Rohan Deshmukh

The Maine kitchen is dark, and I am standing in it holding a fork over a plate I did not finish. Walter Pelletier's knees ache from the route. Every night he takes the stairs at the Harbor Street building two at a time, and the left one pays him back by morning. The beauty mark on his cheek itches when I frown. I am done with him. I was Samer Haddad six spins ago, a prep cook in Chicago with stubble and a bad back and a friend who called him at odd hours. On the call I stole from that life, the friend was crying. His name was Rohan, he was eighteen, and he said he didn't know what he was doing. I said it would be fine. I have had a thousand bodies and nobody has ever asked me anything. The phone is on the counter. The wheel is open on the screen and I press it.

Nothing travels. Walter's kitchen is gone and there is a weight under me, soft and wide. My cheek is in cotton that smells of sleep. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across the sheets. My breath is ragged, caught in the wet of the pillow, and then it is even in one pull. My arm is hanging off the mattress. I draw it up. I roll onto my back and my hands fold themselves on my chest, and I did not choose that.

The sheet is under my fingers, and with it comes a night in a car outside a pharmacy. Samer is in the passenger seat. Rohan is the one driving. He is sixteen and crying about a girl, and Samer tells him in Arabic-accented English that it passes. It does not feel like my memory. It feels like gratitude, warm and embarrassed.

The shirt is old cotton, soft at the collar. It gives me the morning he put it on, one arm and then the other. He pulled it over his bald head and felt the cool of his scalp. He had shaved that morning, and his jaw still stung under the water. His mother had told him it made him look older. He has a girlfriend, Meera, who laughs when he rubs his head like a lamp. Her laugh comes up out of the cotton, small and bright.

I crack my knuckles without asking my hands. The sound is his. The pop runs up my wrist. Under it I find a student's calluses from laptop edges and a backpack strap, and a weight in the chest and belly that is not Walter's muscle. It is an easy, heavy softness. My thumb finds the eyebrow, where the scar splits the hair. A fall from a bike, a driveway, his father laughing and then not. There is $40,000 in an account he has never touched. He is saving it for something he can't name yet. He doesn't drink and never smoked. Nobody prays in this house.

The room smells of old coffee and charging cables. Somewhere under the bed is the rest of his life, and the floor is cold when my foot slides toward it.

I lift my hand into the streetlight. It is brown, broad, and soft across the palm. I turn it over. The knuckles are still warm from the crack. I look up, and I say it to whoever is there.

"Hey, Rohan. It's me. Samer says it passes."

I don't know how long this one lasts.