Marcos Deleón

The site loads slow, like it's shy about what it is. You've had the tab open for an hour, the way you always do, telling yourself you'll close it. You won't. You have wanted this since you were a kid making up rules for a game nobody else would ever play with you — whose body, how long, what it would feel like to stand behind someone else's face and look out through it. It was always a fantasy with no door. Now there's a wheel on a page and a price under it and a button that says SPIN, and it is Thursday afternoon wherever you are, nothing on, the day already spent, and you pay before you can talk yourself out of it.

The wheel spins. It stops. There is no countdown, no loading bar into a body — just the click, and then you are not where you were.

You are on your side on a mattress with no frame, knees drawn up, one arm dead asleep under a pillow that smells like somebody else's sweat. A bar of light has found your face through a gap in foil taped over a window, and you are already turning into it, some old reflex that isn't yours, and your eyes open on brightness and hold there, unblinking, a beat too long for it to be an accident. Boots on the floor by the mattress. Belt still on, heavy, a full duty belt digging into your hip. Your leg is bouncing against the ticking of the mattress before you've even noticed you have a leg to bounce.

The shirt is against your back, damp cotton gone stiff with old sweat, and it gives you the morning he put it on — not this morning, some morning, all of them running together into one gesture: sleeve, then sleeve, the small grunt he makes buttoning the collar one-handed in a bathroom mirror with the fan going, the practiced weight of the belt swung around and buckled without looking. Your body — his body, thirty-four years in it, does the math automatically, five-five, a gut he's stopped fighting, forearms that know how to turn a knob two-handed to save a door — carries the memory of ten thousand mornings like it in the muscle before the mind gets there.

Then the belt itself, leather worn soft where his thumb rides it, opens a wider door. Nights. Not this one — a hundred of them, headlights swinging across a divided highway outside Boston, the radio's low static a kind of company. He likes the overnight shift more than he'd admit to anyone; likes the empty roads, the diner that's open at 3 a.m. where the cook knows his order, likes being the only human awake for miles who's supposed to be. He does this instead of sleeping like other people because somewhere in there it feels less lonely than the version of his life where he comes home to an empty apartment at six and eats standing at the counter. Except he doesn't come home to empty, not exactly — there's Denise. The thought of her arrives warm and specific: her laugh at something dumb he said, texting her a photo of a raccoon in the cruiser's headlights at 2 a.m. because he knew it would make her snort. Comfortable, not much drama, church some Sundays when the shift allows it, the rosary his mother gave him still in the glovebox of the cruiser though he's not sure the last time he prayed it properly.

The nose comes back through his own fingers, which drift up in sleep and brush it without meaning to — broken at nineteen, a call that went sideways before he was even sworn in, a suspect's elbow, the ER at 4 a.m. and the doctor saying it'll set a little crooked and him being too tired to care. He touches it sometimes without noticing. It is the first thing people say when they meet him and the last thing he thinks about himself.

The foil over the window comes into focus as its own small memory: he did that himself, three tapings ago, because sleeping days ruins you if the sun gets a vote, and this apartment came with blinds thin as tissue. The room around you is a room in transition — boxes half packed, a chair wearing yesterday's clothes like a body of its own, a life mid-move that hasn't decided where it's going yet. His weight settles into the mattress under you, twenty extra pounds he carries mostly in the middle, strong in the forearms and shoulders from wrestling car doors and cuffing men bigger than him, tired everywhere else in that specific bone-deep way of a man who works when the world sleeps and sleeps when it doesn't.

You sit up. The belt creaks. Boots wait on the floor, laces still knotted from last time, like he just stepped out of them rather than untied them.

You look down at your hands — his hands, blunt-fingered, a callus along the trigger guard of two fingers, no ring — turning them over slow in the foil-cut light like you're checking they're real, and maybe they aren't yours yet, not all the way, not the kind of yours that stays.

You lift your eyes to nothing in particular, to wherever a camera would be if there were one, and you say, quiet, still thick with sleep that was never yours to wake from:

"Denise is gonna know something's off before I even say a word."