Marlon Iverson

You have been Danny Cabral for one minute, and already it is unbearable. Twenty-two, a soldier, barracks light coming flat through the window, and the leg — his leg — will not stop jittering under the desk like it's trying to shake you loose before you even get settled in. There's a phone in his hand with a photo half-typed into a caption, some girl back home, and you feel the itch of him wanting to send it, wanting to be liked, wanting so bad it embarrasses you standing here in his skin for sixty seconds. You didn't spin for this. You never spin for the ones you land on — you spin for the ones you leave. So you open the site again on his phone, thumb trembling with his nerves and not yours, and you find the wheel, and you let it go.

It stops on gray. Concrete-block walls, steel trusses overhead, the smell of cut lumber and cold Chicago air leaking through the plastic sheeting where a window will be. You are standing — no, you are *lying*, flat, a lamp too bright above you, and someone's gloved hand is pressing a mask to your face, and a voice is counting, and the number seven is still sitting in your mouth when the room keeps going without you in it. The monitors don't so much as hiccup. Under the lids, your eyes — his eyes — drag once, left to right, checking a room they can't see. The hand at your side opens. Closes. Opens again. Testing fingers that are thick and calloused and not remotely yours.

You are on your back on an operating table at — what, eleven in the morning, someone's Monday — and the last thing his body knew was a job site, and now it's a knife. There's a gap you can't cross, hours gone missing between the sawdust and this ceiling, and it will stay missing, because that's not how the wheel gives a man to you. It gives you what's touching him.

The gown is the first thing. Thin cotton, printed with little gray diamonds, and it brings back nothing because it isn't his — but the tan line is, the pale stripe on the ring finger of the hand still opening and closing on the table, and that one comes in hard: a courthouse hallway, fluorescent, Renee's back going through the doors without turning around, twenty-six years compressed into paperwork on a clipboard. Two kids on a school night, calling to ask whose weekend it is. The ring gone eight years now and the skin under where it was still a shade lighter, like the finger never got the memo.

Then the arm — his right arm, heavy on the table, and under the gown sleeve if you could see it: black tribal ink swallowing the shoulder, twenty-three years old, done the week he made foreman on his first big build, proud and stupid and sure his knees would last forever. They didn't. That's why he's here — some surgeon's hands were in him or about to be, something to do with the hip, the years of ladders and kneeling on subfloor finally sending the bill. He remembers, in pieces that arrive out of order: the tape measure worn smooth in his palm, the particular give of a chalk line snapping true, sawdust catching gold in a shaft of morning light under the L, a foreman's satisfaction watching a wall go up straight because he told it to. He remembers church on Sundays, the easy hard handshake of men who trust you because your work doesn't lie. He remembers his blood pressure cuff on the nightstand, the pills he takes and sometimes doesn't, Renee's voice in his head still telling him to take them even now, even divorced, because some habits of care don't file paperwork.

The mask is over his mouth right now, in this frozen second, and it smells like plastic and something sweetish underneath, and his lungs — your lungs, now, this weight, this belly pulling at the sheet, sixty-five years of a body that carried more than it should have and kept walking anyway — pull one slow breath through it, unbothered, unknowing. His leg would be bouncing if it weren't strapped and drugged still. Even asleep some tension is looking for a door.

The counting voice moves past seven, past eight, into numbers he'll never hear the end of.

Your eyes open. Not his — his are gone, all the way gone, no one left in there to have noticed the two people who were just, briefly, in the same borrowed second. A nurse gasps and a surgeon's head turns and someone says *sir, sir, you need to stay* — and you sit up anyway, mask sliding off, and you look down at your hand, thick fingers, pale ring-line, a half-formed old tattoo peeking from under the gown's sleeve, and you turn it over slow like it might tell you something it doesn't.

Then you look up, past the lamp, into the room full of frozen strangers in green, and you say, low, testing the new gravel of his voice —

"Somebody help me up. I got a job site waiting on me."