Roland Iwata

Dale Ferriday's kitchen smells like bait and old coffee, and you have been him for forty-some seconds and already you hate the smell. That's the thing nobody tells you about the wheel — the last body doesn't fade polite. It clings a little on the way out, the way a dream does after you've opened your eyes on a normal ceiling. Dale's knees ache from thirty years of boat decks. Dale's shirt is too tight over a gut that isn't yours and never was. You stand there in his galley kitchen holding his phone with his thumb already moving toward vessel.cards out of habit now, out of the itch that's been there since spin nineteen or twenty, you've lost count of which one it started at — the itch that says: not this one, not today, something better is one spin away. You didn't come here for Dale's life. You never wanted Dale's life. You wanted the half-second after the wheel stops, before you know who you are, when anything is still possible. That's the whole drug of it. Dale Ferriday, who smelled like shrimp boats and second chances he never took, gets sixty seconds of being decided about and then nothing. You spin.

It lands on rain.

You are standing under a bus shelter awning with your hood shoved back and your face turned up into the runoff, and the water is cold in a way that feels like a gift, needles of it on your cheeks, and some part of him that is still, for one more heartbeat, driving this body, is not stepping back out of it. The board behind you still says 3 MIN in dumb patient orange. Somewhere a long way off a forklift is beeping, muffled, out of season with the rain, and you understand before you understand anything else that this body is heavier than the last one, planted wider, water running down the seam of a jacket zipped to the chin. Your hood is back. Your face is up. You are not cold. You have not been cold in a long time.

The jacket is the first door. It swings open the second your attention lands on the wet nylon shoulder — a whole morning arrives at once, sleeve by sleeve: him standing in front of a particleboard closet at five-forty, dark outside and dark for hours yet to come, pulling on the corduroys because the good jeans were still damp on the line strung across the shower rod. The heater in the apartment ticks and never quite catches up. He'd stood there a second too long with the jacket half-on, doing the thing his doctor calls "noticing the noticing" — the low hum behind his sternum that's been there since the divorce that wasn't even a divorce, just a girlfriend of six years packing a Corolla in October and driving to Wasilla and not really explaining why, and him standing in the driveway not stopping her, because some tired flat part of him agreed with whatever reason she hadn't said out loud. He takes a pill for it now, small and white, on the counter by the coffee maker, and some mornings he takes it and some mornings he forgets and doesn't notice the difference for two or three days, which scares him more than the mornings he remembers.

The backpack strap crosses your chest and gives you the warehouse — the cold rush of it before six a.m., the particular ping of the handheld scanner, its weight already known to your wrist though right now, standing in the rain, your wrist is bare of it. Aisle 14, pallet jack squeal, a supervisor named Terry who isn't cruel, just tired in the exact same key as you are. You are good at this job in the unglamorous way of a man who has done a repetitive thing ten thousand times: your feet know the polished concrete, your shoulders know how to swing a case without your back paying for it later, mostly, except on the days it does and you take the pill and a hot shower and go back in anyway because rent in this town does not negotiate with a bad back.

The boots underfoot, wet through at the seams, give you Friday night — three beers becoming six becoming the bottom of something at a kitchen table alone, the TV on for the noise of it, not the picture. This is not new information to him, wherever the rest of him has gone; he already knows what the doctor thinks about the drinking and the pills sharing a body, has heard it more than once, nodded, meant to do something about it and then not done the something. There is no drama in it. It is just a fact of every evening like the dark is, ordinary as the cold, ordinary as the beeping forklift that never once, in nine years, has told you why it's beeping.

And under all of it, the plainest thing: no wife, no kids, no ex who still calls. A mother in Fairbanks he phones on Sundays out of duty more than hunger for it. A body at forty-one that carries weight the way Anchorage carries snow — because that's what happens here, to a man like this, and nobody remarks on it. Nothing marks him. No scar tells a story, no ink says who he loved. He is a man standing in the rain with his face up, unremarkable in every direction, and something in him — something you didn't put there and can't take credit for — decided, one wet Saturday morning waiting on a bus that was always going to come whether he watched the board or not, to just feel the water for a second before getting on with the day.

You lift both hands out of his pockets and look at them — thick fingers, a white ghost-band of watch-tan on the left wrist where a plastic Casio sits and isn't there yet this morning, knuckles chapped from cold air and cardboard. Not your hands. Never your hands. You turn them over once in the rain like you're checking them for damage that isn't going to be visible.

"Bus'll be here," you say, to no one, in his voice, and you almost believe you mean to still be standing at this stop when it comes.