Ismael Correa

Before this there is only the screen and the wanting, and the wanting is old — older than the tab open in the corner of your browser, older than the two in the morning that got you here again, doomscroll after doomscroll, nothing on, nothing anywhere, until a name surfaces out of some forum you half-remember and there it is: vessel.cards, a wheel on a plain page, and a price that means somebody built this for real. You have wanted this since before you could say why. Every film where someone wakes up wrong, every story about waking up as someone else, every thread that should have been a joke and wasn't — all of it pointed here, at a wheel you didn't believe would spin true. You pay. Your throat does something. The wheel goes around and around and slows and you are already gone before it stops.

The respawn counter reads zero and the character on the screen stands up out of cover and you are the one standing, a half-beat behind your own thumbs, a controller warm and specific in two hands you have never had before. The character on screen takes a round to the chest and folds. You don't notice. You are busy being here — this weight, low and stocky through the shoulders, feet bare against a carpet that has been vacuumed by somebody who cared once and stopped caring for a while. You set the controller down, still lit, its little diode pulsing blue against your palm, and you sit back into a couch that knows this exact body's exact shape.

The couch tells you first. It has been sat in this way — off-center, weight left, since forever, since a back that complains a little on the left side from years of carrying a tray tucked against the hip instead of squared in front like they teach you your first week. Then the shirt. It's not on you now, it's draped over the arm of the couch from last night, but your hand finds it without meaning to and there it is: a Tuesday morning, dark still, an alarm that reads 9:40 because the shift starts at eleven and there's a fifteen-minute drive and he never leaves early and never leaves late, and this exact gray henley going over his head, sleeve by sleeve, the left cuff always sticking a little at the wrist because the elastic gave out on that one and he never replaced it, just remembers to tug it, every day, the same tug.

There's more in the couch cushion — a controller charger cable gone soft with age — and it opens onto Kevin, who sent him the app three days ago with a message that just said try this, no context, and the two of them texting through a Tuesday about nothing, about the Mavs, about a coworker at the restaurant named Priya who keeps stealing his best tables, and under that, quieter, the particular ease of talking to Kevin that isn't quite like talking to anyone else, though neither of them has said anything about that and maybe never will. It isn't loud in him. It's just there, a low warm hum he doesn't examine, the same way he doesn't examine why he hasn't dated anyone this year, why the apps sit unopened on his phone for weeks at a stretch. Just tired. Just easier not to.

The bare feet against the carpet bring the restaurant floor instead — the linen closet smell of it before open, the particular hush of a room with every chair turned up onto its table like a held breath, the weight of a full tray balanced on four fingers and a thumb, wrist locked, elbow soft, ten years of knowing exactly how much a table of four is going to tip before they've ordered a drink. Sore knees at the end of a double. The satisfaction, small and real, of a section run clean, no ticket lost, no water glass empty past a beat. A studio apartment paid for out of cash tips folded into a rubber band. A guy at table nine last month who left a number on the check and how good that felt for exactly one day before nothing came of it, the way nothing mostly does, and how he shrugged it off by the time he got home, because that's what you do.

The hard blink comes on its own, and then the throat-clear, both unbidden, both his, a tic worn so deep into the wiring of this body that even you, three seconds in, do it without deciding to. Your shoulders — his shoulders — carry a low, permanent readiness for a tray that isn't there. Your right hand, the one that just set the controller down, still holds the phantom curl of a pen it holds forty hours a week. Nothing hurts exactly. Everything is used.

You look at your hands — his hands, brown, callused along the pads of two fingers where the tray strap sits, nails cut short and practical — and you turn them over once in the gray light of a screen still lit on a dead respawn.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to no one, in his voice, and it isn't relief and it isn't fear, it's just the sound of arriving. "Okay."

Somewhere behind that word is the next wheel, and neither of you knows yet when you'll spin it.