Rohan Deshpande

You are standing in a kitchen in Phoenix, and the afternoon through the blinds is the color of weak tea. The body you have on is twenty-seven and soft in the middle. You've had it less than a minute. The beard itches under your thumb. You came back to the site with a mug of someone else's coffee going cold in your hand, and you know why, though you wouldn't say it aloud. He was a person who could only ever be this tall and this heavy. He couldn't reach anything. You wanted to stand in a doorway and have the doorway be small. So you pay, you spin, and the wheel clicks past a hundred and twenty-eight.

Then you are on the second rung of a ladder with a wrench in your right hand, and the Phoenix kitchen is gone without any seam. Your head is tipped up toward an open ceiling panel. Dust and cold air come down from it. Your arm is mid-turn on a bolt, and the motion is wrong. You feel it go wrong, a half-second slip in a rhythm that was never yours. You back the wrench off and do it again slowly, and it seats. Ten more times you check, each one, on a job that hasn't needed checking in years.

The weight arrives first. This is a tall body, a hundred and eighty-five centimeters of it, and the ladder is too short for him. His shoulders are tight and strong, and his calves are tired from the whole shift. The strap of the tool bag cuts across his collarbone. The jaw under your free hand is perfectly smooth, shaved that morning, and through the skin of your thumb you feel the thin ridge cutting his eyebrow.

The shirt against your back is damp and gives you the first thing. His hands do up the buttons in a dark bedroom while a phone lights on the dresser. It's a message he doesn't answer, from a woman who left in the spring. He buttons slowly, then the cuffs, then reaches for the cargo pants folded over the chair. Each pocket has a place: flashlight right, keys left. The keys on your hip are a heavy bunch, and when they shift, a hallway opens. It's his first week on the job, a building manager with a lanyard saying *you'll learn the ones that stick*. He learned. He knows which door swells in August and which lock wants lifting before turning.

The wrench is warm. Under it comes his father's garage, the smell of coolant, a small brass lamp lit in the corner by his mother. The leather of the boots is cracked at the toe. His thumb goes to his mouth before you tell it to, and you taste metal and salt. He bites his nails, and the edges are ragged. It's the one thing in this body that is only nerves. The debt comes in behind it, a number that sits in him like a stone. He is underwater, and he does it anyway: gets up, shaves, buttons the shirt, does the job. He never drank, never smoked. Mostly he is tired and quietly decent.

Through the glass at the end of the hall, neon bleeds onto the wet tile, pink over the pale gold of the evening. His breath comes slow and even.

You step down. You look at your hands. They are brown and square, with calluses along the base of the fingers and chewed nails, and you turn them over once. Then you look up, at no one.

"Okay," you say. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."