Entangled (caption) - part 2 (Patreon)

The wallet is at the bottom of the bag, under a tampon in a blue wrapper, a gas receipt for $41.20, and a ballpoint with the cap chewed white.

The little snap takes me three tries. Then her license is in my hand, and I read it under the green light the way you read a stop sign, all of it at once.

LEVI, DANIELLE. My last name, printed like it's nothing. 5-04. BRN. The birthdate is mine - month, day, year, not a near miss, mine. And the address. 31 Alder Street. I live at 31 Alder Street. Six years of rent. My name on the buzzer. My coffee maker on the counter and my storm door that never shuts all the way.

The girl in the photo has my eyebrows and the gap in her front teeth, dark hair longer than any hair I've ever grown, and she isn't smiling because nobody smiles at the DMV, but her face is built for smiling, and it's my face gone her way, no two ways about it.

I slide the license back into its slot corner-first, the way I found it. Her wallet has an order to it. The order is none of my business. My thumb knows the order anyway.

The crying quit about half an hour ago. Since then: cold, green light, the hum in the walls, the tears dried to a tight shiny mask I can feel every time I move my face, salt at the corner of my mouth. The phone went off in the bag at longer and longer intervals until it stopped going off, and I counted stair treads until counting stopped meaning anything, and the whole time the state, the condition, I don't have a better word, rode me at a frequency I can't tune out. A second pulse, lower and stronger than the heart one, and it has not taken a neutral position on a single thing all night.

Sitting still stopped being survivable about ten minutes ago. Rule one of anything broken: get somewhere with a lock and a light.

The parking lot is three rows behind the building and November-cold through two bare feet. I walk the rows pressing the fob, press and step, press and step, gravel grit getting me before the cold does, and then a chirp goes off to my left, two notes, and I know the chirp before I turn around. My car makes that exact chirp.

Gray Civic, 2016, same dent over the rear wheel. I put that dent in mine backing out of ShopRite in the rain, that exact crescent in that exact spot, and somebody put this one there too, her, probably, at her ShopRite, in her rain, probably saying the same word I said.

Two women in puffer coats walk a little dog along the fence line and clock me, man's flannel, bare legs, midnight, and something careful crosses both their faces, a whole polite conversation I'm not armed for.

And a man smoking by the dumpster corral watches me walk the rows, and I feel his attention on the backs of my thighs where the flannel stops, a physical thing, like weather, and the body runs a protocol I never had to have before tonight: keys already out, don't hurry, don't look back, doors locked before you're all the way in the seat. I run it. It works. It's older than I am in this skin.

The door thunk behind me is the best sound of the hour.

Her sunglasses are on the dash. A hairbrush in the console with her hair wound through it. A coffee cup in the holder with a lipstick print going dry, lip balm, more receipts.

The driver's seat is already where I would put it. The mirrors are already mine, already hers, already right. I sit down inside a car set up for this body and it fits the way a handshake fits, everything arriving where I reach for it, and I hate that more than anything so far tonight.

Under the seat, sandals. Little brown flip-flops. My hand goes straight to them without bending down, and my feet know how to grip the straps.

The engine turns over with the same hesitation mine has and catches on the second try. The check engine light is on. Mine's been on since March.

The seatbelt comes across and lands in the wrong country. It doesn't lay flat, it finds the middle of me and rides up onto my neck, and I have to hold it down with one hand for the first three blocks. Twenty-six years and I have never once thought about a seatbelt.

I drive home on the route I could drive blind. Right on Fenwick, left at the light. The pothole by the elementary school is still there and the front wheel drops into it, and I know the shape of the drop before it happens, and every seam in the road comes up through the seat and lands in the middle of me, and the body rides the bumps like they're on purpose. I drive like it's a chore. White knuckles at ten and two on a wheel that sits a different distance from my chest than any wheel I've ever held.

The corner where my dry cleaner is has a taqueria on it. Same sign frame, same narrow brick doorway. I look at it in the mirror after it's behind me. That's all I do about that.

At the light on Route 9 a guy in a delivery van looks over and I keep my eyes forward until it changes. The doors are locked. They've been locked the whole time.

31 Alder has the same porch light burning, same sage paint peeling off the rail in the same strips, same hedge somebody butchers every spring and never kills. The key I took for a mailbox key is the house key. It turns like it's been turned ten thousand times.

Inside it smells like a different life. Laundry and lemon and, under that, a candle burned down to a puddle in the dish by the door. Mine smells like coffee and the fryer from Gino's. Same rooms, though. Same everything, laid out identical, my whole house with the volume changed.

Her shoes are racked by the door, toes up, a dozen pairs. My shoe rack. There's a Switch docked where my Xbox sits. The couch is my couch with a throw folded over one arm and a blanket balled on the other end like something lives there.

Mail on the table by the door, a magazine and two envelopes, and the top envelope says LEVI, D., no way to tell which of us it's for, and standing there I honestly can't decide if that's funny.

In the kitchen the fridge hums the same note mine hums. A dental magnet. An appointment in her round handwriting on the little dry-erase pad. And under the magnet, a photo of her and a woman at a lake, the woman's arm around her, laughing at something out of frame, and the woman is my mother, her whole face, and I look at it for exactly as long as I can stand, which is not long.

The cupboard over the sink has her mugs in it and one of them is mine. White, heavy, chip out of the handle, OCEAN CITY in flaking letters. I bought that mug. Senior week, nineteen, I remember the stall and the heat and the exact six dollars. In this house it lives on the second shelf, the shelf that's easy from this height, mine lives on the top shelf, one shelf out of my reach now, and I stand with the counter at a new place against my hip and hold her mug until the porcelain warms, and put it back with the handle turned the way I found it.

It's not mine. It's exactly mine. There's no version of that sentence that comes out right.

The adrenaline from the whole night finally makes it through my kidneys. I stand in front of the toilet on pure muscle memory and nothing happens. There's nothing to aim. Twenty-six years of point-and-shoot and the apparatus just isn't there, and I stand like a man at a urinal in a dream until the obvious wins and I sit, too fast, more of a drop than a sit, and the seat is cold straight through me.

The going of it is different too. No arc, no pressure I know how to read, no sound I recognize as the sound of it starting, just warmth leaving in a rush that's over faster than I expect, and then it isn't, a second wave I didn't know to wait for, channeling through folds, still wet when I’m done. I get up. I've got the flannel most of the way back around me before some instinct, late, useless, says that wasn't finished right, and by then I'm already up and it's not worth going back for. I wash her hands with her soap that smells like her, hard, longer than the hands need, doing all of it the way you'd handle evidence.

Under the sink, a blue box. A whole row inside, lined up. Last week, he said. I push the box back flush with the wall.

The phone goes off in the bag on the counter and I jump clean out of her skin.

GENE, says the screen. you good?? call me.

The buzz isn't even done dying in the leather and my whole front has answered it, warmth spreading up under the flannel like something spilled, low in the belly first, then up. The body knows his name. It heard two syllables through leather and it answered like a dog hears a leash.

I don't answer. I carry the phone into the bedroom and put it face-down on the nightstand, which here is a crate of paperbacks with a candle stub and a hair tie on it, one paperback lying open face-down like it's being punished.

Her bed is made. Hospital corners. Soft sheets the color of shallow water, the same teal as the pillows. The room smells like her shampoo with something under it, faint, warm, male, him, in this bed, some night this week, and my shoulders drop half an inch at the smell, just settle, and I stand there hating it. Her whole body relaxing at the smell of a man I've never met, and me along for it.

The closet door is a mirror, and I've been keeping her face at the edges of my eyes for an hour, but there's no side-stepping it in her own bedroom.

I look.

My face gone her way. The jaw softer, the whole thing softer in places I was never soft, but the space between the front teeth is mine, and there's a little white scar over the left eyebrow that I put there falling off the Johnsons' porch rail at nine, and she has it, same eyebrow, and I touch it and the girl in the mirror touches it at the same instant, and her eyes, my eyes, are wet again.

Below the neck is a stranger. And I know her from the outside. I've spent my whole adult life looking at bodies like this one from out here, and now I'm on the inside of the looking, and looking does something to being. The flush is up her chest in the mirror, blotchy, darker than it feels, and the little hoops catch the lamp and flash, and my eyes do the flick, chest, face, chest, my eyes, my flick, the same half-second scan from the inside now, and I turn away from the mirror with my pulse going in two places and one of them giving instructions.

Okay. It's been over an hour. The sky outside has gone from black to the thin gray before real morning. Cold, panic, a car ride, a full walk-through of somebody else's house, and none of it made a dent. If anything it's worse. My hands aren't steady. My breath won't go all the way down.

I take the flannel off, my choice, this time, the first thing all night I chose to take off, and I fold it. I set it aside and lie down on top of the made bed. The bed is exactly her length and some map in me says I'm seven inches longer than this, and my feet keep reaching for a mattress edge further down than any edge in this room. The near pillow smells like shampoo. The far one, underneath, faintly like cologne. I use the near one.

First, the wrong way.

I do what I'd do. Flat hand, press, move, the whole program, friction and hurry, and my palm drags over the top of the pubic bone and meets nothing. Not a muffled nothing. A nothing like rubbing my elbow. The body doesn't even resent it. It just waits, the way you wait out a man who's misunderstood the question.

My equipment worked like a light switch. One input, one result. Now I'm standing where the switch was and there's a whole soundboard, no labels, and every knob on it is wired into my spine.

And I'm wet. I knew, in the abstract, sure, I knew the fact of it, but the fact is not this. My hand comes away slick to the knuckle, more of it than I imagined, warm, and it's not stopping, and my fingers move and there's a sound to it, a small quiet sound I will hear for the rest of my life, and I dry my hand on the sheet because I don't know where else a hand gets dried.

I go looking with one finger, careful, and everything down there is either nothing or too much. Too low and there's the opening itself, and my fingertip is barely in before something inside closes on it, grips, hard, a handshake from a hand I didn't know I had, and I pull back like I touched a stove. Later. Later for that.

Too high is just skin.

And then, off to the side of where I expected it, at the top, under a fold, there. And the difference between it and almost-it is the difference between a door and a wall.

Direct is wrong. First lesson. I go at it straight, the way I know, and it isn't nothing, it's too much, a zap that jerks my whole leg off the bed, and I lie there with my heart slamming over what two millimeters of finger just did to me. Around, not on. Through the hood of it, whatever the parts are called, with the flats of two fingers, because her nails are in the way, coral, real, and one of them catches on me, on her, a little stitch of pain with no business being here at all.

Slow. It wants slow. Second lesson, and the lesson offends me somewhere old and deep, because slow has never once been what my body asked for.

So: slow circles, light, and the sound starts up again and I let it, and the build, here's where everything I know quits on me. Mine climbs. Straight ramp, event, over, commercial break. This comes in like tide. Up, up, hold, and out. And when it goes out it takes everything with it, drops me to nothing but a heartbeat and sweat, and I lie there betrayed. Nothing in twenty-six years has taught me that pleasure can leave. It can leave. It walks out mid-sentence and you're at the beginning again, and the beginning is further back every time.

My other hand has been busy for a while without me. I catch it holding her breast, the weight of her pooled sideways now that I'm lying down, spilled toward my armpit, everything relocating when you're flat, the whole chest falling open, rising when I breathe in a way I can feel in my back teeth, and the hand isn't gripping. It learned the zap lesson on its own, apparently. It's barely touching, a thumb moving slow, and there's a wire from there to the middle of me. A real wire. I keep landing on it. Every time I land on it the grip low down clenches on nothing, and the nothing has an opinion now. The nothing is the loudest part of the whole body.

It's empty. Not numb. Not resting. Empty the way a stomach is empty, an ache with a shape to it, a hunger in a place I didn't used to have a place. I thought arousal was a surface event. It's a whole floor of a building I never knew the building had, and the floor is on, and the middle of the floor is open, and it wants.

I'm making sounds. I hear one come out of her mouth, high, small, bitten off at the end, and it mortifies me down to the bones of me, and also it does something, coming out. It feeds back. The body hears her own voice make that sound and the tide comes up another step, and I clap the back of my hand over my mouth, and my breath goes through my fingers in little puffs, cherry-sweet, and the body does not care that I'm embarrassed in here. It has never once cared who's in here.

The phone goes off on the crate.

Face-down, and it doesn't matter. The buzz walks through the wood into the mattress and up through the mattress into my hip, two shorts and a long, and the state falls off a cliff.

Gone. Mid-climb, gone, the way a sneeze dies when the phone rings, no, worse, a sneeze only dies to nothing, this drains, there's a draft where the heat was, and I lie there with my hand between her legs holding nothing, and the screen lights the ceiling blue for its ten seconds, GENE, and goes dark, and I could put my fist through the drywall.

Nobody ever told me it could do that. Why would anybody tell me. It's not my body. It leaves. You can be two steps from the top of the stairs and one buzz takes the stairs away, and you're a wet, furious person back at the bottom, and the only way back up is to start over, and starting over takes everything, and there's no guarantee. Apparently there's no guarantee of anything.

I reach over and turn the phone face-up. I don't decide to. The hand does it, and I know why, and I won't put the why in words except to say the buzz helps. The buzz helps and both of us in here know it.

Start over. Slower than slow. Her patience, borrowed, because mine ran out somewhere on the stairs. And on the third wave, or the fourth, I stop running diagnostics. I stop naming the parts, even the ones I don't have words for, especially those. The triage voice, the inventory voice, the guy in me going function test, confirm response, he just quits. There's nobody left to report to. There's the tide and the wire and the ache with the shape, and my legs have fallen open on their own, heels drawn up the sheet, and if the house were on fire they would stay open.

Sweat everywhere she puts it. Behind my knees. The dip of my collarbone. A line of it crawling down the channel between my breasts, slow, and I feel every inch of the crawl on new skin. Hair stuck to my neck. I leave it. The flannel is under my head now, smelling of detergent and his cologne, and the cologne helps, and I knew it would before it did, and I'm past pretending otherwise.

The emptiness gets louder than the shame eventually. One finger, mine, small, and the angle's all wrong from the start, I'm reaching from the wrong side of my own wrist, her arms and her hands and my wiring at cross purposes, and I fold the wrist around and let the body place it, and the body places it exactly, first try, like the whole first hour of fumbling was me arguing with the GPS.

Inside is the grip. Same clench from the stairwell, but around me now, from me, and it's strong, strong enough to genuinely surprise me, a ring of it pulling in a rhythm I am not setting, and the ache answers, the hunger and the feeding in the same room at last, and the tide stops going out.

It doesn't go out anymore.

It comes.

I find a place in there by accident, a rougher patch on the front wall, and touching it isn't the wire, it's the hunger itself, a sweet deep ache instead of a sharp one, and I go back to it and my back arches off the sheet without asking me first. Too deep once and there's a dull ache, wrong kind, a fist against a bruise, and I back out fast and come back to the place that wants me. A second finger, later, when the ache outweighs everything, and the stretch of it is a bright full feeling that turns the volume down on the rest of the world by half. Somewhere in here my hips start moving. Not mine, hers. A slow roll against my own hand, patient, and I let them drive. The bed has a sound now too, springs taking up the rhythm, and the sound helps, and the sound of me helps, and there's a top now. I can feel the top. I've felt it before tonight and had it snatched, so I keep everything small, little circles, breathing the way she breathes, fast, high, through the mouth, and my sounds are out of the bag entirely, no hand, her voice saying oh in a small voice, over and over, and I don't know if that's her word or my word coming out of her mouth, and it doesn't matter. Nothing matters except not thinking. Thinking whose hands. Thinking whose body. Thinking that somewhere, right now, somebody, don't. Don't. Up.

The phone goes off again.

Gene. It has to be him, and I don't look, and the buzz comes up through the crate and the mattress and into the bone of my hip, two shorts and a long, and the body runs to it. Everything the state had spread across all of me pours toward that buzz like water finding a drain. The tracks in her light up, him, this bed, his hand out palm-up on the covers, the whole evening she was walking into when I got dropped in the middle of it, and the screen is glowing on the crate, and from where my head is the words are upside down and an arm's length away and I read them anyway, not touching, like reading something that might go off.

not mad. love you. call me tomorrow.

The body does the rest without asking. I didn't pick it. I was two steps from the top under my own steam, and it doesn't matter what I want, the top is there, it's there, it takes me mid-protest.

Mine was a point. Point, pulse, done. This holds. This takes the whole floor of me and holds it, the grip going rhythmic around my own fingers, one long clench that climbs and climbs and breaks, and breaks, and keeps breaking, waves with weather of their own, my legs shaking so hard the mattress moves under them, heels drumming the sheet, sounds out of her mouth that two hands couldn't have stopped, and I'm not in the sentence anymore, I'm not anywhere. The mirror's across the room and I'm glad. Whatever her face is doing right now, nobody needs to see it. It holds longer than anything my body ever did and lets go in steps, and then aftershocks, plural, little grabs arriving on their own schedule like the tail of a quake, each one smaller, each one still all the way up my spine.

And between two of them, mid-grip, still going, the black seam. No road between. Just the cut.

I'm in my bed.

Dark. My dark. The streetlight stripe through the blinds that I've blinked at ten thousand mornings. My radiator ticking. My sheets, the cheap ones, the ones that pill up under your shoulder blades, rough against a flat chest, a wide chest, bone and flat and nothing, no weight, no give, mine, and I'm so glad of it I could lie here a year, except the ghost is still going. And under the ghost, my own body is worked up in a plain unfinished way I recognize from twenty-six years of the inside of it. I came back to a body somebody else got most of the way through.

The grip still pulsing in anatomy I don't have. The weight of a chest that isn't there. I sit up and feel it swing, and nothing swings. I roll onto my side and the ghost of the weight falls the other way. My hand is down my own shorts, gripping tightly. Of course it is. It made the trip mid-motion, and in the dark my hand is huge, my fingers thick and dry, and I can still feel her on them, and my heartbeat is my heartbeat, big, slow, one dull thud in the big drum of me, nothing fluttering anywhere, nothing giving instructions. I breathe and my chest just goes up and down. Plain. Nothing riding it.

I say my name out loud. Daniel. Low. Cracked. My voice, the whole basement of it, and I lie there listening to it not be hers.

The phone on my nightstand doesn't light up. Nobody's calling me. The house ticks around me, everything the size I left it, the doorways the height I left them, the floor the right distance from the bed for the feet I've got, the whole map matching the territory again, and I could cry a second time tonight, out of plain relief, in my own body, over the floor being where the floor is supposed to be.

And when I lift my hand to my face, my own bed, my own dark, I could swear she's still on it. Faint. Flowers and sugar, and under that, salt. All the way across, wherever across is.

I don't get up to wash it off.