Kenji Tanabe

The bay smells like brake dust and the coffee going cold on the toolbox, and your knees — his knees, sixty-five years of them — ache the way they always ache on a Monday, first thing, before the joints have anything to say for themselves. You are wearing Walter's hands right now, and Walter's hands are good hands, patient hands, gray hair in his knuckles, and you have liked being him well enough for however many weeks it has been. But there was a Buick on the lift yesterday with a wiring harness eaten through by mice, and something about lying on your back under it, staring up into the guts of a car that isn't even yours, that will never be yours, that you will hand back to a stranger who will not thank you properly — something about that reminded you why you stopped being anybody for very long. The work is the same work every time. Only the face changes. You wipe your hands on a rag that will never come clean, and you think: not this one again tomorrow. You go up to the office, close the door, open the laptop, and the wheel is already loaded, like it knew.

The bathroom light buzzes on for a second before it holds steady, and there is a mouth working around a toothbrush, foam gathering at the corner of it, and the tap running loud against white porcelain. Your stroke — his stroke — stutters mid-pass on the upper left molars, hesitates, then starts again on the other side, slower now, deliberate, like relearning where the teeth are. The water keeps running. You let it run a beat too long before you shut it off, rinse twice, stand the brush up bristles-first in a glass that has clearly held toothbrushes this way for years, the grey water it stands in older than any wheel.

Skinny wrists. That's the first thing your new body tells you before anything else does — how light the forearm feels lifting the towel off the rack, how little of him there is compared to Walter's soft, permanent bulk. The towel is thin and smells like a laundromat, and holding it brings back, instantly, some other morning: hanging wet towels over the shower rod in this exact bathroom because the dryer downstairs eats quarters and never actually dries anything, and a girlfriend's voice from the other room saying something about being late, and the small warm irritation of being loved by someone who is always almost late.

The shirt is still draped over the toilet tank where he left it last night, and touching it gives you his hands putting it on this morning — grey, thin, worn soft at the collar from a hundred washes, pulled overhead in the dark of the garage apartment before the light was even on, one arm through, the fabric snagging for half a second on the leather cord and the whistle that lives against his sternum all day, every day, tap tap tap against his chest when he jogs a client through box jumps. You feel the whistle's weight now, cold, familiar, hanging there even though he isn't wearing it yet this morning — just the ghost-weight of habit, the body already expecting it.

Reaching for the toothpaste tube gives you the gym floor: cold light off polished concrete, a client's heels slapping a treadmill belt, the particular boredom-that-isn't-boredom of counting someone else's reps out loud for the four hundredth time, telling a stranger good, one more, you've got it, in a voice you've practiced so long it barely comes from you anymore. There is real pride under it though — you feel that too, unmistakably his — the good kind, quiet, the kind that comes from watching somebody get strong who couldn't do a single push-up in March.

The shorts hanging on the door hook bring back a whole year: him at twenty-two in a community college kinesiology class, learning the names of muscles he'd spend the rest of his life pointing at on other people's bodies; him quitting a warehouse job because his knees couldn't take the concrete anymore and his hands couldn't take being idle; the specific, ordinary satisfaction of a paycheck that finally matched the work. He is not rich but he is not scared, and that unscared feeling sits strange and pleasant in a chest that has spent decades, in other bodies, mostly worried about money.

Your tongue finds the inside of your cheek out of nothing, a habit, and your fingers — his fingers — drift toward a thumbnail already bitten down close, and some old, private anxious energy comes up with the gesture, nameless, just there, the way it must always be there under the whistle and the good one, you've got it. There is a woman he loves whose name arrives with the smell of this apartment — coffee and old grout and her shampoo still faint on the shirt he wore two days ago and hasn't washed yet — and there is a pack of cigarettes somewhere in this room he is not supposed to have and definitely has, and there is a driveway outside cut too steep for anything but a small car, gray daylight coming down it flat and cold even at midday, this whole apartment tucked under someone richer's bay window like a secret the house is keeping.

You look down. Skinny wrist, chewed nail, a tattoo in characters on the forearm you don't yet have the memory to read. You turn the hand over slowly, palm up, palm down, watching it not quite believing it is the one that will grip the wheel of a car he doesn't own and count reps for people whose names you don't know yet, this afternoon, in an hour, whenever the day actually starts for him.

You lift your eyes to the mirror instead of the lens, and there's Kenji's face looking back at you, and you say, to no one, in a voice thinner than Walter's ever was:

"Okay. Let's see what you've got."