Patrick Dolezal

You are Kenji Tanabe for one more minute, and the minute is the problem.

You are standing in his kitchen, in his body, holding his own phone in his own hand, and it is the middle of a Monday and there is nothing wrong with this life. That is the thing you keep circling. The apartment is clean in the deliberate way of a man who trains people for a living and cannot afford to look like he doesn't train himself. There is a green smoothie sweating on the counter. Your calves — his calves — are good calves, and you know, distantly, that you spent sixty-one spins learning what it is to want a body like this and one spin actually being handed it, and now you have had it for sixty seconds and it already feels like a rental car. That's the answer, if anyone asked, which nobody ever will: it isn't that Kenji is wrong. It's that he was never the point. None of them are. You open the site on his phone with his thumbprint, which still works, which is its own small joke, and the wheel is already loading before you've decided anything, the way it always is.

Two thousand miles away and two hours later in the day, in a body that does not know it is about to stop being anyone's, your foot comes down and the next one doesn't land where it should.

There's a lurch — not a fall, nothing so honest as a fall — and then the world reassembles itself around a stride that isn't his. Gravel under a shoe, humid air going into a chest built bigger than the one you left, sweat already cold under a fleece zipped to the throat, a watch buzzing against a wrist that flexes without you telling it to. Earbuds feeding a podcast voice mid-sentence into ears that are not the ears you had a second ago. The canal on the left, brown and flat and steaming faintly where the morning sun finds it. You are running. You did not decide to run. The body is already four miles into deciding that for both of you, and your first true sensation in it is your own heartbeat, big and slow and strong, going harder than it should for the pace, like something underneath is working too hard to keep up with something on top that still thinks it's forty.

The shirt sticking to your back is the first door in.

It swings open on a locker room smell, bleach and hot metal, a walk-in cooler's white breath — the chef's coat, not this fleece, but the memory doesn't check credentials, it just comes: him buttoning that coat at four in the afternoon two days ago, sleeve by sleeve, the left sleeve tugged down an extra inch out of habit to keep the tattoo mostly covered from the dish pit guys who'd want a story about it, and there is a story, there's always been a story, but he doesn't tell it during service. His forearms going into the sleeves, the fabric already gone soft and gray-white from a hundred washes, small burns freckling the cuffs same as his own face freckles in the sun. Stained at the pocket where a pen leaked eight months ago and never came fully out. He ties the apron behind his back without looking, a knot his hands know cold, have known for twenty-some years across four kitchens and one bad divorce and this one, the one he's still at, where the walk-in door sticks in summer and somebody always forgets to write the fish special on the board until forty minutes before doors.

The watch on the wrist opens another: five-something in the morning, dark still, the apartment quiet because she's asleep — Danielle, girlfriend, eight months in, the kind of good that still surprises him a little, still feels like it's on loan — and he's easing the door shut so it doesn't wake her, lacing up in the hallway light instead of the bedroom's. The run is his. The only hour that's only his. He does it hungover more often than he'd tell his doctor, more often than the meter readings would forgive, and there's a needle-prick memory underneath that, brief and unglamorous, testing his blood at the pass between tickets because the sugar swims some days by hour six of service and he's learned to read his own hands shaking as data, not fear.

There's an ex in there too, arriving sideways, the way exes do, off nothing more than the rhythm of his own feet on gravel because she used to run this same path with him before Danielle, before the ending that wasn't ugly so much as tired, both of them just done wanting the same things at the same time anymore. He doesn't linger there. His body doesn't either — it's already moved past her the way you move past a mile marker, noted, gone.

The tattoo on the arm burns through last, faint under the fleece sleeve — a face, someone's face, rendered in a hundred careful grays by a guy in a strip-mall shop off Bellaire who took four sessions to get the shading right — and it comes with weight but no name, no story you're given permission to keep, only the fact of how often his own eyes go to it in the mirror like checking on someone.

You feel his height before you feel anything else about him structurally — the ground is farther away than it's been in any of your last sixty bodies, the stride longer, looser, the knees a little sorry about it by mile three but not sorry enough to matter yet. Average build carrying itself like it used to be more, the kind of frame that was strong in a way it's since let go soft at the edges without losing the memory of strength, hands that know knife work the way his feet know this path, both of them running on the same kind of muscle memory that doesn't ask the brain's permission. Fifty is in the knees and in something behind the sternum that isn't quite pain, just a rumor of one, and none of it is unbearable, all of it is simply new.

The watch buzzes again against the wrist. A split it has no memory of him running, because he didn't run it — you did, in the two strides it took you to arrive, and the device logged an impossibility and moved on the way devices do.

You look at the hand nearest your face, still moving, still swinging with the stride, freckled, a stranger's hand wearing a stranger's history you've only just been given in pieces.

You say, out loud, to no one, over a podcast still talking into dead earbuds, "Okay," — just that, breath fogging faint in air that isn't cold enough to earn it, Houston humid instead of San Francisco crisp — and you keep running, because he was already running, and there is no reason yet, today, this hour, to stop.