Jason Tanabe

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Marvin Okonjo-Little's knees ache on the floor of a kitchen that is not his, in a city that is not his, at an hour when even the pipes have gone quiet. Fifty-seven years in this body, and none of them yours, though you have had it two days and ten hours and you know its complaints like old mail. The delivery van sits cooling three blocks away. Your back — his back — has been telling you something for six hours straight, a low complaint along the spine that no stretch answers, and you are standing at the counter with a glass of water you don't want, scrolling the site on a borrowed laptop at 2 a.m. because boredom is not quite the word. It is more that a heavy, aching, bald-headed man who drives a truck for a living is a life, and you have had it, and you know exactly what tomorrow in it holds down to the dispatch call at six. You want the part where you don't know yet. You open vessel.cards, you let the wheel spin without quite watching it, and you feel Marvin's tired shoulders let go of you the way a coat drops off a hook.

The thumb that was his stops being his.

It was moving a half-second ago, slow, half-asleep, dragging down through a feed it had already forgotten, and now it is yours and it moves differently — quicker, surer, the small compulsive flick of someone who has done this a thousand times in other hands. You are on your side in the dark. A phone is six inches off your face and the blue of it is lying along one cheekbone like paint. Weight settles into you all at once: shoulder down in the mattress, a knee drawn up, the specific, particular ache of a body that has been standing on hard tile for eight hours and only now gets to lie down. You did not choose this angle. You are already in it.

The shirt is the first thing. Not on you now — it's draped over the chair by the window, you can smell it from here, a little sour with sweat and laundry soap underneath, and touching it later, you know, will open him all the way — but even at this distance, in this light, it starts coming: his hand buttoning it, collar first, like his mother taught him, though she's been gone nine years and it still surprises him every time his fingers do it her way. SECURITY stitched crooked on the left sleeve because the tailor at the uniform shop was having a bad week and Jason never bothered to get it fixed. The belt heavy on the hip. The radio clipped and checked, always checked twice, a habit from a supervisor who used to write people up for sloppy clip checks and who Jason privately thought was an ass but copied anyway.

The phone in your hand is warmer than it should be, warm from his palm, and that's a door too — three years of this phone, a case with a crack in the corner from dropping it on the lobby's marble floor during a slow Tuesday, and under your thumb now a texture memory surfaces: her name at the top of the thread, Priya, girlfriend, nine months, the restaurant with the bad lighting where she laughed so hard at his broken-nose story that wine came out of her nose and he loved her so much in that second it scared him a little. Further down, a contact he doesn't message anymore but hasn't deleted — Soo-min, four years together, ended quiet instead of loud, and some nights his thumb still hovers over her name before he catches himself and keeps scrolling. That's what he was doing, you understand now, feeling it in the stalled motion the arrival inherited: he'd stopped on an old photo of her, hadn't opened it, was deciding whether to.

Under your back, the mattress — cheap, lumpy on the left side where the frame has sagged for two years because he keeps meaning to call the landlord and never does. The window behind you, Brooklyn-cold against a thin pane, sodium light leaking orange along the sill even now. Outside, a wet street he walked up at — what, six? seven? — after a shift that ran into daylight in the wrong direction, because the night desk means sleeping through the hours everyone else calls normal, means grabbing four hours before the sun's even properly up and calling it his night. That's the joke of it: his body is heavy with exhaustion in a dark room while, somewhere behind you, in the body you left, a man stood over a kitchen sink at 2 a.m. wide awake. Both of you in the dark. Neither of you on the same clock.

The jaw. You feel it before you understand it — a tightness along the hinge, molars pressed, a habit so constant it isn't even a thought anymore, something Jason does climbing stairs, holding the fort downstairs at 3 a.m. lobby silence, listening to Priya talk about her sister's wedding, lying here right now not deciding about a photograph. You feel your own jaw — his jaw — unclench for the first time in what must be hours, now that nothing in you is bracing against anything. The small hoop in the left ear is cool where your cheek almost touches the pillow. A nose, canted a few degrees off true, from a pickup game nobody remembers the score of, aches faintly in cold rooms, and this room is cold.

A temple bell somewhere back in him, a small chime from a shelf — his mother's, the only Buddhist thing he owns outright, the rest borrowed half-belief and a cushion he sits on maybe twice a year when his chest feels tight and he doesn't know why. Beneath the muscle, the rest of him: thirty-five years old, athletic because the job and the gym both ask it of him, not vain about it, just practical, the kind of strength that comes from carrying nothing heavier than a radio and a flashlight for eight hours but staying ready anyway. Hands that know how to check a badge without looking at it, that know the weight of a clipboard, that have never held a cigarette and don't miss what they never had.

Your thumb — his thumb, now entirely yours — stops scrolling. You turn the hand over in front of your face, slow, the way you always do, the way you did with Marvin's broad knuckles and before that with whoever came before him, watching unfamiliar fingers answer to a want that isn't theirs.

"Okay," you say into the dark room, quiet, not meant for anyone, Jason Tanabe's voice coming out level and a little rough with disuse, "let's see what you've got."

You don't know yet how long. You never do.