Russell Keahi

The site loads slow on a Sunday that has decided to be nothing. You have scrolled through everything there is to scroll through twice. You know the shape of this fascination the way you know your own front teeth — it has been with you since you were a kid watching a body-swap movie and feeling something click into place that never clicked back out. Every story about waking up as someone else. Every thread at two in the morning asking would you, could you, who would you pick. You never thought it would be a page with a wheel on it and a price under the wheel. You pay anyway. You spin anyway, half-believing in nothing, which is its own kind of belief.

The wheel is still slowing down when the floor changes under you.

Concrete, not carpet. Bare feet, not whatever feet you had a second ago, because you didn't have feet a second ago, you had a chair and a screen and now you have weight, real weight, low and stocky and planted, and a warm sock in your hand pulled from a dryer drum still turning its last few rotations. A fluorescent tube buzzes above you like it's been doing it for years and will do it for years more. Somewhere above this room, upstairs, it is the middle of a bright day. Where you came from the evening was already giving up. You do not get a word of warning either way. You are just here, crouched, holding a sock.

The body you're in is shorter than you expected a body to be, compact through the middle in that soft way that isn't fat exactly, just forty-six years of sitting more than moving. Bald head cool under the fluorescent light. You reach up without meaning to and feel the smoothness of it, and that's the first touch, and that's the first flash: an electric razor buzzing over this same scalp in a bathroom mirror, done without looking, done a thousand times, done so long ago as a young man that going bald on purpose stopped being a decision and became just a Tuesday.

The sock in your hand gives you more. Not words — a feeling, folded tight, like the sock itself. Pairing by weight and color, matching a client's thin ankle socks to another client's thick wool ones in a basket that should never be mixed, the private satisfaction of getting it right every time. Mrs. Agbayani's socks, always the lavender ones. You feel his patience arrive before you feel anything else about him, patience worn into the muscle of him like a callus you can't see.

The t-shirt against your back — his, soft gray-blue cotton gone thin at the seams — gives you a whole morning. Not today's morning, some morning, maybe every morning: pulling it over his head in a room with a rusted tin roof ticking as the sun hits it, red dirt visible through the louvered window, the glare outside so white it makes the inside of the house look like dusk by comparison. His arms know this shirt. They've known it through a hundred loads just like this one, Sunday laundry, alone, nobody to fold for but himself, because the ex-wife took the folding-for-two with her when she left and he has never minded it as much as people expect him to mind it.

More comes, now that the door's open. A kitchen that isn't his — a client's kitchen, small, pill organizers lined up along the counter like a little city, seven days wide, and his hands — these hands, now, your hands — know the weight of each capsule before they know the name on the label. He is good at this work in the exact way nobody notices: quietly, completely, without performance. He likes the old women. He likes that they tell him the same stories twice and he never says so. He likes driving the long way to Kāne'ohe side because the ocean shows up on the left for about forty seconds and he has never once failed to look at it.

The scar through his eyebrow — your fingers find it without being told to, the way his fingers must find it twenty times a day — came from a fall off a bike at eleven years old, a day so unremarkable that the body remembers the pain in the eyebrow better than the day itself. No tattoos. No rings. A toothpick he isn't chewing right now because his hands are full of a dryer door and a sock, but you can feel the ghost of where one usually sits, back left of his mouth, worn into the habit like a missing tooth of its own.

He has money — more than this little house with its tin roof and red dirt yard would suggest, more than this careful, toothpick-chewing, laundry-folding life would ever announce. It sits somewhere behind him, untouched, unflaunted, the kind of money a careful man makes slow and never talks about. None of it is in this room. In this room there is a dryer, a basket, a sock, and you.

You pull the rest of the load free. It is warm in your arms in a way that feels like it belongs to somebody, even though it belongs to nobody now but you. The folding that follows surprises you — not planned, not willed, just his hands doing it, fast and square-cornered and sure, a competence so far beyond anything you walked in with that you understand, suddenly and completely, that you are a passenger here wearing a man who is very good at exactly this.

Then the folding stops, because you make it stop. You look down at the hands doing it.

They are not your hands. They have never been your hands. You turn one over anyway, slow, in the stuttering fluorescent light, and the scar in the eyebrow, and the bald head, and the whole small sturdy architecture of him is yours now the way nothing has ever been yours before — completely, and for no length of time you get to know.

You lift your eyes off the hand, into the empty basement, toward whatever's watching.

"Okay," you say, in his voice, like you're agreeing to something. "Okay."