Karan Bhatti

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Aaron Pressler's hands smell like the antiseptic gel dispensers bolted to every wall of the med-surg unit, and they have smelled like that for less than a minute, and already you hate them. You made him check his phone before his shift — a habit, not his, yours, grafted on — and the message from a number he doesn't recognize (you don't recognize it either, it isn't for you, it's a wrong number, a woman named Diane asking about a truck) sits there meaning nothing, and that's the whole problem in one flat little screen: nothing here means anything yet. Twenty-three years old, skinny in a way his scrubs don't hide, red hair, a gap in his teeth that isn't yours either — you inherited it same as you inherited his shift schedule and his overdrawn checking account. He's fine. He's serviceable. He has been yours for forty-one seconds and you are already thinking about the wheel the way you always think about the wheel, which is the only thought you reliably have anymore: *not this one. Not yet settled. Something else.*

You find the site on the break-room laptop because some other nurse left themselves logged into everything, and you spin standing up, coat still on, and you don't even resent him goodbye.

—

The foil peels at one corner and lets in a blade of Ohio daylight, and Karan Bhatti turns away from it in his sleep the way he's turned away from that same seam a hundred mornings, and then — you — turn back into it, and the light is the first thing, hot white through closed lids, and you open his eyes straight into it and do not blink, because blinking is a decision and there hasn't been time to make any yet.

The body registers before you do. Short. Compact. A tiredness sunk so deep into the muscle it isn't tiredness anymore, it's just what the muscle is. Your — his — heart is already going fast for someone lying still, a hum under the sternum that has nothing to do with waking up and everything to do with a nervous system that runs a little hot all on its own, medicated down from wherever it would be otherwise. Boots on the floor by the mattress, laces still tied the lazy way, stepped out of rather than untied. A T-shirt damp at the collar. Work trousers still on, the belt still through the loops, because whoever this was didn't undress last night, he just stopped.

The shirt is against your back and it gives first, the way sweat-cotton does, in a smell before a scene: cheap cologne gone stale, cigarette smoke that isn't his — other people's, carried home on him from the rope — and beer spilled hours ago on concrete. Then the scene: the door of the club, one in the morning, a string of red light over the entrance and his breath fogging even though it's not that cold, just Ohio-in-October cold, and a guy twice his height leaning on the velvet rope arguing about a wristband, and Karan not moving, not raising his voice, just standing there being five-foot-four and immovable, because that's the whole trick of the job, you don't have to be big, you have to be the thing that doesn't go anywhere. *ID or you don't come in, man, doesn't matter whose brother you are.* And the satisfaction of it, small and real, when the guy backs off first.

The mattress under you next — bare ticking, no frame, shoved against a wall gone soft with old water damage — and that gives you the apartment before it gives you a single memory: cheap, temporary in the way places become permanent by accident, a lamp with a shade the color of weak tea burning because the foil makes it night in here at any hour God chooses to run the shift schedule. And the schedule itself arrives like a held breath let out: the graveyard door shift, four nights a week, home at two, home at three, and sleeping through whatever the sun is doing outside because the sun does not care what shift you're on. He came here for a girl who left within the year and stayed because leaving costs money he doesn't have. Scraping by. He knows exactly how much is in the account without looking, the way you know a bruise is there before you touch it.

The trousers give you the morning he put them on — not this morning, a morning, all of them folded into one — sitting on the edge of this same mattress, threading the belt through with his leg already going, that knee bouncing on its own the way it always does when he's not paying attention to it, up-down, up-down, some motor running under the thinking one, and him not fighting it anymore because the pills from the clinic in Mansfield took the worst edge off two years ago and what's left is just this, a leg that needs to move, small weather he's stopped apologizing for. Turban unwound and rewound that morning too, patient, practiced, his father's hands somewhere behind his own without either of them being in the room, and a beard he keeps trimmed close and neat, and none of it dramatic, just Tuesday, just a boy getting dressed for a job that pays him to stand outside in the cold and be the last decision before the door.

You get the gap in his teeth from the inside of his own tongue finding it, an old unconscious errand, and with it — free, unasked — a whole small joy: a girl at a party two summers back saying she liked it, that gap, said it like it was a good thing to have, and him walking home lighter than the walk should have made him, and nothing ever coming of her, and that being fine, actually fine, not every memory needs to hurt to be worth having.

You get the boots last, only by proximity, only because your — his — foot is bare and cold on the carpet near them: steel toes, salt-stained, a smell of asphalt and other men's cigarettes, and under that the plain fact of the work itself, at the rope, at one in the morning, six nights out of seven feeling like the only adult left standing on that whole dead stretch of Main Street with its one stoplight running its colors for nobody, the diner behind him dark and closed since before he moved here, and him not minding the quiet the way you'd think he might, actually liking it, actually finding something in it that felt like his.

You sit up. The blanket slides. Your hand — his hand, small-knuckled, a callus along the first two fingers from grabbing wristbands out of drunk fists all night — comes up in front of your face because some old animal habit says *check what you're holding*, and there's nothing in it, and you turn it over anyway, palm up, palm down, watching the light from the torn foil lie across it in one clean bar.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to the empty room, in a voice pitched lower than Aaron Pressler's ever was, "so this is you now."

The leg under you has already started bouncing.