Russell Granby

Four minutes is not very long to be anybody.

You know this now, sitting in Craig Dillenbeck's body on a Sunday morning that belongs to a city you didn't grow up in, in a condo you've never furnished, with blond hair falling into eyes that are not the ones you were born with. Craig is thirty, average, dimpled, a civil engineer with a decent couch and a decent view and absolutely nothing wrong with him that you can find in four minutes of being him. That's the problem. There's nothing to find. You spun the wheel to feel something arrive, some new weather in a new chest, and what you got was a nice young man with a mortgage and a gym membership, and already — four minutes in — the boredom is a physical thing, a kind of itch behind these borrowed eyes. You did not come this far, nine men deep, to sit still inside somebody comfortable. You open the laptop. The page loads the way it always loads, patient, the wheel sitting there like it's been waiting on you specifically. You do not think about what happens to Craig when you let go of him, because you have learned, nine times over, not to. You spin.

The ring light flickers.

You are leaning into it, mid-sentence, and the sentence does not finish the way it started — your mouth is already moving but you are only now arriving behind it, catching the back half of a word you didn't choose. There's a webcam, a monitor full of scrolling chat nobody is reading, a game controller heavy and strange under a hand that is suddenly, enormously not the hand you had a second ago. This hand is broad. Thick-fingered. A pale stripe at the base of the ring finger where the overhead light catches it. You are sitting, and the sitting is different — more weight low in the body, a solidity that Craig never had, shoulders set wider, a beard brushing collarbone when you turn your head to find the number four glowing green in the corner of the stream window. Four viewers. The least private audience in the world, and somehow it feels like no one is watching at all.

The flannel is the first thing. Not flannel — you correct that without meaning to, the fact arriving ahead of the word — a plaid short-sleeve, the kind he keeps six of because sizing is a hassle to shop for and he found a brand that fits and bought out the rack. The cotton is soft from washing, soft the particular way of a shirt owned longer than it should've been kept, and with the softness comes the morning: his hand — his, not yours, you are only riding the memory of it — buttoning this exact shirt in a bathroom with a fogged mirror, going slow over the belly because the buttons there pull if you rush them, a small practiced patience, no resentment in it, just a man dressing a body he has stopped arguing with. Russell Granby. The name comes with the shirt the way his address came with nothing at all — some things arrive loud, some things you have to go looking for.

The chair under him is a gaming chair bought during a bad stretch two years back, when the apartment got too quiet after Diane took the dog and most of the furniture and, more than either of those, the particular noise of someone else existing in the next room. The divorce had been almost polite. That was the worst part. No one had done anything unforgivable; they had just stopped being for each other, which is a harder thing to recover from than betrayal because there's no one to be angry at. He drinks more now than he used to, something he knows and doesn't examine, bourbon mostly, alone, with the TV on for company rather than content. He quit smoking the year his father died, traded one hand-habit for another, and the knuckles crack now instead, a tic that lives in him below conscious thought — you feel the urge rise in these fingers even now, unbidden, old.

The headset is warm against his ears, worn in. His job is at a bench twelve miles from here with an oscilloscope and a soldering iron and a kind of exacting quiet he's good at and mostly likes, work that rewards a mind that wants things to resolve cleanly, which is maybe why faith sits in him the way it does — not showy, just load-bearing, a Sunday-morning habit skipped today for this instead, a livestream some younger coworker talked him into trying, half as a joke, half out of a loneliness he would never phrase that way to anyone. Four viewers. He'd been proud of four viewers, in the small, undefended way of a man fifty-two years old doing something new and bad at it on purpose.

The mouse under his other hand remembers nothing in particular — new peripheral, still learning its weight — but the beard against his own forearm when he leans forward is a decade of mornings, trimming it close at the jaw and letting it run long and gray-shot down over the chest, the one vanity he's kept since the divorce, something Diane used to call his badger coat, fondly, back when fond was still available between them. The freckles across his nose you cannot feel, only know are there, the way you know the room: beige walls, a window behind him going bright with afternoon he can't see because the ring light is in the way, cables underfoot, a desktop tower blinking blue in the corner like something patient.

You look at the hand on the mouse. Thick, broad-knuckled, a white band of untanned skin where a ring sat for years and doesn't anymore. You turn it over, slow, the way you have done nine times before in nine other hands, and it is somehow never not strange — the weight of a stranger's palm arriving in your own attention like a bell struck once.

You lift your eyes to the lens. Chat is still scrolling, nobody typing anything that matters, four viewers who will never know what they almost watched happen live.

"Didn't think this one would take," you say, in his voice, which is slower now, careful, finding its new footing — and you don't know yet if that's a joke or a confession, and neither, this time, do you.