Terrell Boykin

You are standing in Jamal Fenwick's body in a hotel corridor in Miami, and the cart handle is warm under his palm. Beat one is this: the cart has a bad wheel. For forty minutes you have pushed it down the long carpet and it pulls left, always left, and you have felt that pull in his shoulder and his good, strong forearm. He is twenty-three. His body is a clean machine, and you have worn it for less than a minute of your own sense of time. It does everything you ask. A room's worth of towels, six feet of height, the quiet hum of a body that was never tired.

It is not enough, and you know exactly why. Behind door 412 a woman's voice said thank you in Spanish, and he, Jamal, would have known what to say back. You stood there holding a stack of sheets, with your mouth shaped around nothing, because his language is not handed to you. You took his body and nothing else. You are tired of being a stranger inside a man who is fluent in his own life. So you let go of the cart. The wheel keeps pulling left even without you.

Then the wheel turns, and the corridor is gone.

You are standing at a counter. The room is small and the light from the window is flat and gray. Your weight is different, lower, heavier, settled into the hips and thighs. Your right leg is bouncing, a fast small tremor from the ball of the foot, and you did not start it. Your hands are over a row of plastic organizers in pale blues and yellows, one pill held between two fingers. The kitchen smells of old coffee, dish soap, and something sweet and medicinal. A moment ago you were halfway through a motion. Now you are.

The pill goes into the wrong slot. Your hand does it, and you feel the error before you see it. You pluck it out. You do it again slowly, Thursday, evening, correct. Then ten more, each one checked, a small hard look at every compartment, though your hands know this work. They want to run. You make them walk.

The strap of the bag bites across your collarbone. When your fingers brush the clipboard in its side pocket, a flash comes up that is his and not yours: a woman at a bus shelter, rain, her umbrella tipped toward him, and the particular ache of watching her not turn around. It is a year old and it still sits under his ribs like a swallowed stone. You did not ask. It is gone.

The hoodie is soft at the cuffs, worn thin at the elbows. Your thumb finds the frayed place and he is there at dawn, pulling it over his head in a cold rowhouse bedroom, the zipper stuck, the first sun coming down the block and lighting the white marble steps worn hollow by a century of feet. He sits on them to tie his shoes every morning. He likes that the stone dips to fit him. He had the scrubs on already, the pants a size up because the smaller ones pinched, and he tugged the shirt down over his belly with a small private sigh. Then the belt, the khaki one, cinched a notch looser than last month. Then the earrings, one at a time, the small one in his left lobe first because it is always the stubborn one, and the ring in his nose with a tiny bright pinch, done by touch, no mirror.

You flex your hand against the counter, and the cold laminate gives you the client. Mrs. Arlene, the pills, the way she grips his wrist at the door and says you're my good boy. He is not hers, but he lets her. He sings under his breath when he works. Your mouth is already shaped for it.

You feel the money, too, without anyone handing it over: the thin, constant arithmetic in his chest. Rent, the bus pass, a card with eleven dollars on it. A week of work that never comes out ahead. You feel the scratch of the moustache against your upper lip when you swallow, and his big night once a month, the laughter, his cousin's apartment, the floor tilting kindly.

The freckles you cannot feel. But the way his cheeks warm when someone looks at them, you can.

You lift your hands off the counter and turn them over. They are broad, soft in the palm, steady. They are not yours. You close them, open them, and the leg keeps bouncing.

You look up, toward the window, the brick street, the gray day.

"Okay," you say, in a voice lower than you expected. "Okay. Let's see."

Somewhere behind the word, already, the wanting is waiting to see how long he lasts.