Sean Lachlan Malick

You are sitting in Devin Ashby's body in a dark condo in Houston, and the chair under him is still warm from the man who actually paid for it. Three minutes in this skin and already you're bored of it — the streamer's whole life laid out like a set: ring light cold, monitors glowing standby-blue, a mic arm folded down like a dead bird. You spun for him because the card promised presence, an audience, a body people watch. Now you're sitting in his gaming chair at three in the morning his time, alone, nobody watching anything, and it turns out having a body people would watch isn't the same as having something to do with it. Devin's hands — broad, warm, an athlete's hands — rest on the desk and you don't want them. You want to feel that stoop again. Concrete under bare feet. You spin.

The bed comes up under you sideways.

You are face down, one arm gone dead where it hangs off the mattress, and the breath that was ragged a half-second ago levels out under you like something switching off a struggle. It's the middle of the night here too, but wrong — his night, not yours, hours ahead or behind, and the body under you is exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with the hour. You feel the arm lift itself, unbidden, and fold across a chest that's leaner than the one you just left, and you roll onto your back in a position this body has apparently never once used to sleep, and something in you that isn't quite yours settles at the strangeness of it and then stops minding.

Streetlight cuts a blade through a gap in heavy curtains. Somewhere outside, Brooklyn breathes: a truck downshifting two blocks off, a dog, nothing.

The sheet against bare arms gives you the first flash — not words, just temperature, cotton gone soft with washing, and underneath it a whole day arrives the way heat arrives off asphalt. Gantry crane groaning somewhere above and behind, a smell of diesel and harbor salt, gloves — those gloves, the leather ones with the frayed seam at the thumb — and the ache that lives permanently now in a nineteen-year-old's shoulders from swinging container locks since he was seventeen. Sean Malick. The name comes up out of his own hand closing once, reflexively, on nothing, the way it closes around a twist-lock a hundred times a shift.

You feel the migraine before you feel anything else about him — a old, familiar pressure behind the left eye, dulled now by sleep but present, present the way weather is present, something he has stopped mentioning to anyone because nobody on the dock wants to hear about it. Second one this week. He'd taken the nicotine pouch out from under his lip before bed, tucked the tin under the lamp, and that tin is right there on the nightstand giving you its own small flood: the taste of it, wintergreen going bitter at the end, the little ritual of tucking a fresh one in before a shift starts, hours before dawn, the crane lights coming on like something igniting.

The T-shirt against his back — thin, worn at the collar — gives you this morning, or the morning that was: him pulling it over his head one-armed, sitting on the edge of this same mattress, hungover just enough to be careful with his own movements, Saturday night's big one still sour in his mouth. He doesn't do it often — once or twice a month, if that, mostly with two guys from his shift, a bar near the pier that doesn't card too hard about the noise you make coming in stinking of the harbor. He'd stood outside this building afterward, on the wet stoop, sodium light orange on the steps, key missing the lock twice before it caught, laughing a little at himself, nobody around to see it.

The mattress under him gives you nothing dramatic — no marriage, no ex who still counts, no kid asleep down a hall. Just years of the same room, the same brownstone, a roommate's door shut down the hall, rent that eats more than it should of what the union local pays a nineteen-year-old skinny kid who took the job because his uncle got him on the list. Scraping by. He counts differently than most people his age — not what he wants, just what's left after the second week of the month, and whether the migraine days cost him hours.

You know this build from a different angle than most — you were, four spins ago, a line cook in a kitchen in Ohio, sweating over a flat-top with a body that ran soft in different places than this one runs lean, and that man, Kevin Truong's coworker, worked a counter three feet from a man who talks about Sean sometimes on his break. Small talk. A cousin of a cousin, a name that came up over cigarettes you didn't smoke because that body didn't. You left that kitchen two days and twelve hours ago. You know things about the edges of this life that this life doesn't know you know.

The body itself: skinny in a way that isn't delicate, tendon and forearm and not much else, six-one and built for reaching a locking pin above his head without a ladder. Nothing wrong with him that a day off wouldn't touch, except the headaches, which no day off touches. Brown eyes he's never once looked at long in a mirror. Hair he keeps meaning to cut and hasn't, because barbers cost money that a case of energy drinks doesn't.

You lift your — his — hand up out of the dark and turn it in the thin blade of streetlight, and for a second the calluses catch the light like something scored into it on purpose.

"Three hours," you say to the empty room, to the curtains, to nobody, and you don't know yet if you mean until the alarm, or until the wheel again.