Juan Delacruz

You have been Danny Truong for four minutes, and four minutes is long enough to know it is a mistake. The barbershop smell is still in his nose — talc and hot metal and the Barbicide tang — and the scar through his eyebrow itches in a way that has nothing to do with you, some old habit of his hand wanting to touch it that you keep almost obeying. His knees ache standing at the register. Outside the window Kentucky is going the color of a bruise, that end-of-day light nobody photographs because it never looks like anything on a screen, only in a room. You did not choose this body so much as receive it, the way you receive all of them, and already the receiving feels like a debt. Four minutes of somebody else's tired feet. You did not even get to spin for it — this is only what was left over from the last time, sitting in his chair, in his shop, wearing his life like a coat that fits wrong at the shoulders. You open the site again on his phone, thumb clumsy in a hand that isn't yours, because the only cure for a body you didn't want is another one you haven't seen yet.

The wheel turns and there is no travel, no warning, no falling — only the sudden fact of a mattress under you and a shirt-less back against sheets that smell like somebody else's fabric softener, and lungs that were ragged a half-second ago going smooth and even, obedient, like they had always belonged to you. An arm that was hanging off the edge of the bed lifts itself, folds up onto a chest that is not the chest you left. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtain in one bright seam. You are nineteen and asleep in the middle of an ordinary Wednesday evening, which means somewhere in this life the sun and the shift work have come loose from each other — long nights, long drives, a body trained to sleep when the light says not to.

The room gives you nothing yet — it is dark and unfamiliar and there is nothing in your hands. But the sheets are. Cheap cotton, a little too warm, and touching them a memory surfaces before you've asked for it: him kicking them off at four this morning after getting back from a closing call two states over, too wired on gas-station coffee to sleep right away, lying there listening to a Temple game with the volume low so it wouldn't wake anybody, though there's nobody in this rowhouse but him. The mattress remembers his weight better than you do. Under your palm, against the fitted sheet, comes a flash of the girl who used to share this bed — Marisol, gone two years now, her laugh loud enough that the neighbors used to bang the wall, and the ache of missing her arriving clean and whole and not yours, a grief with no claim on you and every claim on him.

Then your hand finds the shirt balled at the foot of the bed — the one he stripped off before collapsing — and that is the door that opens wider. Sleeve by sleeve, an ordinary morning comes back: standing in front of the mirror at six a.m., knotting nothing because it's just a golf shirt and slacks today, not the suit — the suit was yesterday, three back-to-back meetings at the Marriott downtown, lanyard slapping his chest every time he leaned in to shake a hand, JUAN D. printed too small to read across a conference room. He remembers the weight of that jacket on his shoulders, good wool, bought on commission money he was proud of, and the particular tired triumph of closing two accounts before lunch. He remembers his mother's rosary looped once around the bathroom mirror, out of habit rather than devotion, crossing himself fast before big pitches the way she taught him, not because he fully believes it works but because it feels like insurance against something. He remembers Sunday mass skipped more often than attended and the small guilt that never quite curdles into action. He remembers, underneath all the hustle, how his knuckles crack on their own when he's bored on a sales call, a tic he's given up trying to break; how his body is nineteen and still surprised by its own strength, quick in a pickup game, sore in the mornings from nothing at all; how two nights a month he lets himself really drink, loud bar, louder friends, and is careful never to make it three.

Your hands — his hands — come up in front of your face in the dark, turning slow, like you're checking they're real. They are. Calloused faintly at the first knuckle from a life of paperwork and handshakes and nothing else, no rings, no ink, nothing he'd ever bring up if you asked. You sit up into that seam of streetlight, feel the dimples pull at your cheeks even though your face is doing nothing, an expression that isn't an expression, just how he's built.

"Okay," you say, to the empty room, to the sheets, to nobody. "Okay. Let's see what you're worth."