Sameer Adiga

The tow truck smells like other men's engines, and Gary Kowalski's knees ache from the seat's bad springs even at rest, even now, hours off shift, sitting alone in a kitchen he has decided is not really his. You have had him less than a minute and already you know: this is not the one. The freckles were the last body's, not this one's — Gary's are pale ones, sun-spots on white forearms, and you keep touching them like a tongue checking a missing tooth, comparing. Fifty-three years old and heavy in the gut, blond going gray, and something in the wanting that brought you back tonight is already impatient with him, the way you get impatient with a hotel room before you've even unpacked. Boredom, mostly, if you're honest, which you don't have to be. You open the laptop on his sticky table. The wheel is already loaded from last time, spinning cursor and all, like it knew you'd be back.

You spin.

There is no seam. One half-second you are thumbing the mouse in Gary's kitchen, blood pressure never a problem for that one, and the next you are upright on a couch you have never sat on, spine straight as a plumb line, a remote settling out of your hand onto the cushion's arm with a small foam sound. The television throws a white frame across the room and then cuts to something darker, and in the new light you feel a body arranged around you that is not thick like the last one — narrower through the chest, softer at the middle in that specific way that isn't fat so much as absence of anything else, long through the leg. One foot, sock only, rests on a coffee table crowded with mail and a phone charger cable and a little dish of change. A nipple piercing you did not put there presses cold through a navy T-shirt when you breathe in. The room around you is dark except for the screen, and somewhere outside it a Brooklyn street is wet and orange under sodium light, and it is deep night, the kind where even the trains sound apologetic.

The shirt is what gives you the first flash — not dramatic, just a hand, his hand, pulling it over his head that morning in a room with the blinds still down, sun already up outside though he didn't look. Sameer Adiga. The name arrives with the memory rather than before it, the way his mother says it, two syllables of exasperation, from a phone call he didn't return. He'd dressed like this most days without thinking about it: T-shirt, sweats, because after a double shift at the fab shop your body does not want denim against it, does not want a belt digging into anything. His hands, when you look through them, know things automatically — the drag and catch of a MIG gun, the practiced blindness behind a helmet, the way you lean your whole weight into a clamp without thinking, and under all of it a low ache in both shoulders that never fully goes away, that he has stopped mentioning to anyone because there is no one left to mention it to.

The couch itself gives you more — years of it, actually, the given-to-him secondhand of it, a coworker's uncle's, delivered up three flights by two men who complained the whole way and whom he tipped anyway because that's who he is, or was, before you. He remembers Sunday mornings on it, not this one, dressed for church in the one good shirt without a piercing showing through it, the ward smaller than it used to be, a bishop who calls him brother and means it, and Sameer sitting in the back pew doing the arithmetic in his head about the last time he prayed and meant it back. He gave up drinking at twenty-six, not for any single reason, more that it stopped agreeing with him and nobody made him keep at it. No cigarettes ever, not once, his father's warnings so thorough they took before he'd even wanted to try. He remembers, distantly, being at a work party where a woman he liked fine as a person put her hand on his knee and he'd had to find the words, again, for the thing he'd known about himself since he was a teenager and had stopped apologizing for by thirty: that wanting people that way was a door he simply didn't have, and it had cost him nothing he still misses.

The remote in his hand a moment ago — before it left — gives you the shape of tonight, or the night this was for him: home from a shift that ran long, the shop's last spark still ashing out somewhere behind him in his memory, standing under the ceiling fan of a fabrication floor with his mask shoved up, sweat cooling on a T-shirt that would be this one by morning if he doesn't change it, if he just falls asleep like this in front of the television the way he does more nights than he'd admit to his bishop. He'd been laughing, a minute ago, at something small and stupid on the screen. Now the laugh isn't there. He doesn't reach for it and doesn't know it's gone.

You look down. The hand at the end of the arm is longer-fingered than Gary's, the nails cleaner than you'd expect for a welder, a thin white scar across one knuckle you didn't put there and don't ask after. You turn it over once, like checking change for a counterfeit, then let it rest open on your knee.

"Right," you say, to the empty dark room, to nobody, in a voice that isn't quite settled into his yet. "Let's see what you're worth."