Marcus Attah

You have been Todd Resnick for one minute, and one minute is long enough to know you made a mistake.

It's the beauty mark that does it — you keep catching it in the hallway mirror on your way to the kitchen, low on the cheek, and something about it is wrong in a way you can't make yourself stop noticing. The dad bod settling into this body like a couch cushion that's taken a shape and kept it. The blue eyes that don't feel like your eyes because none of them ever do, not really, but these especially don't. Todd was good enough on paper — a nursing assistant, somebody who spends his days being gentle with people — and you wore him into a Houston Sunday evening without even deciding to, the way you do now, the way the wheel makes you not have to decide much of anything. But a minute in his kitchen, light coming low and orange through the blinds, and you already want out of him. It isn't dislike exactly. It's that he feels used already, like a hotel room somebody else checked out of ten minutes before you got the key. You want new sheets. You go back to the site with his heavy hand on his own phone, vessel.cards loading slow on his cracked screen, and you spin before you can call it anything but restlessness.

The wheel stops and there is no Houston kitchen anymore, no orange light, no phone warm in a stranger's hand. There is a couch under you, a remote loose in your fingers, and a television throwing cold blue light across a dark room. Your spine is straight where a half-second ago — someone else's half-second, not yours — it had been sunk low into the cushions. You set the remote down on the arm of the couch, carefully, like you've done it ten thousand times, though you haven't done anything yet. The show on the screen cuts to something bright, laughter on the soundtrack, and you don't laugh.

The first thing is the body. Taller than Todd, leaner, a frame that's been standing up straight for shifts at a time instead of sinking into couches — you feel it in the knees first, a particular ache that isn't soreness so much as a record of hours, concrete floors, standing at a lobby desk through the dead middle of nights while the rest of the city sleeps. There's gray in close-cropped hair you can't see but can feel under your own palm when it drifts up out of habit, waves brushed into it, a private vanity that surfaces before anything else does. One eye doesn't quite sit where you expect it to — you feel the pull of it, a muscle that's always been a half-degree off, and with it comes an old memory, thin as paper: a boy getting asked what he's looking at, so many times he stopped bothering to explain it wasn't anything.

The hoodie is what opens the rest. Soft, worn-in, a gray gone soft at the cuffs, and the second your fingers close on the drawstring you're standing in a bedroom this morning — his morning, hours behind this one, Pittsburgh's Sunday still young while this couch sits deep in its own blue evening — pulling the hoodie over his head after a double that ended at seven a.m. His name comes with it, finally, the way his own name always arrives last and sideways: Marcus. Marcus pulling on sweatpants that still smell like detergent and nothing else, because he doesn't smoke, never did, and there's no beer smell either, hasn't had a drink in years, just the clean smell of a man getting into his own clothes to disappear into his own couch. The shirt underneath — a plain undershirt, nothing to it — gives you the locker room at the building he guards, the badge he pins on before every shift, DENIED LLC stitched small over the pocket of a uniform hanging on a hook at home, tag still reading his own last name in case anyone forgets whose desk the overnight belongs to.

The couch under you gives you more of it. Four years at the desk downtown, the lobby cold at 3 a.m. and too bright at 6, coffee from a machine that's never once gotten it right. A girlfriend — Renata — whose laugh you remember before you remember her face, the weight of calling her after a bad night and feeling instantly better for no reason he could explain to anyone who asked. No wife ever, no kids, nothing that complicated; just a life built mostly out of shifts and small comforts, a mother two bus transfers away who still calls him baby, friends from the old neighborhood scattered now across three zip codes. Nothing in the bank worth mentioning — he knows this without shame, the way you know weather. He has never once prayed about any of it and never missed having a reason to.

The remote in your hand remembers being gripped looser, an hour ago, something funny on screen that made this man's chest move with a laugh you can still feel the ghost of in these ribs — and you don't do it now, can't, because the feeling behind it isn't yours yet, might never be. The wet leaves out past the window, down the public stairs between the backyards, are his too, some Saturday errand returning with groceries, breath fogging, the particular tired-good feeling of almost being home.

You look down at your hand on the remote. Broad, weathered, a thin callus along the side of the trigger finger that has nothing to do with any gun — flashlight, clipboard, years of turning a key in the same stiff lobby door. You turn it over once like you're checking it's real, like it might not hold.

"Didn't even get to the end of that one," you say, to the empty room, to no one, and you don't reach for the remote again.