Kevin Jiang Zhou

You are leaving Owen Marsh because of a staircase. Twenty-three years old, and his knees shook on the second landing of the parking garage. That was the whole trouble. Some hand of his had been shaking since the morning, and you could not make it stop, and you stood at his kitchen counter in Philadelphia with his cursor over the wheel. His beauty mark itched. He had been yours for less than a minute and already you were bored of being careful with him. You pay. You spin.

Light, white and flat, pours down from one big round lamp. A mask sits on your mouth, and the paper breathes in and out against your lips. Your tongue is in the shape of the number seven. Then the sound of it is gone, and you are lying down in a man.

The first thing is weight. It sits in the belly, a warm, round, settled heft under a gown that smells of laundry and starch. The monitors keep a slow rhythm and your chest follows it. Your eyes slide once, left to right, across the lamp's glare, because they are his eyes and they check a room before anything else. Then your right hand, down on the table, opens and closes twice. The fingers are thick-knuckled and quick, and they test themselves like a man patting his pockets.

The gown's cotton rubs your wrist, and under it something comes up unasked. A cold office, carpet tiles, the dust under a desk. His knees on the floor and his cheek almost against the wood, the little plastic click of a cable seating into a port. It is not your memory. It comes with a flat, tired satisfaction, the pleasure of a small thing put right when no one will ever thank him.

The mask's elastic pulls at your ears, and with it comes the morning. Not this morning, an older one. He stands in a bathroom in a cheap apartment, dragging a razor up the jaw, and the face in the mirror is round and tired and smooth. The little steel barbell sits over his eyebrow, and he rolls it with a thumb the way another man would crack his neck. He is thinking about money. There is a number in his head that never moves, a heavy number, and every day he carries it upstairs and downstairs with him like a bag of wet sand.

The table presses at your shoulder blades, and a different flash comes. Two small children in a stairwell between backyards, wet leaves slick on the concrete and late light coming through bare branches. A girl of maybe six hangs from his hand and a smaller boy runs ahead and skids. His chest swells so hard you almost cry out around the mask. He would do anything. He is doing this, you understand, some surgery, because the number has to be paid down somehow, or because something in the body would not wait. The memory will not say which.

Your lungs fill. They taste faintly of old smoke under the sweet gas, a pack in a jacket pocket and the vape in the tray of a car. He tells himself every week he will quit. The craving lies in the throat like a small animal asleep.

Then a girlfriend's laugh, and a brown leather shoe kicked off beside a couch. It is gone before it has a name.

You lift your right hand into the glare of the lamp. You turn it over, palm and back, the soft pad of the thumb and the faint ridges where cables have bitten it. It is a good hand. It is a stranger's hand, deep in debt, and it is yours.

You look up through the light and say it aloud, muffled by paper, hoarse: "Okay. Okay, you."

Somewhere under it, the question is already awake, patient as the monitors: how long this one lasts, and whether you are still him by the time they wheel you out.