Sanjay Malhotra

You are Isaiah Marquez for one more minute, and you spend it the way he'd spend it: standing in his kitchenette in high-desert Nevada, evening light going orange through a blind that never quite closes, one hand on the counter he leans on when the textbooks make his eyes ache. You are not him — you were never him, not really — but his body is a good one to be bored in, and that's the problem exactly. Twenty-three, a little soft in the middle from studying too much and moving too little, brown eyes that water when he's tired, which is always. Eight minutes ago you were somebody else — blond, tall, a cockpit smell still in the nose you no longer own — and coming down out of that into this felt like a demotion you didn't ask for. You didn't even unpack this one. Didn't look in his mirror. Just felt the smallness of the wanting come back, quiet and total, the thing that has nothing to do with need and everything to do with the fact that the wheel is sitting right there on the counter, glowing on a laptop screen you didn't bother to close. You know already, the way you always know, that you are going to spin it again. You don't examine that. You just open the tab.

You pay. You spin.

The rain finds you first — not falling on you, already on you, already soaked into a jacket that isn't Isaiah's, sleeves heavy with it, a hood pushed back off wet hair in one motion that isn't yours but that your new body is already halfway through finishing. Your face is tipped up into the water. Somewhere behind you, unseen, a board is still counting down a bus that is now one minute closer and will arrive to a man who no longer knows to look for it. Your legs are planted in runoff at the curb. Your left hand still remembers, for one more second, the shape of an umbrella it was gripping and has already decided not to open.

Then him. All of him, at once, the way it always comes — through what's touching you, which right now is everything, because he's soaked through and standing in it.

The umbrella in your hand: cheap, bought at a Ralphs two rainy seasons ago, a folding one with a bent rib that never sits right in its sleeve, and with it comes the memory of buying it — irritated, in line behind someone counting change, his daughter six months old at home and his wife texting *are you almost*. The jacket: his father's old rain shell, actually, handed down and taken in at the shoulders by a tailor near his office who does his suits and did this too as a favor, and there's a whole warm decade in that — his father teaching him to drive in weather like this, gripping the wheel too hard, both of them laughing about it after. The shirt against your back under the jacket, still dry where the jacket covered it: this morning, buttoning it in front of the bedroom mirror with the cuffs already turned back once because his wrists are short for off-the-rack sleeves, his wife half-asleep behind him telling him to eat something, the baby monitor crackling on the dresser. His hands did the buttons without him watching them — they always do — because his hands know this shirt, this order, top to bottom, cuffs last, the same as they know how to shake a hand a beat too firm on courthouse steps, the same as they know, without asking permission from the rest of him, how to find the edge of a thumbnail and worry it when a deposition runs long.

The ring: plain, warm even in the rain, and it brings her — not a whole story, just her laugh at something not funny, caught on a video he has and rewatches sometimes on bad nights, and the fact that he has never once, not one single time since, wanted to be anywhere else at the end of a Tuesday.

He is thirty-three and his knees are fine and his lower back is starting, faintly, to file complaints about the courthouse steps he takes two at a time out of habit. He is not a big man but he is a used one — runs when he can, which isn't enough, and knows it, and doesn't mind knowing it. The freckles across his nose are the first thing anyone says about him and the last thing he thinks about himself. He does not go to temple, has not in years, and does not miss it, and has never smoked, and drinks like a man who has somewhere to be in the morning even when he doesn't. He is worth more than his father ever imagined for him and has never once told his wife the number out loud, not because it's a secret, just because it never seemed like the thing that mattered when he said it.

And under all of it, at the bottom, plain as the rain still running down your — his — collar: he was happy three seconds ago. Standing here. Face up. Not because of anything. Just standing in it.

You look down. His hand — your hand, now, for as long as this lasts — is still curled where the umbrella was, fingers a little chewed at the nail same as they always are, a wet gold band catching the gray light.

You turn it over once, like you're checking it's real.

"Okay," you say, to no one, to the rain, to the board that reads 3 MIN behind you, "let's see how long you last."