Malcolm Dessalines

You are Colin Aspinwall for the seven hundred and eighth time, and you are done with him before the lunch rush even starts. He is small in a way that makes cooks talk over him, and today one did, right to his face, about the walk-in temp, and Colin just took it, the way he always takes it, dimpled chin tucked, blue eyes sliding to the floor. You sat in his skin at the little desk behind the kitchen, printer humming, and you thought: not this again. Not the invoices, not the apron he irons, not the beard he keeps a half-inch too careful. You want out of him the way you want out of a coat that was never yours to begin with, and there is a phone in his pocket and a site already open in a tab because you checked it twice this morning like you always do, the wheel sitting there patient as a slot machine that never asks why. Your thumb — his thumb, small-knuckled, clean nails — taps the screen at two in the afternoon in Los Angeles. You do not think about who is on the other end of the spin. Nobody who spins ever really does.

The wheel turns and stops and the light comes apart behind your eyes and reassembles as a ceiling.

You are on your back. That is the first wrongness — arms folded at your chest like a man laid out for viewing, though the breath moving through this chest is easy and slow, drawing in air that smells like fabric softener and, faintly, someone else's shampoo. Streetlight comes low and orange through a gap in heavy curtains. Somewhere below, tires hiss on wet asphalt. Your body — his body, and it is enormous compared to Colin, big-shouldered, long through the leg — has already stopped being asleep. It did that on its own, before you got here, the way a held breath lets go.

The wedding band is the first thing you feel, cool metal loose enough to spin on the finger when the hand moves, and it opens like a door. A woman's laugh in a kitchen that smells like burnt garlic and her insisting she can fix it. Her name arrives folded into the memory rather than announced — Danielle — and with it four years of Sunday services at a storefront church in Bed-Stuy, her hand tight in his during the parts of the sermon that used to make his throat close up, though he could never explain to her exactly why. There's a second warmth behind that one, guiltier, quieter — a woman who is not Danielle, whose photographs he deleted and whose voicemail he kept, one, just one, that he has never played for anyone and rarely plays for himself. He tells himself that's finished. Most days he believes it.

The pillow under the back of his skull gives him the smell of his own hair product, and that pulls a whole morning up whole: standing in front of a mirror in this same bedroom, threading a lanyard over his head, dragging a comb through mid-length hair he keeps meaning to cut and never does. The shirt — pale blue, still on him now, twisted where he slept in it — remembers itself being buttoned, cuff first, the way his mother taught him because a man who starts at the cuffs never has to redo his collar. The blazer is somewhere on a chair, not on the bed, but the memory of putting it on this morning comes anyway, sleeve finding his arm the way it always does, easy, a jacket that fits a man who has worn suits five days a week for nine years and stopped noticing the weight of them.

His hands are restless even now, laced on his chest, and the nails are bitten close on every finger, a habit that started in a boardroom in his twenties and never had a reason to stop. Between his cheek and his gum there's the faint mineral ghost-taste of the dip he had before dinner and didn't have again, because he decided a long time ago, the same year he decided about the drinking, that some things a man puts down and doesn't pick back up, not even a little, not even once. That decision sits in him solid as a rib.

The room keeps giving. Under his back, memory foam that Danielle picked out because his shoulders bothered him after redeyes; against his bare feet where they'd hung off the mattress edge, the nap of a rug they bought at a stoop sale two summers ago, still slightly the wrong color for the room, a joke between them now. The hotel lobby comes back sideways, through nothing he is touching, just the leftover ache low in his back from standing in it all day, badge swinging, shaking hands he'd shaken ten times that week already, a client who liked him — everyone likes him, the dimples do half his job — and a flight that got him home late enough that Danielle was already down when he came in, so he'd just dropped onto the bed the way he was, face-first, meaning to only rest a minute.

You feel all thirty-three years of him at once for a second — the strong stretch of legs that used to run track, the tired place behind his eyes that four meetings a day puts there now, the particular ease in his shoulders that a man gets from being tall enough that rooms rearrange slightly around him without him asking.

Then it's just the ceiling again, and the streetlight, and the ring loose on your borrowed finger.

You lift the hand off your chest and hold it up against the orange light, turning it, watching the knuckles, the bitten nails, the pale ring catching what light there is. It is not a hand you have ever owned. You roll your head on the pillow and look toward where a window would be if there were a camera there, and Malcolm's mouth — dimples pressed in even now, even slack, even doing nothing at all — makes words that are not quite his.

"Didn't feel a thing," you say, to no one, and you almost believe you mean it kindly.