Mateo Reyna

The electrodes go one by one, little constellations of heat along your scalp, and you feel yourself arrive the way a bruise arrives — slow, then all at once. His hands are already gripping the armrests when you get there, so you grip harder. His head presses back into the cushion. Behind his eyes, for one white second, there's nothing at all.

Then you settle.

You look at the chair beside you like someone just stood up from it. Nobody did. Nobody was ever there. This is apparently how the machine leaves a person — facing an absence, as if the self that used to live here just excused itself to the bathroom and hasn't come back.

You unclip the cap yourself, because his hands remember how, even if you don't. The room is beige and tired, a desk lamp throwing yellow onto a cork board full of printouts, a cardboard box shoved under the folding table like nobody's unpacked in months. Somewhere close, a compressor kicks on. You stand up out of the chair and his knees hold you, and that's the first gift he gives you without knowing it: a body that already knows how to be a body.

His name, you learn later from a wallet on the nightstand of an apartment that smells like coffee grounds and hangar dust, is Mateo Reyna. Twenty years old. A pilot's license in a plastic sleeve, creased soft at the corners like he's pulled it out to look at it more than strictly necessary. A photo, half tucked behind a receipt, of a girl with her arm slung around his neck at some overlook, wheat gone gold behind them both — recent enough that he hasn't thrown it away, old enough that he clearly should have.

You go to work because the calendar on his phone tells you to and because you don't know what else a person in this life is supposed to do with a Tuesday. The jet bridge smells like jet fuel and carpet cleaner. The aircraft nose fills the little round window at the end of the tunnel like something patient, something that's been waiting there its whole life for someone to walk toward it. Another pilot claps him — you — on the shoulder, says something about the weather rolling in west of Dodge, and you say something back that comes out sounding exactly like him, because his mouth still knows the shapes of his own jokes even when the mind behind it is a tourist.

At altitude, above the stitched squares of stubble and the black anvil of a thunderhead climbing up out of nothing, the light through the windshield goes the color of a bruise healing — yellow-green, strange, beautiful in the specific way that means trouble is coming. You watch his hands move across switches with a competence you didn't bring with you and can't take credit for. It's humbling, being a passenger in your own borrowed hands.

Back on the ground, in the apartment, you find her number still saved under a name and not a joke, which tells you everything about how it ended — not badly enough to delete her, not well enough to call. You don't call. That's not yours to finish. You lie in his bed instead and touch the mole high on his cheek in the bathroom mirror, the one thing about this face that feels permanent, unmistakably his, the detail a stranger would pick out of a photograph a decade on.

You have him for a while. Long enough to fly through two more storm fronts, long enough to learn which diner in town does the coffee he likes, long enough that the empty chair in your memory stops feeling like a question and starts feeling like a fact you've made peace with. Then one morning — no countdown, no warning bell — you'll simply stop being the one standing in the jet bridge with the plane's nose filling the glass.

He won't remember the empty chair beside him ever having a shape in it. He'll just feel, for a month afterward, like someone stood up from beside him once, and he turned to look, and there was nothing there at all.