Wrong Man - part 1 (Patreon)

The charger won't take the card. That's the last normal thing, me stabbing the contactless reader on the Electrify America stand while the Bolt sits there at four percent and the screen says PROCESSING and then asks me to tap again. Hot for March. The asphalt's giving off that smell, tar and something sweet off the Sheetz dumpster around the side, and my lower back's doing the thing it's done since February, that low ache that never fully lets go, and I've got one hand pressed into it and the cable handle warm in the other, still warm from whoever charged before me, and I'm doing the math on whether there's time to use the bathroom inside before the session starts.

Then it tips. A white drop behind the eyes like standing up too fast, except I'm already standing, and a pull, like something with a grip on the back of my skull yanked once and let go.

And I'm wrong.

The cable's still in my hand and the hand is wrong. Big. Hair on the back of it and a band of pale skin at the wrist where a watch goes, and the knuckles are scabbed, and I drop the cable like it's hot. It clatters against the stand. I'm taller. The screen on the charger's lower than it was a second ago. There's no weight out front. Eight months of leaning back to balance a thing I lead with and now I lead with nothing and my own correction nearly puts me on the ground. I grab the charger stand. The legs under me are long and they don't answer right, there's a half second of lag in them, and the shoes are too big and there's room around my heel, and my pants are loose and low and wrong everywhere. And there's weight where there's never been weight, low, between my legs, a presence the loose fabric does nothing to hide, and when I shift my stance to keep from falling it shifts too and I freeze for a second. The smell coming off this body isn't mine. Sweat and a deodorant I'd never buy, and under it just him, a person-smell that's close and constant and not me.

Across the row, by my Bolt, a woman is sitting down on the curb very carefully.

Pregnant. Hand under the belly the way you learn to do it. My gray coat with the missing toggle. My face, slack and gray, mouth working. She's looking at her breasts, and then she looks up and finds me, finds this body I'm standing in, and something in my face that I have never seen from the outside goes hard and fast and awake.

"Aaron." It comes out of her in my voice, my own voice, except wrong, pitched and breathless and not mine to make anymore. She's gripping the curb. "Aaron, listen to me -"

I don't get the rest. A car comes off the access road too fast and cuts the corner into the lot, a gray Tahoe, mud up the sides, and it doesn't pull into a stall, it just stops, slewing a little, nose-in behind the chargers. Two men. The passenger's out before it's fully stopped, big through the shoulders, sweats, a face that isn't going to ask me anything. The driver takes longer, unhurried.

The woman on the curb, my body, my face, gets a breath into her and screams it. "RUN. Aaron, RUN, GO -"

I run.

I don't decide to. The body decides, or the part of me that's stopped arguing decides, and it's a disaster for about four steps. I run like the belly's still there. I run leaned back, careful, knees soft, the pregnant run, the waddle I've spent two months learning, and this body has none of that, it's all reach and power and it overshoots, my own stride throws me forward and I almost go down between two parked cars and catch myself on a Camry's mirror and the mirror folds in under my hand. Too strong. Everything's too much. I push off the Camry and the next steps are better, longer, the ground coming up fast, and somewhere behind me a man is yelling. I can hear the slap of him on the asphalt and it's closer than it should be.

He gets a hand on the jacket. I feel it, a tug at the shoulder, fingers in the fabric, and the old me would have gone down right there, but this body twists without asking and the jacket pulls half off one arm and I let it, I let it slide, and the weight of him goes past me as the cloth comes free in his fist and he stumbles a step on it. That buys me three yards. I take them. There's a cart corral and I put it between us, then a row of trucks, and I cut hard left toward the building where the cars are parked too tight for a big man to follow at speed and I'm not a big man, I keep forgetting, the body is, I'm just renting it.

Around the side of the Sheetz. The dumpster smell up close is a wall. There's a loading dock, a propped door, a kid in a polo on a milk crate with a vape, and I go past him close enough to take the vape cloud in the face and it tastes like blue raspberry and I'm through the propped door into a back hall that smells like floor cleaner and fried potatoes, and I don't stop, past a mop sink, past a guy carrying a tray of taquitos who says hey, hey man, you can't, and out through the swing door into the store, and it's bright and cold and there's a woman at the coffee island doing her creamer and an old guy reading the scratch-offs through the glass and none of them so much as turn. I make myself slow down for the length of an aisle, walk, just a big sweaty man buying nothing, past the registers, the bell on the door, into the front lot where the gas pumps are, and I cut between a box truck and a minivan and crouch.

My heart is going in a way I don't recognize. Lower, heavier, a big slow slam instead of the quick flutter I've had since the second trimester. The breath's deeper too, more of it, the chest doing more work with less panic in it, the body is calmer than I am, that it's built for this and I'm just along.

I look down at myself crouched there. The pants have ridden down and there's a stripe of stomach showing, flat, a line of hair down the middle of it I have to look at twice. The thighs are thick and hard and there's no give to them when I press a thumb in, none of the softness I'd gotten used to seeing, and when I rock back on my heels the weight between my legs settles against the seam of the pants and I shift again, automatically, the way you'd shift off a stone in your shoe, and there's no shifting it. It's mine now. I'm going to have to stop flinching every time I notice it and I can already tell that's going to take longer than I have.

My hands. The scabbed knuckles, and a ring of paler skin on the left ring finger where something used to be and isn't. There's a phone in my back pocket and I dig it out and it's not my phone, it's a black slab in a cracked case, locked, and I don't have the code, except a six-digit string floats up out of nowhere, an XSync neural implant, like mine, and my thumb enters the code before I've read it and the phone opens. That's when I understand it isn't only the body I got handed.

A text is already sitting there. From my own number.

its me. dont talk to anyone dont go to a cop. that face owes people and now you got it. you saw them. go to charlie. 4412 Hollow Oak unit B. get the tablet i left there, the black one, dont let her keep it. i cant move in this thing and i cant pull the money without the tablet and you cant either. you want this fixed you do exactly this.

Then, a second one, fast, like he typed it after, like he made himself type it.

and whatever you think of me. there's a kid in here now. its on your clock too. so go.

I read it twice. The taquito guy is at the front window of the Sheetz, shading his eyes, looking out at the lot. Somewhere on the other side of the building the Tahoe's engine is still running, I can hear it idling rough, and I think about my body sitting on that curb, the careful hand under the belly, and I think about the men who didn't come for her, who came for me, for this, for the face I'm wearing now, and how they have no reason to touch her and the only thing they want is me.

I put the phone away. My back doesn't hurt. I'm crouched between a box truck and a Honda with a baby-on-board sticker faded almost to nothing. Two months of that ache and it's just gone, somebody else's spine, and I hate how much my shoulders have dropped without it.

A door slams on the far side of the building. The idle drops as the Tahoe gets into gear.

I go the other way, low, between the cars, out past the air pump and the propane cage, toward the chain-link at the edge of the lot and the gap in it the local kids have clearly been using for years, and I think, with no plan attached to it, just a flat fact I'm carrying now: 4412 Hollow Oak. Charlie. The tablet. And whatever's in my body on that curb, however careful that hand was under it, it's on his clock and it's on mine, and I'm running toward a stranger's apartment in a stranger's skin to keep it breathing.

The gap in the fence is too small for these shoulders. Of course it is. I turn sideways and force my way through, the chain-link biting the back of this neck and snagging the shirt, and on the far side I stand up in somebody's back easement, no jacket, the thug's got the jacket, and I start walking like a man who lives here.

There's a wallet in the front pocket. I get it out walking, because I have to know, and the license is under the cracked plastic window, and the face on it is the face I've got now, a little younger, a little less tired, half a smile like he couldn't be bothered to do the whole one. Aaron Petrakis. Thirty-four. An address on the other side of the river that I'm never going to see. Forty bucks behind the cards, a punch card for a barbershop with eight of ten punched, a photo strip folded behind everything, the kind you get in a booth, and it's him and a blonde, four frames, her laughing in two of them and him only in the last one, late, like she got it out of him. I look at that one too long. Charlie, I think. A car slows on the cross street and I put the wallet away and keep my head down and my pace even and the car goes on.

Aaron Petrakis. I say it in his voice, under my breath, just to hear how wrong it sounds in my mouth. It doesn't sound wrong at all. The name comes out easy and the body knows the way before I've read the map, and the only thing in the world that's still mine is sitting on a curb across town with a stranger's hands and a baby that's running out of clock.

The phone wants to give me directions and I almost let it, then don't, because it's his phone and his phone is the thing they'd be pulling if they could, so I look at the map once, hard, the way you memorize a thing you're not allowed to keep, and then I shut it off and put it in the front pocket with the wallet and walk on memory. Hollow Oak's maybe two miles. Used to be a walk that meant something. Two miles while eight months pregnant is a project, a thing you plan around bathrooms, and I keep bracing for it, the ache, the waddle, the stops, and it doesn't come. The stride just eats the distance. I cross against a light without checking because the legs are already across. A man coming the other way with a leaf blower on his back lifts his chin at me, the nod men do, and I'm slow giving it back, half a beat behind, and he's past before I land it. I'm going to have to get faster at that.

It's the small stuff that's going to get me killed. The nod. The way I hold the phone. Whether Aaron Petrakis says hey to a guy with a leaf blower or doesn't. I don't know one thing about him that the firmware doesn't hand me cold and late, and the firmware doesn't know the nod, and Charlie's going to know the nod, Charlie's going to know all of it.

A school lets out somewhere close, I can hear it, that high wash of kids, and a crossing guard's whistle, and I keep to the side streets where the only people out are landscapers and a woman power-washing a driveway who doesn't look up. The sun's straight down and the shirt's stuck to this back and the sweat smells like him, like Glacier and the person underneath it, and I've stopped flinching at the weight between my legs, more or less, which I notice and then wish I hadn't.

4412 Hollow Oak. Unit B. Third pot on the landing. I keep walking.

Part two is available here.