow, and touching pillow to skin brings it forward on its own — a bad little design, lines that don't quite close, done in somebody's kitchen sophomore year by a guy with a rotary tool and no business doing this to skin, for a girl named Priya who is not Marisol and who he has not spoken to in four months and whose name he still, God help him, half-expects to see light up the phone at odd hours. It doesn't. It hasn't in weeks. He looks anyway, thumb still moving past reels and reels of other people's evenings, half-hoping, half-relieved. He regrets the ink more than he regrets her, which he understands is not the healthy way to feel about either one.

Under the sheet your legs are crossed at the ankle in thick socks even though the room is warm — his feet always run cold at the end of a long day of sitting, lecture halls, a laptop on a lawn, hours of stillness that leave him more tired than a shift would. Five-eight, average build going soft in the middle from sitting and firm in the forearms from nothing in particular, twenty-three and carrying the specific fatigue of a person doing two full-time things badly instead of one thing well. Nothing hurts exactly. Everything is just slightly heavier than it should be. He vaped on the porch step twenty minutes ago, and the ghost of that is still faintly in your throat, mixed with the taste of the energy drink still open on the floor by the bed frame, going flat and warm.

He believes, in the unexamined churchgoing way of people who don't go as often as their mothers wish, that somebody somewhere is keeping a ledger, and that a man who's decent to his wife and doesn't run up debt he can't pay comes out fine on it in the end. He doesn't think about the wheel because there is no wheel in his ledger. There is only a phone, a bed, a Tuesday, and a scroll he means to stop any second now.

You stop it. The thumb goes still and the light steadies and holds on the ceiling water stain he's meant to ask the landlord about for two years. You bring the hand up in front of your face — his hand, blunt fingers, the band catching light, the tattoo's bad lines running down toward the wrist — and turn it over slowly, like it might be wearing a glove that comes off.

"Huh," you say, out loud, to the empty trailer, in his voice, and it comes out younger than you expected, and steadier than he'd have said it.

You lie there a second longer with his heart going at his pace, not yours, and think: this one, or the next one, or the one after that — no telling which, no telling when — but for right now, this Tuesday, in this heat, you are the only one home.