Marcus Feliciano

DAY ONE — LOS ANGELES

Labor Day, and I spent it doing nothing at all, which was the entire point.

I walked. Six hours in a body nobody had told me I couldn't have, through a neighbourhood I'd never seen, and for six hours I was looked at. Not stared at. Looked at — the ordinary amount, the amount everybody else gets for free. The woman at the counter finished her sentence to my face instead of past it. A guy at a crosswalk nodded, because I was the kind of person you nod to. Somebody called *Dev!* across a parking lot and I turned around and it landed, and I nearly sat down on the asphalt.

I ate three things I'd have thought twice about. I took my shirt off in a stranger's bathroom four separate times to check it was still true. I walked past a window and looked twice, then went back and did it again on purpose. That night I put on his best shirt and went out and stayed out.

The phone buzzed all day and I let it.

---

DAY TWO — LOS ANGELES, THEN HOUSTON

The alarm went at 3:40 and my body was up before I understood why.

That's the part nobody warns you about. *He* was up. The legs swung out and the feet found the floor without me routing any of it, and I was just riding along inside somebody else's habit.

She called at 3:50. Which meant she'd been awake. Which meant she'd been awake a while. *Dev, we had plans yesterday. Why didn't you answer your phone.* I said nothing, because I couldn't tell her the truth and I couldn't manage the lie either — the lie needs you to know what you are to someone, and all I had was two letters and a heart.

The bakery was a hundred and four degrees at five in the morning. The man who runs it says the name like it's a task. Dev, the racks. Dev, you left the door. *Keep up.* Turns out being addressed as somebody else lands beautifully at four in the afternoon on a holiday and means absolutely nothing at six in the morning over a proof oven. Same word. The day before it undid me. That morning it was just a man wanting something.

Eight hours. My arms were unbelievable and they hurt exactly as much as anybody's arms would.

At lunch the card came back declined, and the cashier said sorry the way you say it forty times a day, and I stood there with flour still on my forearms and understood that I had escaped overnights into overnights. Different hours. Same money. Better shoulders.

I sat on the edge of his bed that afternoon and told him I'd miss everything but his life.

---

I arrived mid-shave.

That's the thing about the wheel — it doesn't check what you're doing. The light came and my hand jerked and the razor opened a small clean cut along the jaw, and I stood there watching a stranger bleed in a mirror and laughed out loud, alone, at eight in the evening in a bathroom in Texas.

*Jesus. Spins can be dangerous.*

Twenty-four. Black hair slicked back like he does it every morning without thinking. Brown eyes. Mixed — his father in the jaw, his mother somewhere in the mouth, or the other way round; I'll never know and neither will anyone who looks at him. One earlobe pierced, healed years ago. Built, but built by doing something, not by a gym.

And the ink. A portrait on the side of the neck and another across the back of the hand — a face, photographic, somebody's real face done by somebody very good. I held it up close and looked at it for a long time.

I don't know who that is. He does. He knows exactly. It's the face he sees on the back of his own hand every time he holds a coffee, every time he raises it in front of a room of teenagers, and it's a man, and it's from years ago, and that's every single thing I'm ever going to know about it.

There's a rosary on the counter and a toothpick chewed flat beside it.

I called the alias, still bare-chested, still watching myself.

*Are they young muscular hunks every time?*

He said no. Definitely not. Completely random, and I'd just got lucky, and then he left a pause and said maybe it was time to slow down.

I was looking in the mirror when he said it. Two days into this and I already knew I wasn't going to stop.

*I dunno. A body a day sounds fun.*

He didn't say anything back, and I've been thinking about that more than anything he did say.