Marlon Abasi Whitfield

You are standing in a break room in Pittsburgh with a mop bucket cooling by the door and a phone in your borrowed hand, the fluorescent tube overhead ticking the way it does before it finally decides to die. This body has been yours for two minutes. You know it the way you know a rented coat: broad through the shoulders, a low ache set into the right knee, the smell of bleach gone all the way into the calluses. You did not choose him for anything in particular. He was just where the wheel put you last, and two minutes is not enough time to want to stay anywhere. That's the truth you don't say to anyone, not even yourself most nights: it was never going to be enough time, not this one, not any of the ten before it. The itch is not boredom exactly. It's more like a hand that keeps finding its way back to a doorknob.

You thumb the site open standing right there in the break room, bucket water going still, and you spin.

There's no fall, no tunnel, nothing so generous as a transition. There's a bench, and a rack over it, and your hands two inches wider on the bar than they've been in a year, and a body already three-quarters of the way through a rep it started without you. Weight presses down through forearms that are not the ones you had four seconds ago — longer, leaner, a dentist's forearms, steady in a way that has nothing to do with the gym. The chest under the shirt fills wrong, fills bigger, fills like there's more of him standing between you and the world. Sweat runs down a hairline that ends in an afro instead of the low fade you just left behind. You finish the rep because the muscle finishes it before whatever's left of him can stop it. Then the bar goes back into the rack with a sound like punctuation, and you're sitting where he was sitting, breathing where he was breathing, and there is nobody else home.

The bench slats print themselves into the backs of your thighs. That's the first thing that comes through — not a memory, just weight, warm metal, the particular give of an old bench that's been reupholstered once and should be again. Then your palm finds the water bottle sweating on the floor and it arrives all at once: this gym, six a.m. three times a week before the office opens, the guy at the front desk who calls him "Doc" like it's funnier every time. A whole stretch of Tuesdays folds into you — the same bench, the same bar, the plate count going up half a year ago when his girlfriend started coming with him and he didn't want to be outpaced by a woman four inches shorter than him, which she found hilarious and never let go of.

The shirt is next — not the tee he's got on now, but the one that comes back through his own hands, this morning, buttoning up the collar of the pale blue scrub top one stud at a time in a bathroom mirror in a new-build house that still smells faintly of drywall paint. He does that collar up slow because the studs are stiff and because his mother taught him, decades back, that you dress like the work matters even when the work is somebody's molar. The navy trousers next, creased from the dryer, the same three pairs rotating through the week, black shoes that have gone soft at the crease from four years of standing twelve feet from a patient's open mouth. He remembers — no, you remember through him — the mirror-check before leaving: afro picked out, not for vanity exactly, just habit, the comb an old church-basement one that used to be his father's.

Under the touch of the locker-room bench more comes, layered, unbidden. Dental school in Houston, the year he almost quit after failing a practical exam and calling his ex — Danielle, though he doesn't let himself think her full name much anymore — at two in the morning because she was the only person who'd ever made panic feel survivable, and she talked him down for forty minutes and then they didn't speak for a year after that call for reasons that were never really about the exam. The dental practice now, off a strip mall on the north side of Dallas, the particular smell of the operatory — clove, latex, the whine of the suction — that clings to him even here, hours off shift, ghosting under gym sweat. His current girlfriend, Renata, who leaves a toothbrush at his place that he still finds funny given the profession, who he is supposed to call after this workout, who does not know yet that tonight is any different from a hundred other Tuesdays.

His body under your hands — because it's yours now, plainly, the only hands you have — is thirty-three years into itself and carrying it well: the knee doesn't ache the way the last one did, the shoulders are tired in the honest way of a fourth set finished, not the way of a body that's been used up. Grip strength good, the kind that comes from years of small precise tools rather than heavy ones. A church upbringing sits somewhere back in him like furniture in a room you haven't opened, unused most weeks now but load-bearing anyway. No mark on him anywhere that you can find, nothing to snag your eye — which is itself its own kind of answer to why the wheel chose to give him to you without a single distinguishing thing, a face built for nobody to remember and everybody to trust.

You turn your palms up in the fluorescent gym light, look at them like they might still belong to the man in the break room in Pittsburgh, like the bucket's still there and the knee still aches. It isn't, it doesn't. These hands are narrower through the wrist, unscarred, a dead man's muscle memory for probing a canal still humming somewhere just beneath where you're sitting.

"Two more," you say out loud, to nobody, because it's the last thing his mouth was going to say before you arrived in it, and it comes out of you anyway, like a habit finishing itself.

Nobody in the gym looks over. The water bottle sweats on. Eleven spins now, and no telling — not to you, not to him, not to anyone reading this after — how long you'll let this one run before the wheel calls you back.