Wade Kessling

You are standing in a Manhattan apartment that isn't yours, in a body that isn't yours either, thirty-one seconds from not being Marcus Odell Fenwick anymore. The lease is his. The dimples in the mirror are his. You have worn him for less than a minute and already the wanting is back, that itch under the sternum that no amount of somebody else's good life ever quite reaches. He has a closet of clean shirts and a job with a schedule and an ex-something who texts him about splitting a storage unit, and none of it is interesting, because it is all still just a life, and you have never once wanted a life. You want the turning-over. You go to the laptop still open on the counter, the wheel already loaded from last time like a held breath, and you do not think of it as leaving him — Marcus — because you never think of any of them as anyone once you're done. You spin.

The gym noise arrives before the room does — plates clacking somewhere behind you, a fan rattling in a window unit — and you are gripping a barbell with your palms already chalked and cold and someone else's forearms are shaking two inches wider than they were a second ago, though you don't know that yet, you only know the bar is heavy and your teeth are together and a breath you didn't start is running out through your nose. Green light through a dusty skylight. A water bottle sweating somewhere below and behind. The rep finishes itself before you understand you're the one finishing it, and the bar goes back on the rack with a sound like a struck bell, and you are sitting.

The bench is a two-by-ten someone salvaged and bolted to pipe, and it holds him — holds you — the way it always does, exactly your weight, a groove worn into the wood you didn't know was shaped for you until you sat in it. The shirt against your back is thin cotton gone soft from a hundred washes and it comes up sleeve first: standing in front of a dresser this morning, dark still outside, the shirt catching on your goatee the way it always does because you never remember to duck your chin, and underneath that a whole closet of identical green shirts you buy six at a time because deciding is a waste of a morning. Your boots on the plywood floor bring the gravel road they usually stand on, a gate hanging a half-inch off true that you have meant to rehang for two years, a water tower on the horizon rusted the exact orange of an old penny. Barbed wire under a palm that doesn't sting anymore because it hasn't in twenty years.

The scar through your eyebrow throbs faintly with its own memory when your fingers graze it without meaning to — a colt, a gate latch, twenty-two years old and too proud to get stitches that night — and right behind it comes a wedding that isn't a wedding anymore, a woman's laugh in a kitchen that belonged to both of you and now belongs to neither, two kids who call this number on weekends and Christmas and sometimes just because, a phone on the nightstand you check first thing and last thing though you'd never say so. None of it bitter exactly. Just settled, like silt. Money in the bank that nobody who meets you would guess at, because you still drive the same truck and eat standing at the counter and the gym is a metal building with a rope and some iron, not a place with a smoothie counter, because what would be the point of that.

Your body — this body — is forty-three and built like something that works for a living and also, separately, works out: shoulders thick from throwing hay bales for two decades before hay bales were a machine's job, chest and arms thick from choosing, lately, to keep them that way, because a man alone on four hundred acres has time on his hands he didn't used to have. Something in the left knee complains on the stairs. Everything else is stronger than it has any right to be at your age, and you feel that — feel him — in the particular ease of the muscle letting down now that the set is over, blood loud in the forearms, palms raw-warm from the bar's knurling.

You look down at your hands. Rope-callused, bar-scraped, one knuckle permanently thick from a break that never got set right. Not Marcus's hands. Not any hands you were wearing an hour ago in any of the eight hundred and twenty-six men before him. You turn them over slow in the gym light, and the goatee moves when your mouth does, and you say, to no one, to the empty rack, in a voice with Texas worn all the way into it:

"Well, hell. Let's see what you got left in you today."