Walter Sedlak

The trailer smells like pine sap and motor oil, and you are standing in it wearing a body that is not yours, three minutes into being Danny Reyes, and already restless. It should not be possible to be bored inside a 26-year-old logger with green eyes and a back that doesn't ache, but here you are: chainsaw dead in your hands, sawdust on your forearms, and a feeling like static behind the sternum that has nothing to do with him and everything to do with you. Six men deep now. You know this itch. It isn't about Danny — Danny is fine, Danny is strong, Danny's shoulders do things your last two bodies couldn't. It's that you always know, within minutes, whether a body is a place to live or just a place to visit, and something in you has already decided this one is a hallway. You set the saw down on the stump. You take out the phone that isn't yours, in a hand still learning its own calluses, and you open the page with the wheel on it, because it is Saturday and early and nobody is watching you not work.

You spin.

The chainsaw is gone. There is no weight in your hands at all — there is a body instead, long and thin and lying face-down, and you arrive already exhaling: a breath that was ragged going out and comes back even, like a held door finally closing all the way. The arm that was hanging off the mattress lifts by itself, not because you decided it, but because the shape of arriving folds it upward, and the hands come to rest on a chest that has almost no meat over the ribs. Streetlight through a gap in the curtain lies across the room like a dropped rope. You are on your back now, in sheets that don't smell like you yet, in a body that is fifty-eight years old and has never once in its life slept in this posture, hands folded like a man in a casket, and you understand before you understand anything else that you have skipped from one clock into a completely different one — his morning already halfway gone, thick with daylight behind the curtain, while the body you left was just starting its Saturday in the dark.

The shirt is what gives him to you first — black cotton, worn soft under your shoulder blades, and through it comes a hand that is not yours pulling it on this morning, one sleeve and then a pause, a hard cough into the elbow, acid climbing the back of a throat that has learned to live with it, a swallow, a grimace that is already old news to the man who owns it. Walter Sedlak. The name arrives with the shirt like a tag never cut out. Thirty years — no, more, he's lost count on purpose — of load-in and load-out, of standing at a fly rail in a blue wash of work light that turns everyone underneath it into a ghost, of counting sandbags in the dark by feel because the house lights are down and the actors are the only ones allowed to be seen. You feel his hands do it without asking: fingers finding the right line among forty lines, a memory in the tendons more than the mind. You feel how the reflux times itself to the second act, always, like clockwork, like it too has read the script.

Under the shirt, the body: skinny, sinewy, not a soft inch on him, a bald head that has been bald so long he doesn't register the cold air on it anymore. Both knees complain the same complaint they've had since a rigging job in '04 that he never told anyone hurt worse than he let on. His right hand wants, badly, without his permission, to go up to his mouth — an old argument between him and himself, decades of nails bitten to nothing backstage in the dark where no one could see him do it, quit smoking eleven years ago and moved the whole anxious engine of himself into his teeth instead. You feel the pull of that habit now like gravity in the fingers.

The mattress under you gives up a marriage, unasked — eleven years, ended on nobody's cruelty, just two people who stopped reaching for each other in the dark, and the divorce is old enough now that it doesn't hurt so much as itch, a phantom weight on the left side of a bed he sleeps only in the middle of. No kids. A few beers at Easter and Christmas because the family expects it, church every few Sundays more out of habit and his mother's memory than belief, though something in him still means the Lord's Prayer when he says it. The graveyard shift explains the daylight leaking gold through the gap in the curtain — he came off a load-out somewhere around four in the morning, Main Street already dead and dark, the diner on the corner closed for good two years now, its sign half-lit and buzzing like it forgot to give up. This is his eleven a.m., his midnight, whatever you want to call the hour a man like him actually sleeps in.

Your eyes open — his eyes, brown, a little bloodshot with the wrong kind of tired — into a bedroom you have never stood in until nine seconds ago, streetlight gone gray and thin against actual daylight now, and you lift one hand up into that light and turn it: the nails bitten down close, a callus riding the base of each finger like a second knuckle, the tendons standing up thin along the back of it in a way Danny Reyes's hand never did.

"Huh," you say, out loud, to the empty room, in a voice that isn't rough yet but will be by tonight's show. "Didn't know I had this in me."