Marcus Reyes

Gregory Novak's hands smell like creosote and cold ash, and you have had them for less than a minute, and already you know you are done with them. It is a Tuesday evening in New York, a chimney sweep's brushes still leaning by the door of an apartment that isn't yours and never will be, and something in you — not boredom exactly, something meaner and more specific, a kind of hunger that has learned to disguise itself as curiosity — is already reaching for the laptop. Novak's knees ache going down into the chair. You don't care. You were Kevin Otani two spins ago, a soldier in Phoenix, a good man with a bad hip and a wife who called him mijo, and you left him standing in his own kitchen less than a minute into being him, because the wheel doesn't let you linger where you land, it only lets you choose to look again. You are choosing now. The page loads. The wheel sits there, patient, colorless, waiting to be paid.

You spin.

The room arrives before you do — dark, motel-cheap, a seam of streetlight cut thin through gapped curtains — and you are face-down in it, one arm hanging off the mattress into cooler air, and the breath that was ragged a half-second ago evens out under you like a tide going still. You are not gasping for him. He was gasping for himself, some private thing chasing him in sleep, and now you are here instead and the chasing stops. The arm draws itself up. The body rolls onto its back on its own authority, hands coming to rest folded on the chest, a shape this man has never once made in his sleep, and nobody in the room is awake to see it happen, which is the only mercy the wheel ever bothers with.

The sheets are the first thing. Cheap thread count, a faint bleach smell layered over a used-up hotel smell, and under your back — under his back, which is the same thing now — a mattress that has taken the weight of a hundred strangers and none of them him. The asthma flares small and immediate in his chest, a tightness like a held door, and with it comes a flash: an inhaler on a nightstand two states away, a woman's voice saying *did you pack it this time*, a boy of nine coughing once, theatrically, in imitation, and the man laughing despite himself because that's exactly what he sounds like at 2 a.m. reaching for the puffer. This room has no inhaler in it. That absence sits in the memory like its own small fact.

The wedding band is the second thing, plain gold, worn thin on the inside of the finger from twelve years of a hand that goes into spreadsheets and coffee cups and a wife's hair. Marcus Reyes. The name comes with the ring, comes with a whole Tuesday: a fluorescent office two towns over, two monitors bleeding blue light into a face with a cleft chin so pronounced his own kids used to press their thumbs into it as babies, laughing, *Daddy's got a hole*. A ledger closed at six. A drive home on a road with one stoplight, past a diner that closed the year the plant did and never reopened, the neon sign dead but nobody's taken it down, some kind of town-wide superstition about admitting it's over.

Except this isn't that drive. This is a motel, and the memory that comes up to explain it comes up reluctant, ashamed of itself even in recollection — a woman who is not his wife, a recent thing, already ending, already something he tells himself he's ending, and this room booked under a name that isn't quite a lie because it's his middle name, and a text sent to his wife about a "conference," and the particular guilt-taste of a man who goes to Mass most Sundays and believes, actually believes, that this will cost him something, later, somewhere. He fell asleep face-down and alone in the room because she left an hour ago and he told himself he'd just rest before driving back. His knuckles remember cracking themselves, one hand into the other, while he stared at the water-stained ceiling working up the nerve to feel bad enough to stop.

Under it all, the body: forty-four and strong in a way that surprises you, gym-built shoulders, a runner's calves, lungs that pull tighter than they should on a full breath, an old asthmatic wheeze living just behind the sternum like a tenant who pays on time. Dark hair cut close at the sides. A wife named — the memory won't quite hand you her name yet, only her weight against his side at 3 a.m., only two kids' voices overlapping at a dinner table, only a whole domestic architecture built and now, in this exact unwitnessed hour, betrayed and about to be inherited by somebody who owes it nothing.

You sit up. The sheets pull back. You look at the hand with the ring on it, turn it over once in the thin streetlight, and something that isn't quite his guilt and isn't quite your amusement moves through the cleft in his chin as it settles into a small, unreadable shape.

"Guess I'm not driving home tonight," you say, to the empty room, in his voice, and you have no idea yet how long you intend to keep it.