Wendell Thundercloud

Kevin Lum's apartment smells like the microwave dinner he didn't finish, and his phone is face-down on the counter because he already knows what's on it — a performance review, a manager's manager wanting "a word" tomorrow. Thirty-one years old, and this is the body you're standing in: soft in the middle, tired in the shoulders, a scar through the eyebrow you gave him and never asked for. It has been forty seconds since you became him and you are already sick of it, sick of the fluorescent kitchen light and the smallness of the life waiting on that phone screen. Chicago is going orange outside the window. You open the laptop instead of the review. The site loads the way it always does, patient, the wheel already spinning lazy on the homepage like it knew you'd be back before you did. You did not come here bored, exactly. You came here because you could, because Kevin Lum's problems are Kevin Lum's, and you have paid to never have to find out how they end. You spin.

The toothbrush is between your teeth and you are him already, no seam, no falling — just the taste of mint gone slightly metallic and a jaw that was mid-stroke on the left side and now, a beat later, without your telling it to, drifts to the right side instead, slower, working the back molars like it has done ten thousand nights before this one. Water runs into a basin gone grey at the drain. A hearing aid sits warm and small in your right ear, humming its faint electronic presence under the sound of the tap. You are heavier through the belly than Kevin ever was, sturdier through the forearm, and there is a weight hanging down your back and over your shoulders that takes you a second to place as hair — two long braids, still damp-cool at the ends from something, sink water maybe, brushing your chest through a thin grey T-shirt.

You rinse. Once, then again, the way he always does, spitting into water that has held forty years of exactly this. You stand the brush up bristles-first the way it has always stood.

The shirt is the first thing that opens him to you. It's soft, worn, and it comes with a morning — not this morning, some morning, all mornings folded into one — his own hands pulling it over his head in a bedroom with the blinds still down, his wife Renata already gone to the kitchen, the smell of her coffee finding him before she does. Wendell. The name arrives with the shirt, unbidden, the way his own name always arrives to him, without ceremony. Wendell Thundercloud, fifty-one years old, and the shirt remembers being pulled on over a body that aches a little in the lower back these days, that carries itself carefully down stairs it has walked ten thousand times.

The sink edge under your palms gives you the funeral home — not this evening's, but every evening's, folding into each other. Rows of chairs facing a casket, the particular held-breath quiet of a room built for other people's worst day. His hands, broad and sure, knowing without thinking how to arrange a collar, how to close a program into someone's cold fingers, how to speak just loud enough that his own ears, imperfect now, can hear himself do it kindly. He has laid out neighbors. He has laid out a boy from his own family, once, years back, and something in that memory arrives heavy and quick and he — you — has to breathe through it, has to let it recede like tide, because that is not a room you get to stay in right now.

The braids against your collarbones bring his mother's hands, braiding this same hair when he was young enough that his father was still alive to watch her do it. The ring on your left hand, plain gold, worn thin at one edge, brings Renata — twenty-two years of her, the wedding they had on her cousin's land upstate, the way she still reaches over in the car without looking, expecting his hand to already be there, and it always is. One child, grown now, a voice on the phone on Sundays. The tattoos on your forearms — tribal ink, done young, one of them a little regretted, most of them not — bring a friend now gone, a shop that closed, a summer that mattered more than it should have to a man who was twenty-six and thought he had time to figure out what all of it meant.

The tap running against your fingers brings tonight, plain and recent: dinner finished, dishes half done, Renata already reading in bed, the particular late-evening quiet of a rowhouse settling. He was not thinking about anything. That is the whole of what he was doing — not thinking, the toothbrush doing the thinking for him, the day already laid down and folded and put away like his clothes will be in a minute, his hand already lifting toward his own scalp the way it does without him noticing, an old unconscious comfort.

You look down. The hand doesn't move the way Kevin's would have. It's broader, sun-marked at the knuckle, a nose you can't see but can feel crooked in the mirror's edge, set that way since some accident that isn't in the shirt or the sink or the braids yet — some memory the objects haven't handed you and maybe never will. You turn the hand over once, watching water run off the fingers into the basin, watching a wedding ring catch the bathroom light.

"Renata," you say, to no one, just to hear it in his voice, out toward the hallway where she is not yet asking who he's talking to.