Paul Kavanagh

You are standing in Gary Tomczak's kitchen at some hour that belongs to no one, and the thing that decides you is small and stupid: his knees. Fifty-one years old and every time he crouches to a floor lock his knees fire off like knuckles cracking, and you have been crouching to floor locks for three weeks now wearing him, and you are tired of it in a way that has nothing to do with him and everything to do with the fact that you don't have to be tired of anything, ever, if you don't want to. That's the whole shape of the wanting. Not despair. Appetite. You set down the mug with his chipped Dallas Cowboys logo on it, you go to the laptop already open on the counter because you never really closed it after last time, and you pull up the wheel on vessel.cards, and you spin it the way you'd flick a light switch in a house you don't plan on staying in.

The wheel doesn't ask permission. It never has.

Your breath, which was ragged half a second ago — snoring, maybe, or the thick pull of a man sleeping face-down with his own weight against his lungs — evens out in a single motion. The arm that had been hanging off the mattress into cold air draws itself up on its own, and the body you are now wearing rolls onto its back, hands folding at the chest like a man laid out for a wake, though he is very much not dead, only new. There is gray early light coming through a gap in dark curtains. There is a smell of salt that isn't inside the room but is somehow inside the room anyway, the way the sea gets into a house that's stood near it long enough. You are enormous. That's the first fact your new body hands you before it hands you anything else — the sheer province of it, the reach of the arms, the ballast of a gut and a chest that some men would call fat and some men would call built and this one is both. Your knees, when you notice them, don't hurt at all. It's your lower back that's already complaining, a dull tenant noise, familiar the second you feel it, like it's been complaining for years and just resumed.

The pillow under your cheek is cool cotton, ironed — somebody irons pillowcases in this house — and that touch alone opens a door: a woman's hand smoothing a sheet, laughing at herself for bothering, Paul, nobody irons pillowcases, and you telling her you like it, you like that she does it, and meaning it. The name comes with the memory, not before it. Paul. You are Paul Kavanagh, and the ring is still folding into the memory before your hand even finds it — a plain band, worn soft at the edges, twenty-two years of a thumb rubbing at it in waiting rooms and church pews and the front seat of a truck outside a middle school. Deborah. Her name arrives the way names arrive in dreams, whole and unearned. She sleeps three feet to your left, on her side, away from you, and some old habit in this body wants to reach for her and doesn't, because some newer habit has learned not to.

The mattress under your back is memory too — foam gone soft with your exact weight over years, the give of it at the shoulder blades where your spine has been complaining since you were forty and lifting kids out of the dental chair with your back instead of your knees. Every dentist tells his patients to bend the knees. Every dentist ignores himself.

Your hand finds your own jaw, feels stubble, and that single touch — your own hand on your own face — comes back loudest of all, because your hands are what this life has been. You feel, without meaning to, the ghost-weight of the mirror and the explorer, the particular light-headed precision of your fingers finding a cavity by feel before the film ever comes back from the machine. Thirty years of hands that know things without being asked: how much pressure a molar root will take before it complains, how to hold a screaming six-year-old's jaw steady while sounding, somehow, like the calmest man in the room. Your hands, when nobody's watching them, go to your fingernails, and you feel the memory of biting them down past sense the night the insurance company called about a lawsuit that went nowhere, the night Melissa left — the ex, not the wife, a woman nine years younger who wanted more of you than the practice and the marriage left over, and who you still think about on Sundays you won't admit to. There's a daughter too, eleven years old, a soccer cleat somewhere in this house with her name written on the tongue in Sharpie, and thinking of her is the first thing that makes you — Paul, the you that's under you now — flinch, because that is the one memory you did not come here wanting.

Under your palm, the sheet. Under your feet, when you shift them, the cold plank floor past the rug — a floor he refinished himself two summers back, kneeling on it for a weekend that wrecked his knees for a month, satisfied anyway. The shirt he'll put on in an hour, hanging over the chair, is a scrub top the color of a robin's egg, and even from here, unworn, it gives you something: the particular ritual of dressing for a body that doesn't fit standard sizing, the extra reach behind the neck for the second snap, the way he checks the mole in the mirror every single morning without meaning to, an old habit from a scare that turned out to be nothing.

You lie there a moment longer in the gray light, borrowed and enormous and aching quietly in the low back, and you lift your hand up off the sheet into the light from the gap in the curtain and turn it over, this thick tattooed stranger's hand with its soft-worn ring, watching it like it might not follow your instruction, and when it does, exactly, obediently, you almost laugh.

"There you are," you say, to no one, to the ceiling, to whatever was sleeping in this skin an hour ago and isn't now.