Marcus Broadnax

You are somewhere over Pennsylvania in your head, though the body you are wearing is parked on a New York street, engine ticking, cab smelling like cold coffee and the pine tree hanging off the mirror. Miguel Otero's hands are on the wheel at a truck stop, forty-four years old and forty pounds of dad-bod softness around the middle, freckles across a nose that has been broken once. You have had him less than a minute and already the newness of him is gone flat, the way a joke gets flat the second time someone tells it back to you. Monday afternoon light through the windshield. A dispatcher's voice crackling something about a delay in Scranton. This is the whole of what he is: a schedule, an ache in the lower back, a photo of a woman clipped to the visor whose name you have not learned yet and do not intend to. You did not choose him. You never do. You take out your phone, thumb already knowing the site before the thought finishes, and you spin.

The foil peels at the corner. A blade of noon light lays itself across a face that is not the one you had. You turn from it, because some reflex older than you flinches from the sun, and then you turn back into it and open Marcus Broadnax's eyes and hold them there, unblinking, into the glare. Weight comes first — more of it than Miguel had, settled low and wide across a couch cushion gone soft in exactly this shape, an arm's worth of dead-limb tingle where it has been folded under a big body for however many hours this has been. A beard under your — his — chin, thick, and the fingers of the near hand already moving into it without you telling them to, tugging at a curl of it the way you'd worry a loose thread. Boots on the floor below, laces still tied the way feet get pulled out of them at 5 a.m. without being undone. Somewhere behind the wall, birds, day birds, wrong for what the dark and the taped window are telling this room. Seattle. Midday. A man built for sleeping through it.

The shirt is the first thing that talks. Black T-shirt, cotton gone thin at the shoulder seam, and it gives you a morning that already happened once and will happen again in twelve hours: him standing in a bathroom with the light off because Nia's still asleep down the hall with both kids piled into her like a litter, pulling this same shirt over his head one-handed, locs already gathered back with a rubber band he keeps on his wrist for exactly this. The work pants next — navy-blue twill, a button fly he does up without looking, muscle memory built over nine years of dressing in the dark so as not to wake anybody up. There's a coffee-shop glow he half remembers from the route's last stop, condensation on a window, a regular named Dot who taps twice on the glass before boarding, always twice, and the small unimportant pleasure of knowing that before it happens.

The couch under his back gives him the apartment — two bedrooms, one of them shared by a boy and a girl who fight about the top bunk though neither of them has ever slept in the bottom one, a rent that's a stretch but not a crisis because there's money set by, more than anyone driving a 44 route has business having saved, and he's proud of that in a way he'd never say to your face. The tattoo on his inner forearm answers when the light from the window lands on it — black tribal bands, done at twenty-two in a shop that isn't there anymore, no meaning he could explain to you except that his cousin got one the same week and it felt like something to have matching with somebody, back before the cousin stopped answering calls. Straight down the middle of him: no drink, not once, watched an uncle come apart from it and decided early he wasn't interested in finding out if he was built the same; no cigarettes either, never saw the appeal. Church, some — not the building so much as the quiet fifteen minutes before the route starts, sitting in the driver's seat with the doors still closed, which is as close to praying as he does anymore.

The boots on the floor are the last thing, and they're heaviest: eleven hours of a night route, the 7 through Rainier Valley in the dead hours when the only passengers are shift workers and a man who talks to nobody the whole way and gets off at the same stop every time. Legs that ache at the knee in a specific way only another driver's knee would recognize. Two kids waiting for him tonight who think their father works nights because he likes it, not because the day slot went to somebody with more seniority. A partner asleep down the hall right now who taped this window herself, badly, because morning comes into this room like an accusation and he needs the dark to sleep in it.

You sit up inside all four hundred pounds of him, boots still on the floor, beard already snagged between two of his fingers, and you look at the hand doing it like it belongs to someone else, because it does, for now.

"Didn't feel a thing," you say out loud, to the taped-over window, in a voice that isn't yours and isn't quite his either — and you don't know yet if that's true for one more hour or for a season, and neither does the wheel.