Owen Kaczmarek

You are Gary Truesdell, and you have been him for three minutes, and it is already not enough.

You are standing in his kitchen, which smells like his coffee, and his phone is on the counter with a text from a woman named Denise still unanswered, and his knees ache the specific ache of a fat man who has spent twenty years running toward gunshots and car wrecks and houses on fire. You know this ache. You have known dozens of aches, all of them somebody else's, and this one bores you already. Three minutes and you know the whole shape of the next forty years of Gary Truesdell: overtime, a bad hip by fifty, Denise or somebody like her, a retirement party in a union hall with a sheet cake. You did not spin the wheel to be handed a man whose whole future you can see standing in his own kitchen. You spin it to be surprised, and Gary is not going to surprise you. So you pick the phone up, not his, yours now, and you open vessel.cards on it standing right there in his slippers, and you feel the small ugly thrill of it, the same thrill you have felt seventeen times, and you tell yourself this is the last one for a while, and you have told yourself that every time.

You spin.

—

You are bent at the waist over a coffee table crowded with white cartons, and there is a cookie broken open in your left hand and a paper slip pinched between the thumb and first two fingers of your right, half-drawn from the wrapper, and your mouth is already moving, already a word past where the sentence on the slip ends, because the sentence was short and your mouth didn't know to stop. Weight comes down into you all at once — bigger than Gary, taller, younger, a gut that sits differently, forearms that end in hands twice the size of the ones you just left, and the couch under you is soft and gives at a different angle than any couch you have sat on as anyone. Your knees are folded up under you cross-legged, barefoot, and somewhere behind your sternum there's a tightness that isn't quite pain, just a kind of narrowness to the air going in, old and familiar to whoever this is and brand new to you.

The slip says something about patience and a road. You don't finish reading it as him. You finish it as you, and then your hand — his hand — folds it into quarters without being told to, and tucks it into the shirt pocket, and that's the first thing his body does that you didn't choose.

The shirt does the rest.

Flannel, unbuttoned, soft from a hundred washes, and touching it the way you're touching it now — collar loose around your neck, one panel fallen open over the belly — brings back this morning, or what would have been this morning if you hadn't just skipped past it into now: him pulling it on after the shower, left arm first because the right shoulder catches sometimes when he reaches back for the sleeve, a thing from a summer of lifting hotel pans that never quite healed right. He buttoned it standing in front of the bathroom mirror in the apartment on Himrod Street, not looking at his face, looking at the wet hair combed back off the forehead that keeps receding a little more every year, and he did not think about that, the way you don't think about your own weather. He thought about the walk-in at Fen, whether the delivery of squid came in right, whether Priya was going to be on the line with him again because when she is the ticket times are good and when she isn't they aren't. He thought, buttoning the second-to-last button, that his back hurt in the low specific way it hurts every single day of his life now, twenty-nine years old and already carrying it like a man twice that.

The couch gives you the rest of the apartment: Kayla's coat on the hook by the door, her mug still in the sink from yesterday because it was her day off and his was a double. Four years in this apartment together, the fights about money that aren't really about money, the good mornings that are better than anybody's good mornings, her laugh through the bathroom door. And under that, older, a name that still has weight when it moves through him — Meg, three years gone, married now to somebody in Ridgewood, and he still thinks of her sometimes standing at the pass on a slow Tuesday and hates that he does, and doesn't tell Kayla, because there's nothing to tell, just a shape a person leaves.

The takeout cartons under your hand smell like the restaurant that is not his restaurant, somebody else's kung pao, eaten alone on a Sunday because Kayla's at her sister's and he came off a double at 4 a.m. and hasn't really slept, just dozed sitting up, which is why eleven in the morning feels like the middle of the night to whoever used to be behind these eyes — because for him it basically is. The vape on the coffee table, three inches from your knee, is warm from his hand an hour ago. Your knuckles want cracking, one after another, a habit so old it isn't even a decision, and you feel the want of it arrive like a stranger's itch inside your own new palm.

He is twenty-nine. He is enormous, all of him, shoulders and belly and a face that has never once made anyone look twice for any reason at all, which he knows, and has stopped minding, mostly. His forearms know a hundred knife-cuts by feel with no eyes on them. His asthma is a small tightening thing that lives at the bottom of every double shift, worse in the walk-in cold, worse on cigarette nights that aren't his, better with the inhaler he keeps in the apron pocket that isn't on him right now because right now there is no apron, just a shirt going soft at the elbows and a body gone loose and easy on a couch that has absorbed four years of exactly this.

You look at your hands. They are pale, big-knuckled, a thin white seam of scar tucked along the inside of one forearm where a hotel pan slid wrong three years ago, half-hidden under the folded cuff. You turn the right one over slowly in the lamp light, fortune cookie crumbs still stuck to two fingers, and something in the wrist wants to crack and you let it.

Terrell's neighbor, you think, not out loud, a small private laugh at the size of the world — this soft enormous man living four doors down the hall in Bed-Stuy from the cop whose body you wore for four minutes and left two days ago, both of them going about their lives never once knowing they'd been the same address to somebody, twice.

You lift your eyes off the hand and into whatever's watching, and you say, in a voice heavier and slower than the one you brought in with you:

"Bigger fortune than I asked for."