Saul Rosenthal

You are lifeguarding a shift you have already lived once, in a chair too small for the boredom of it, and Jaylen Torres's shoulders are starting to peel from a Sunday you don't even remember, because the shoulders were his before they were yours. Eighteen years old, six-one, strong as a diving board, and you have been him for twenty-three hours and twelve minutes, and the pool is closed for cleaning and the desert light is doing that flat afternoon thing where nothing moves, and that is the whole problem. Nothing is happening. You spun for a lifeguard because a lifeguard sounded like summer and it is summer and it is also just a chair by water nobody is swimming in. Your phone — his phone — is in the lost-and-found bin where you left it charging, and you dig it out and open the page out of habit more than hunger, the wheel already spinning in your head before your thumb even finds it.

It lands on a man asleep on the other side of the country, which is not fair, the day not being over there yet being over here, but the wheel doesn't care what time it is where it puts you.

The breathing goes even before you have a name for it. Ragged, then not — one long pull of air that isn't yours and is immediately everything you have. The arm that was hanging off the mattress lifts on its own, not because you told it to, and folds in with the other one at the chest, a position this chest has apparently never once held in sleep, because something in the shoulders resists it for half a second before giving in. Streetlight — no, not streetlight, too orange, too low — comes through a gap in curtains that smell like a house that has had the same curtains a long time. You are on your back. You were not on your back a breath ago.

The room comes in through the skin before it comes in through anything else — a mattress with a give to it that speaks of a body that has slept on it for years pressing exactly this deep and no deeper, a ceiling fan somewhere clicking on its third setting, the specific late-day heat of a house in Texas in a month that hasn't let up yet. Your ear itches where the piercing sits, an old itch, healed and unbothered, and your hand — his hand — comes up without asking and touches it, and that's the first door: a barbershop chair, decades back, a dare from his brother-in-law, the tiny sting of it and how his first wife laughed so hard she had to sit down.

The wedding band is next. Your thumb finds it on the other hand out of the same unthinking habit that has apparently owned this hand for years — pick at the cuticle, touch the ring, pick again — and it opens wider than the ear did. Not one wedding. Two. The first one ending slow and then all at once, papers on a kitchen table in a house that isn't this one, a woman's voice going quiet instead of loud, which was somehow worse. Kids in the doorway pretending not to listen — three of them, a fourth memory of a fourth kid you're less sure is real, all of it moving too fast to count. Then the second wife, later, steadier, a laugh that comes easier, her hand finding this same ring finger in a diner booth before there was a ring on it at all.

The uniform isn't on him now — he's bare-armed in a T-shirt and shorts, face-down a second ago, on his back now — but the memory of the uniform comes anyway, riding in on the smell of the pillow, which still holds a little of the wool and the brass polish from the shift he came off six, maybe eight hours ago. Sleeve by sleeve: the jacket with the stiff stand collar going on over an undershirt already damp with Texas heat before the sun's even up past the water tower, the watch chain settling against his hip with a weight his hand checks without looking, the cap set by feel because the mirror in that house has a crack across it he's stopped seeing. Forty years of that motion. Whistle, chain, cap, the step box carried out to the platform before the first train's ever due. A body that knows the two-hundred-yard walk from the depot office to the platform in the dark better than it knows most people's names.

The hip complains, low and familiar, the old injury that never set right — something from a coupling accident decades back that the story of has been told so many times at family tables it has worn smooth, funnier now than it was then. Sixty-three years old and athletic anyway, out of stubbornness more than vanity, the gray coming in at the roots he shaves to the skin every ten days in a bathroom mirror that fogs from the shower before he's even in it. The dye job on top, flat and a little too even, a small vanity he'd deny if his wife brought it up, which she does, gently, often.

There is money in this, somewhere behind all of it — not a memory so much as a temperature, the ease of a man who has never had to think hard about a bill, whose worry, when it comes, is about people and not numbers. There is faith in it too: a candle lit on a Friday evening more times than not, a language of holidays that arrive with their own smell, brisket and wine and a prayer his grandfather's grandfather would recognize, said now half by rote and still meant.

You surface out of it with his gold tooth catching no light at all, because there is no light in this room to catch — the day is ending here while it was barely past noon where you were. You lift your hands off your chest, the ring hand and the other, and look at them the way he never once had reason to.

"I'm not asleep," you say, out loud, to the dark, in a voice with a small metal flash of a smile already in it that nobody's here to see.