Nolan Zawistowski

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You have been nowhere for a long time, and nowhere is not restful. It is a waiting room with no chairs. You do not remember your own name — that went early, the way a word goes when you say it too many times — but you remember wanting, and wanting has kept its shape better than anything else about you.

Then there is a hand on your side of the world.

That is how it happens, in the end. Not a summoning, not a bargain. Skin, warm, damp at the small of a back, two men asleep in a room on the east side of Detroit with the blinds half-shut and the radiator ticking. You are in the seam between them, in the heat where they touch, and when one of them stirs at ten past six you go where the warmth goes.

You do not choose him. He is simply the one who wakes up.

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The first thing is the weight of him. You had forgotten weight. A soft belly under a thin gray T-shirt, thighs thick in yesterday's jeans that he never got all the way out of, socks still on. Twenty-seven years old and already carrying himself like a man who works twelve-hour shifts and eats standing up. It is not a beautiful body. It is a *lived-in* body, and after nowhere, that is nearly unbearable — the way the mattress edge presses a line into the back of his knees, the way the air is cold on the inside of his wrists.

The second thing is the leg. His right heel is going, tap tap tap tap, fast, a small engine, and it started before you got here and it does not stop when you arrive. You try to still it and it stops for four seconds and then begins again, and you understand: this is not his mind doing it. This is the body's own habit, older than whatever thoughts are in it. You let it go. Let it bounce. You are going to be here a long while; you can learn the animal later.

The third thing is him.

Nolan Zawistowski is in here with you for a moment, the way steam is in a room after the water is off. Not a fight. There is nothing to fight with. He is only a series of things surfacing, and you receive them like mail addressed to someone else.

Dawn through the blinds, striping the wall in gold bars. *I have to be at Beaumont at seven.* Charting under fluorescent light, the click of the mouse, the smell of hand sanitizer that never leaves the skin between his fingers. *Room 412's family is going to ask me the same question again.* A brick house on a wide street, low gray sky, snow shovel by the door since March. His mother's kitchen; the candle she keeps lit for his grandmother; the church on Saturday afternoons where he goes to sit at the back and not take communion, because he has decided, quietly and for years now, that he will not lie in a line of people. God, in his experience, has been mostly weather. Present. Unhelpful. Not gone.

And then the one that comes hardest, the one that arrives with a hot flush in the throat: a name he almost said last night into someone else's shoulder. Not the name of the man asleep behind him.

*Ilan.* Four years gone. Still the name that comes up out of him when the lights are off, the way water finds the old crack in a foundation. He never told anyone that. He carries it the way he carries everything — nothing he would bring up.

You take that too. You did not ask for it. You cannot give it back.

Then the steam is out of the room, and it is only you.

---

You sit there a while longer with your elbows on your knees and your hands hanging between them. You look at them. Broad, blunt-nailed, a small nick on one thumb knuckle from a bed rail. The wrists have that pale look of a man who is indoors all winter. You turn one hand over. Then the other. You do this not because it is uncanny but because it is *available*, and everything is available now, and you have to start somewhere.

Down the front of the chest, under the collar of the T-shirt, there is color. You pull the neckline with a finger and look: an old heart in bold black outline, red gone dusty, the kind of ink they put on sailors and put on twenty-year-olds who like sailors. It has faded the way it was always going to. You do not know what the banner says because you cannot read it upside down, and you do not tilt to check. Later. There is later now. There is nothing but later.

You stand.

The sheets slide off your lap and puddle back onto the mattress. Borrowed sheets, gray, someone else's laundry soap. The floor is cold through the sock. The room turns out to be smaller standing up than sitting down: a dresser with the drawers not quite shut, a clot of clothes near the baseboard — a blue shirt, dark shorts, a T-shirt inside out. The window is bright and the day out there is doing nothing yet.

And at the edge of the frame, on the far side of the bed, there is a shape under the blanket. A shoulder. Dark hair on the pillow. Breathing slow and even.

You look at him.

This is the part you will remember, if you keep remembering things. Because you understand, standing there with your bare arms and your bouncing-quiet leg and this cheap sunlight across you, that it could have been the other one. The one still asleep. There were two of them in this bed and the hand was on the wrong side of nothing, and you went where the warmth went. If he had woken up first, you would be over there under that blanket right now with somebody else's morning breath and somebody else's rent.

So you check. Calmly. Almost administratively. *Which of us am I.*

You lift one of these hands and look at the nick on the thumb and you feel the belly under the shirt and the pull of the tall stiff hair still holding its shape from yesterday's product, and you say it to yourself without a mouth: *this one. I'm this one.*

And you choose it. Not because there is a way back — there is no way back, and no one has offered you one, and you would not take it. You choose it the way a man chooses the chair he is already sitting in. Yes. Mine. All right.

The sleeping shape shifts and does not wake.

You will not wake him. You will find the shoes, and the keys, and the badge on its white retractable reel, and you will drive to a hospital in this body and stand at a nurses' station at 6:58 and be handed a report you do not understand yet. You will learn it. You have a whole life to learn it in, which is the joke, and you are not laughing, but something in the chest — his chest, your chest — is going very fast.

Twenty-seven years old. Five foot seven. Money in an account you have not looked at. A mother who will call on Sunday. A dead God who keeps almost speaking. A leg that will not stop bouncing.

And a name in the back of the throat that isn't yours to say and that you will say anyway, someday, in the dark, because you have his mouth now and it already knows how.

You go out into the hall.