Tyler Roanhorse

---

You have been nowhere for a long time. Nowhere is not dark and it is not cold; it is a corridor with no walls, and you have been standing in it since the night the beam took you apart in a lab in another state and never put you back. You do not remember your own name anymore. That went first, the way a phone number goes. What you kept is the wanting — the specific, animal wanting of a man who had a body once and understood, too late, what a bargain it was.

Then a machine somewhere in Houston opens the same door, and you feel the draft.

He is standing on a metal pad in a hangar-lit room. Grey T-shirt gone dark under the arms — it's June and the building has one working AC unit at the far end, and you can feel the humidity on his skin before you're in it, the way you can smell rain through a screen. Six foot four. Broad through the chest and shoulders in a way that isn't gym-shaped so much as inherited. Freckles scattered across his nose and cheekbones, and that's the thing you cannot stop looking at, because freckles are a child's feature and he is not a child, and something about them makes him look like a man who has been trusted his whole life and never once found out why.

He is a stranger. You want that understood. You did not choose him, you did not hunt him, you had no way to. He simply stood where the door was.

You learn him in the first ten seconds, the way you learn a car in the first block. The tattoo on the upper arm, half under the sleeve — script, a name and a date, and the name is not his girlfriend's, you find that out later, and you will not say whose it is because it is the one thing he never brought up to anyone. The lanyard with two brass keys, hanging in the truck now. The wallet with a Mass card in it, soft-edged from riding against a hip for years. Twenty-two hundred in checking. Fifty-one thousand in a retirement account he set up at twenty-two because someone told him to and he did it, immediately, the way he does everything anyone tells him.

And the leg. God, the leg. He is standing perfectly still for the technicians, jaw set, chin up, doing the calm he thinks the room needs — and his right heel is going, going, going, a little jackhammer he isn't aware of, and you understand him completely. He is terrified. He said yes anyway. Somebody from the district put out a call for a volunteer for a demonstration, a body on a pad, sensors, nothing dangerous, and Tyler Roanhorse said sure, because that is what he does. He is twenty-four years old and he teaches sophomore biology and he raised his hand.

The far pad flares white.

The light crosses the room — not fast, not like lightning, more like a wave running the length of a pool — and it hits him in the chest and there is a sound you feel in the teeth you don't have yet, and then you are in.

He staggers a half step. That's him: the last thing his body does on its own is stumble.

And then you steady. Weight back on the heels, shoulders dropped, chin down a quarter inch — a stance that was never his, the stance you had in a body twenty years older and forty pounds heavier, and it comes out of you like a signature. Somebody by the console says *hey, whoa, you okay?* You feel the mouth. It's the strangest part, always: the inside of another man's mouth, the exact geography of his teeth, the way his tongue sits. You breathe. Air. Hangar air, dust and hot metal and someone's coffee.

The leg is still. That's the tell nobody in that room will ever notice and everybody who knows him will.

You look down at the hand. Big. Callused across the palm, which surprises you — a teacher's hand shouldn't be, but there's a house somewhere with unfinished work in it. You turn it over. Freckles on the back of it too, faint. Not yours. Never going to be anyone else's again.

Because there is no way back. You know that the way you know the corridor: you were in it and now you're not, and the door that opened does not open twice. He is not somewhere else. There is no somewhere else. There is only you, wearing him, for good, and a woman who will text at four o'clock asking if you're picking up dinner, and a classroom on Monday with thirty-one names you'll have to learn off a seating chart, and a Sunday obligation you will keep going to because it turns out you want to, which is its own kind of frightening.

You lift your eyes. Fluorescents. Two men in the room and one of them already reaching for a clipboard, writing down *subject reports mild disorientation*.

"I'm fine," you say, and it comes out in his voice, low and Texas-flat, and you hear it from the inside for the first time. "I'm good."

You'll get the vowels right by August.