Reginald Fauntleroy

The site loads slow on purpose, like it wants you to sit with the wanting a second longer before it hands you the wheel. Nothing on tonight. Nothing on any night lately. You have read the threads, you have watched the films where a man wakes up wrong and spends ninety minutes deciding whether to panic, and it has always been the only thing you actually wanted, the way some people want a house or a body of their own that fits better. You did not think it would be real. You pay anyway. You spin anyway. The wheel does what wheels do, and then it stops.

You are bent slightly at the waist, setting a box down onto a bare floor, and the box is the last thing you know that isn't him. Your hip aches faintly where it was pressed. The keys are still in the door behind you, houseplant-cool morning light coming through a window with no curtain yet. You straighten up into fifty-five years of knees. Somewhere behind your sternum a heart is going a little fast, a little high, the kind of blood pressure a doctor has mentioned more than once. You do not know his name yet. Your hand does, though — it goes to the wall on its own, knuckles trailing the plaster, checking it the way you check a berth at 1 a.m. for a draft that shouldn't be there.

The flannel is the first thing that talks to you. Worn soft at the elbows, and touching it gives you a Saturday — Reginald standing in a bedroom in Pittsburgh, his wife's voice from another room asking has he eaten, the shirt coming off a hanger he's had since the Clinton administration, his arms lifting into the sleeves out of habit older than thought. That morning bleeds into other mornings, the same shirt, the same door, a life folded into cotton. The jeans come with a name he doesn't say out loud much anymore — his ex, and the years when the house was smaller and louder and his. The wedding band on your left hand is warm already, worn-in warm, and it gives you a second wife, a real one, her laugh in a kitchen you haven't seen the rest of, a habit of loosening his tie for him at the door that he lets her keep doing even though he can do it himself.

The keys, when your hand drifts back to them, are a whole different weight — the sleeping car, the corridor after midnight, the give of the door latches, forty years of the same walk down the same narrow hall with the lights turned low and the country running past dark outside the glass. It is two in the morning where his body's clock still half-believes it is, and eleven in Pittsburgh where the light actually is, and the gap between them sits in your chest like missing a step. His body doesn't know which tired to be. It is tired both ways.

You feel his son somewhere in the box you just put down — not what's in it, just that he packed it himself, didn't trust anyone else with it. You feel church, a Sunday feeling that lives in the shoulders more than the mind. You feel a beer on a porch with somebody, nothing stronger, never needed to be. You feel the dimples pull at your own face without your permission, an old habit of his even at rest, even alone in an empty room, like his face never fully let go of being glad to see people.

Your leg is bouncing. You didn't start it. It's just going, knee jackhammering lightly against nothing, the tell of a nervous system that has been doing this since before you arrived and doesn't plan to stop for you.

You lift your hands — his hands, dry-knuckled, a callus along the side of the first finger from years of luggage handles and door latches — and you turn them over slowly in the flat morning light like you've never seen a hand do that before.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to the empty room, in a voice that isn't yours and is the only one you have. "Okay. Where am I."

Nobody answers. The keys are still in the door. You don't know yet how long you get to keep asking.