Kevin Iwasaki

Rafael's mouth tastes like someone else's toothpaste, and you have been him for exactly seven minutes, and it is already not enough.

You lie there in his dark bedroom, in his good sheets, in his narrow lawyer's body with its gap-toothed mouth and its small clean hands, and you feel the disappointment come up through you like a tide going out. Seven minutes of being Rafael Cintrón and you already know the whole shape of it: the condo, the ex-wife's number still in the phone he hasn't deleted, the brief due Monday sitting open on the laptop across the room, glowing, judging. Twenty-nine years old and careful in every direction. It is Saturday, deep night, coastal Maine breathing cold against the window, and somewhere in this tidy rented life there is nothing left to want. You spun for this. You spun and got a man who flosses.

You don't decide so much as notice your thumb already moving, already reaching for the phone on the nightstand, the site blooming up in the dark, that wheel with its lazy confident spin, vessel.cards, and the little jump in your chest that has not gotten smaller in five hundred and thirty-four tries. It is not boredom exactly. It's the specific boredom of a good decision. You pay. You spin.

—

The thumb is already moving when you arrive, faster than his was, sure of itself in a way his wasn't, and the phone light holds steady on a face that has stopped blinking on schedule. You are on your side in the dark, weight settled low and soft through a stomach that was not there a second ago, the mattress taking your hip at an angle that feels enormous and strange, the phone six inches off, some stranger's thumb scrolling nothing, going nowhere, the motion outliving the intention that started it.

—

The T-shirt against your back is the first door. Grey, thin at the collar, worn a hundred washes soft, and through it comes a morning — not this one, some other one, all of them really, folded into each other the way worn clothes fold time — pulling this same shirt over his head in a bedroom with plywood behind blackout curtains, the long amber light of an Anchorage evening that never quite leaves in summer and never quite arrives in winter, whichever this was. The smell under the collar is his own sweat gone stale and familiar, not unpleasant, just his.

His name comes with the shirt, quiet and certain the way a man's own name always is to him: Kevin Iwasaki. Forty-one. A body that has stopped being surprised by its own softness, a gut that pushes gently at any waistband, shoulders that used to carry more muscle before some year — 2019, maybe, the year everything with Diane went sideways — turned itself into sitting in rental cars and hotel bars instead.

The ear against the pillow holds the cartilage piercing, small and cool, and through it comes a version of him twenty-two years old getting it done on a dare from a woman he doesn't marry, laughing, half-drunk, in a strip mall in Tacoma. Diane comes later, comes through the wedding ring he doesn't wear anymore but whose ghost-groove is still there on the fourth finger of a hand that already knew, before you did, where that dent was. Seven years married, no kids, and the divorce wasn't a war, it was just a long slow leak — two people who liked each other fine and wanted different weather. She's in Seattle now. He still texts her on her birthday. She still answers.

The lanyard is not on him now, it's on the chair, but its ghost is in the muscle memory of his neck anyway — hotel lobbies, a rolling bag, the particular exhaustion of small talk with a man from Fairbanks about fasteners, his whole working life a string of Marriotts and rental Altimas and PowerPoint decks nobody reads past slide four. He is good at it. He hates that he is good at it. The crooked nose comes with a memory of nothing dramatic — a basketball, high school, a bad landing — and the doctor who set it slightly wrong and the years of Kevin catching his own reflection at an angle and thinking, close enough.

The phone in his hand — your hand now — is warm from his palm, and through it comes tonight already, the actual tonight, before you: three drinks in, alone, a hand of solitaire against sleep, some article about heart medication he clicked past too fast to read, the blood pressure cuff in the bathroom drawer he keeps meaning to use more than once a week. Nearly midnight here. He should be asleep. He isn't anyone's, no one is waiting up, and that particular quiet — not lonely exactly, just unaccompanied — is the last full feeling that arrives before it's only yours.

—

You bring the hand up in front of your face — his hand, wide-knuckled, a little swollen the way hands get lying on their side too long — and turn it once under the phone's blue light like you're checking it for damage.

Then you look up into the dark past the screen, and you say, out loud, to no one:

"Okay. Not Maine, then."