Marcus Deshawn Fielder

Larry Feinglass's knees have been talking to him since April, and tonight, standing in his own kitchen in the gray wash of the laptop screen, they are the loudest thing in the room. Fifty-nine years on a body will do that. He flexes the hand that broke his nose for him decades ago, the knuckles gone thick and slow, and thinks: not this one anymore. It isn't that Larry is unbearable — the drywall work is honest, the silver hair suits him, there's a decent ache of pride somewhere in there about a job well taped and floated on Aurora last week. But Larry's back seizes when he bends to the low cabinet, and Larry falls asleep in his chair by nine, and a minute of being him already feels like a rental past its use. Forty-eight men worn and folded away and this one lasted less than sixty seconds of actual wanting. The site is already open in the other tab. You didn't come back for Larry. You came back because there is always a next tab.

You spin.

The stairwell takes you standing, mid-stride, weight already committed to the second stair down, and the body catches itself the way a body that's done this every day for years catches itself — automatically, correctly, no stumble at all, because these legs have run this exact flight two-at-a-time a hundred times and they do not need you to tell them how. The phone is warm in your palm, screen still lit on a forum post you did not write and did not read, a name you can feel still sitting in the shape of your mouth like a coin under the tongue. The stairwell light is the color of an old fluorescent tube deciding whether to commit to being on. Nobody is around to have heard the third saying, lower than the first two, come out of this throat. The air smells like paint and old carpet glue.

The phone goes first. Its case has a worn patch where a thumb has rested a thousand times scrolling — and there it is, unbidden: three months of two-in-the-morning boredom in the break room at the distribution warehouse off Route 30, the forum with the bad kerning, a thread called *say it three times if you dare* that four different nights he clicked past and this fifth night, restless, half-joking, alone in the stairwell because the office upstairs was locked and this was the only place with signal, he did not click past. He'd laughed while he typed the name into his own memory to practice it. He had not really believed anything would come of a man dead eighty years being spoken into a Tuesday night in Ohio. The séance itself, an hour earlier, had been somebody's aunt's idea, candles from the dollar store, everyone half-drunk on cheap wine and looking for something to post. He'd gone along for the same reason he goes along with most things: it was there, and he was bored, and being agreeable is easier than being anything else.

The plaid shirt against your back opens next — flannel, soft from washing, a shirt he grabbed off the same hook every morning this week because laundry day is Sunday and this is Saturday night bleeding into Sunday morning, which is why the house behind him and the town around him is dark and asleep while some version of you, three thousand miles and three hours west, was just getting done with dinner. He works nights now, has for eight months, ever since the promotion moved him off the floor and into the glass-walled office with the door he always leaves open because a closed door at Fielder Logistics reads as a man hiding something, and he has never in his life wanted to look like he's hiding something. The office chair memory comes fast on the heels of that — mid-level manager, comfortable pay, a name plate he was proud of for exactly one day before it just became furniture, spreadsheets that need him more than he needs them, and a leg that bounces under the desk during every single meeting whether he's nervous or not, a tell he's given up trying to kill.

The stubble under your own — his — jaw, when the hand not holding the phone drifts up out of habit, brings back a woman's laugh: Jasmine, two years gone now, the one who used to tell him to shave before her mother visited and who is, if he is honest with himself in the two a.m. quiet more nights than he'd admit, still the reason his shows go unwatched alone on the couch and his phone still has her number un-deleted in a folder he tells himself is for emergencies. She left for Columbus and a nursing program and a version of a future he wasn't in, and he let her go without much of a fight, which he has never once stopped regretting at exactly this hour of exactly this kind of night.

The earlobes carry studs that don't unlock anything, just a Tuesday five years back and a dare from a cousin. The gum he isn't chewing — patch instead, on the inside of his arm under the sleeve, day nine of quitting nicotine again, the fourth attempt this year — flares a small, ordinary misery, a want with no object, the particular itch of a habit half-killed. Feet on cheap stairwell carpet remember standing in this same stairwell smoking, before the patch, before the promotion, a younger and thinner version of these same tired legs.

None of it is dramatic. That's the whole of him: a decent job, a decent income, a decent apartment two towns from where he grew up going to church on the Sundays his mother still calls to check on, a heart still a little bit broken in a low-grade permanent way, a name he said three times as a joke in an empty stairwell at an hour when joking is the only thing left awake in a town with one stoplight and a diner that closed for good last spring.

You look at your hands. They are longer than Larry's, the fingers narrower, unmarked by forty years of joint compound, and when you turn them over under the ugly stairwell light there is a thin white keloid trace of nothing at all — no scar you were told to expect, no mark that isn't already accounted for, just a young man's hands, a little restless, wanting already, without your permission, to bounce a knee that isn't currently sitting down.

You say it to the empty stairwell, quiet, so as not to wake a building that is not even yours yet to worry about waking:

"Guess it worked."