Reginald Maddox

The night is nothing. That's the whole truth of it — you've scrolled past two hours of other people's dinners and other people's dogs, the blue light doing that thing to your eyes where the room stops existing, and you land, the way you always eventually land, on the thing you've wanted since you were a kid watching a man turn into his own father in a bathroom mirror on basic cable. Body swap. Possession. The question under the question: what would it be like to not be the one steering. You have wanted this for so long the wanting has gone quiet, background, a hum. You did not think it would ever be a thing you could buy.

The site is ugly in a way that feels honest. A wheel, a price, a button. You tell yourself you're not really going to. Then you do.

There is no sensation of crossing. There is only the fact of arrival: a mattress under you that is not a mattress you own, a smell of fabric softener and something staler beneath it, an arm — yours now, only now — hanging off the edge into cooler air. The breath that was ragged a half-second ago goes even, obedient, like a held note finally let go. You feel the arm draw itself up without your asking it to, feel the whole body roll onto its back and the hands come together at the chest, fingers lacing, a shape like a man laid out for viewing. You didn't do that. The body did that, arriving into itself, finding a posture it has never once chosen in fifty-three years of sleep.

Streetlight comes through a gap in curtains two shades of gray stacked on each other. Everyone in this house is asleep except you.

The wedding band is the first thing. Cold brass of a long ring against the second finger of the left hand, and it comes with a flash — not a memory exactly, more a weather system — standing at the front of a church in Germantown that smelled like candle wax and old hymnals, a woman named Yvonne gripping his hands so hard the ring bit into his finger, and that bite of pain is the realized thing, the first physical fact he ever loved. Then it's gone, folded back under, leaving only the ring's weight, familiar as a tooth.

The sheets. Under the laced fingers, cotton gone soft from years of washing, and through it — a different bed, years back, a different woman's hair across the same pillow, a name you catch only as *Denise* before it slides away, something unfinished and never quite put down even now, a door he closed and still checks sometimes to see if it's really shut. That one comes with shame riding under it like a second heartbeat, his, not yours, and you let it pass through without grabbing at it.

Under your back, the mattress itself gives you the apartment before this house — a futon on a floor, him twenty-six and sure of nothing, working the line at a diner on Girard, forearms burned so many times the hairs stopped growing in patches. The tattoo on the left arm answers when you think of it: a woman's face in black and gray, her headscarf rendered in soft shadow, and touching it — no, *being* it, skin is skin — gives you a funeral in July, his mother in the box in her church hat, him twenty-two, getting inked three weeks later in a shop on South Street because he needed her somewhere he could still reach her. The anchor on the other forearm is smaller, dumber, something from the Navy years he half-regrets and half doesn't, salt air and a buddy named Teach who is dead now too.

The body under all of it: five-six, which still surprises you each time you notice the ceiling isn't as far as you expected, average weight carried low and solid through the gut the way fifty-three carries it, a left knee that has opinions about weather, forearms stronger than the rest of him from twenty years of hauling bus tubs and carrying two highchairs at once through a packed dining room. Hands that already know, before you ask them anything, how to fold a check presenter, how to steady a tray, how to find the seam in a stack of menus without looking. The crew cut is a ghost of pressure against a pillow that isn't there anymore. Freckles he never once thinks about, scattered like someone shook a pen at his face at birth and it stuck.

Clean-shaven — the morning of this exact day comes back sleeve by sleeve, not from anything you're touching now but close enough, bleeding in at the edges: him at the bathroom mirror at four in the afternoon, razor dragging slow under a chin gone soft with age, the black shirt already on the hook on the door, pressed by Yvonne though she complains every time she does it. One child, a daughter, seventeen, texting him a joke about a customer while he buttons his cuffs. The restaurant on Friday nights eats men like him alive and he loves it anyway, the host stand, the wait list, the way a full room sounds like something going right.

No drink in him ever, hasn't smoked in eleven years though his hand still sometimes wants the shape of a cigarette between two fingers, and when he's not thinking about his hands at all they find each other and crack the knuckles, one two three, a tic older than his marriage.

You feel all of it land in a body perfectly still, laced hands over a chest that isn't moving fast, in a dark room in the middle of a Tuesday night that is, somewhere outside this window, already the middle of a Tuesday morning for whoever you used to be.

You unlace the fingers. You hold the left hand up against the thin blue light, turn it, watch the ring catch what little there is to catch, knuckles a little swollen, a scar you didn't put there pale across one of them.

You bring your eyes up off the hand and into the dark where the lens would be if there were one, and you say, quiet, so as not to wake the woman beside you:

"Whose turn is it now."