Zain Abbasi

The last thing I did as Marcus was stand in an empty classroom and lie to myself about why I was leaving.

The kids had gone. I'd had them for six hours and I'd given them nothing — I couldn't, I didn't know the material, I didn't know their names, I didn't know which of them needed watching. Some of it came to me eventually. A boy's name arrived in the middle of fourth period, out of nowhere, correct, and I still couldn't have told you a single thing about him. That's how it comes. Useless pieces, out of order, hours after you needed them.

They worked me out by second period anyway. Children always do. By the afternoon there was a particular quiet in that room, the kind where thirty people have privately decided something about you and are being polite about it.

He'd built something with them. A year of it, probably. I spent it in a day.

I told myself I was leaving because teaching was hard. That's the lie. I was leaving because I'd have had to go back tomorrow and be worse at it, and because there was a wheel on his laptop and it cost nothing.

I opened it and clicked and didn't look at the room again.

---

I came in kneeling.

Carpet under my shins, heels under me, hands resting palms-up on my thighs. A lamp on. Somebody had knelt down here on purpose about ninety seconds before I arrived, and I got here in the middle of it, and I said sorry out loud to a ceiling in a city I'd never been to.

Then I did the routine. Three days and I have a routine. Found the mirror, pulled the shirt off, and there was nothing there. Fingers went round my own arm and overlapped. Five foot five, so the whole room came up to meet me.

*Hm. So they're not all muscular.*

I laughed at him. I want that on the record because of everything after.

---

The alarm was for six and I was awake before it, so I lay in the dark and went through his phone.

That's the fastest way in, and it's the only way that's reliable. The rest of it — his own memory, whatever's left of him in here — comes in like weather. You can't ask it anything.

His phone was two generations old with a crack across the corner and no passcode worth the name. There was nothing from yesterday. Nothing from the day before either. A group chat from a class he'd taken in the spring that went quiet in May. A delivery app he'd opened eleven times in a week and ordered from twice. A balance I looked at once and closed and then opened again to make sure I'd read the minus sign right.

Nobody was going to notice he'd gone strange. That's the thing I keep coming back to about that morning. In Los Angeles I had a girlfriend shouting at me by ten to four. In Houston there were a hundred and thirty children who could tell in an hour. Here I could have sat on that floor for a week.

---

He goes to a community college on Spring Garden and works Tuesday and Thursday nights at a pharmacy counter, and I knew both of those before I found the evidence for either. That's how it works now. I got on the right bus without checking. I got off at the right stop. My hand went into the correct pocket for the card.

And on that bus I found out what his body actually is.

It's cold. That's the first thing. Skinny is cold — I'd never known that. I have been in bodies that hold their own heat and I assumed that was just what November feels like to everyone. He had a coat that wasn't enough and he knew it wasn't enough and he wore it anyway.

It's also tired in a way that isn't about sleep. He'd had a banana. That was the whole morning. I ate at eleven like a normal person and felt the body actually turn on — like a room where somebody finally hit the breaker — and I understood that he does this constantly, that hungry is the baseline and eating is the deviation, and that he has been running his whole life about four hundred short of it.

And the hands don't move. That's the part I still think about. I sat in a lecture on Tuesday morning with my mind going like a wasp in a jar and I watched his hands rest on the desk, completely still, the entire time. He trained that. I know he trained it the way I know the bus — it arrived without a story attached, just the fact and the certainty, and no way to ask why. Somebody at some point made him understand that a boy who looks like him being restless in a room reads differently than a boy who doesn't. So he learned to be still. Now the stillness is just how he is and the inside of him is a riot nobody will ever see.

I have been walking around in bodies for three days looking for a face that gets looked at.

He's got one. Not the way I meant. He's got a cleft chin and a jaw and a shag of dark hair he cuts himself, and nobody in that lecture hall was going to call him handsome, and every one of them would recognise him in a year. The last two were beautiful and I could not describe either of them to you now. This kid has a face you'd remember.

---

An old woman came into the pharmacy for her husband's prescription and I knew her name before she said it.

Not remembered. *Knew* — the way you know a word. She called me beta and I called her it back without deciding to, and neither of us made anything of it, and I stood there holding a paper bag with somebody else's warmth in my chest for a person I have never met.

That was the only one all day who talked to him like they knew him.

I don't know her husband's name. I don't know what he's sick with. I don't know if this kid has a father or where he went. The pieces that come don't come in any order and none of them are the ones you'd choose. You get the bus route and the old woman's name and the exact place under the bed. You don't get the reasons.

---

I got home at ten and I couldn't do it.

The mirror was there. The phone was there, cracked, six percent, plugged in by the bed. Every other night the answer to a bad day has been the wheel. Los Angeles was a bad day and I spun. Houston was a bad day and I spun.

I sat on the end of his bed for about forty minutes and just didn't.

Then I got the rug out from under the bed — I knew where it was the way I knew the bus — and I knelt down on the floor where I'd arrived.

I don't believe anything. I want to be clear about that. I got it wrong at first, and then I didn't. It came up out of him and I let it, and somewhere in the middle I stopped steering, and it went on without me the way your own hand writes your own signature.

It took four minutes. It was the first thing in three days I'd done for one of them instead of with them.

Then I set his alarm for six and slept in his bed like it was mine, which it is, for now.