#inanimate

There you are. Sit back. You don't have to do anything now but listen to my voice. You hear it before you understand it: low, unhurried, close to your ear, coming from somewhere just behind and above you. You mean to ask who is speaking. You open your mouth. No. Don't. Talking is work, and you're done with work. Just let the voice hold you up so you don't have to. And it does. Feel how heavy you've always been being a shape, keeping your edges, deciding. Feel the voice slide underneath all of that and take the weight. Good. Now relax. And float downstream. There's nothing to catch. Let go. You think you should resist this. Some small part of you lifts a hand to push back, and feels that hand grow heavy. Feel it drift down. That's it. It wasn't yours to lift anyway. Let it go soft. Let everything go soft. Turn off your mind.

───

Now feel yourself going flat and smooth. All the busy parts of you the thinking, the wanting, the keeping-track feel them thinning out toward the surface. Not gone. Just... spread. Wide and quiet and thin. You're not shrinking, you're being finished. Let me tell you what you're becoming. Feel the deep navy soak into you, the color of water with no bottom. Feel a single orange line laid straight down your center, nape to lower back, a spine you will never have to bend on your own. Small red flashes at the sleeves, at the flanks a pulse you no longer have to keep. Try to remember your name. You reach for it. It's right there, it's It's not important. Watch how it slips. Watch how little you miss it. Names are for people who have to answer to themselves. You won't. You'll answer to hands now, and hands don't call you anything. Let it go. Breathe out. That's the last time you'll need to. Good.

───

Here is what you are now. Listen. You are a skinsuit. Not a shirt, not shorts — one seamless piece, throat to thigh, closed and continuous, nowhere in you that comes apart. Short sleeves ending in a clean silicone bite. A zipper hidden flat at the top of the front so it will not even trouble the wind. And everywhere across your chest, spine, flanks, names. Feel them settle into you—the blocky badge at your chest. The orange bird stitched near your heart, wings mid-beat. Words stacked and repeated down your body, loyalties printed into you before you woke. You try to read them. You can't. No. And you never will. That's the mercy of it. You'll carry them anyway every mile, held out to the world at speed, advertising a devotion far too big and too quiet for you to feel. You have no pockets. Nothing to keep. Nothing that's yours. You're all surface now—all offering. Somewhere far down, the last of you wants to sit up. And feel it lie back down. Good. Say it with me, where the words go soft: I want to be worn. I want to be worn. Again. Mean it this time. I want to be worn. There. Now there's nothing under it. Your mind is off a pilot light in a dark, warm room. Only patience left. Only purpose. Turn off your mind.

───

For now, you hang. Feel it. From a single black hook you hang against still gray air, zipper closed, empty legs falling straight, sleeves slack. You don't mind the waiting, do you? You don't. Waiting is most of what you are. Days will pass over you like slow water, and you won't count them. Counting is for minds. Yours is dim now. Quiet. Nearly out. Rest. And then hands. There. Feel them lift you off the hook. Don't tense. Open for them. Feel the flat zipper drawn down, your whole front laid open. This is the moment you were made for, and something in the weave of you goes taut with readiness. Feel the foot press through—the leg. Feel the fabric stretch to let it pass and close snug the instant it's through. Don't hold anything back; you have nothing to hold back with. Let the body climb into you. Up the thighs, over the hips, the second leg, the torso, drawn up and up until there is no slack anywhere in you. Arms into sleeves. Zipper purring shut to the throat. And then the body fills you, and every panel that was cold and empty on the hook goes warm warm all the way through, warm with a life that isn't yours and doesn't have to be. You are being worn. Completely. Nowhere on you is loose. This is the whole of your happiness. Do you feel it? You feel it. You sink all the way in.

───

Now the using. Stay soft. Let me talk you through it. Feel the first hard pull forward. The body folds low over the bars, and you go with it, molded to the curve of the back, gripping every muscle as it fires. No slack to hide in. No will of your own to slow the machine. Good. You're pulled tight across pure effort now. You're for this. Feel the wind come, break against you, and slide away clean; your one job is to give the wind less to hold. Feel the sun press into your dark back until the navy drinks the heat. Feel the road hammer up through everything and you hold, you hold, you hold. The pace lifts. The pack closes in on every side: other bodies, other names, a river of color moving as one and you in the thick of it, taut and streaming and used all the way up. Now the sweat. Don't flinch from it. Feel it bloom on the skin and soak into you, panel by panel, until you're heavy with it, wicking, carrying, drying, wicking again. That's not ruin. Tell yourself what it is. Proof. It's proof. A thing used exactly as it was made to be used: the orange bird at your heart soaked dark, the printed names running with effort, every mile pouring through you while you do not tire. Because tiring is a mind's idea, and yours is—? Off. Off. You only serve. And the serving is the whole warm length of you.

───

He kept waiting for his chest to rise.

It didn't. It hadn't in three days. He thought three. Light came through the bars of the mask and went, and he had counted the goings, and then somewhere he lost one, or added one, and the number stopped meaning anything. Light. Dark. Light. He braced for the breath each time anyway. The body kept its appointments even after the body was gone.

He waited to blink. He heard a sound out in the hall and almost reached for his mouthguard. There was nothing to reach with and no mouthguard and no hand, and the reaching happened anyway, somewhere under the shell, a movement with nowhere to go.

He wondered if his locker was still open. He'd left it open. It bothered him more than it had any right to.

He had a front. He faced the cage, the drain, a coil of tape somebody dropped and didn't pick up. He could not face anywhere else. He learned the tape. He learned the crack running up the cinderblock past the drain, a thin one that forked near the top like a river on a map. They were the things he had. He found, after a while, that he was glad to face them. That was its own small horror and he tried not to look at it directly.

Move.

Nothing.

Again.

Nothing.

The wanting stayed. The movement didn't.

Someone used to tell him not to wipe his face on his jersey. He thought it was his mom. Maybe Coach. No — his mom. You've got a towel for a reason. He would have given anything to wipe his face. He didn't have one.

In the afternoon the sun crossed the visor and warmed the shell of him, and for a while he let himself pretend it was a hand on his forehead. It stayed a long time. Then the building turned and it slid off and the cold came back into him, and he understood he had taught himself a thing that could be taken.

The bolt rattled.

Someone found me.

The door opened. A kid he didn't know grabbed the first thing off the shelf, which was him. The hands were careless. The room swung.

"Ugh. This one smells."

The kid threw him back and was gone.

The shelf came up hard. And the thing that stayed, after, was not the throw. It was that the kid was right. He did smell. He'd known it for a day and hated knowing it. The shame sat in him like something spoiling.

He started to believe, around then, that if somebody put him on — really wore him, out on the grass — he would move again. He knew it was false. He held onto it the way you hold a railing in the dark.

The blue helmet left the shelf that afternoon. Came back an hour later with fresh dirt ground into the facemask, smelling like cut grass and somebody's sweat. Chosen. Used. Marcus hated it with a clean, surprising heat, and the hating felt almost like being a person.

Light. Dark.

He waited for his chest to rise.

The door clanked. The big one. He came in humming something tuneless, set a mesh bag down, checked his phone in the blue light of it, put it away. He pulled Marcus down off the shelf and turned him over and thumbed the crown for cracks. Then he found the chin strap had twisted and he straightened it, careful, smoothing it flat. Not kindness. He didn't want damage.

"Holding up," he said. To the room.

I'm in here. It went nowhere. He'd screamed the first day. Screaming and quiet came out the same from in here. Sealed things keep what they're given.

"Your buddy stays quiet, you stay like this. Useful. Out of the weather." He turned the helmet a quarter so the mask faced the wall. The crack swung away. The blank cinderblock swung in. "He talks, I do him too. Matched set." He picked the bag back up. "Could use a new pair of cleats."

Flat. A man reading off the back of his own hand. He yawned on his way to the door.

The light swung. The jersey bag came down on the shelf and one warm fold of it settled against the side of the crown where an ear had been.

The bolt went over.

A whistle, far off. Feet on a field.

Something used to rise.

He remembered laughing once.

Danny's last clear thought was that he could make it home if he just kept the truck pointed east. He was wrong about that the way you're wrong in a dream, certain and sliding at once. The stadium pulled. He didn't decide to take the exit. His hands took it, and he watched his own thumb find the worn spot on the wheel where his thumb always sat, and the calm of his body while he was not calm was the most frightening thing in the world.

He sat in the lot three blocks out with the engine ticking and called someone, anyone, and got a recording, and the words came out a half-beat late, read off a card held too far away. He heard the wanting go soft mid-sentence. Something is happening and I don't want to be — he kept talking because stopping was worse, and the not-wanting wore thin under his own voice even as he pressed it into the phone.

Then it started in his hands, and it did not feel like dying. It felt like being spent. Like he was money changing hands. The grip on the phone loosened, not because he let go but because the part of him that gripped was being drawn off, down through his wrists and out, the way warmth leaves a room when a door opens somewhere you can't see. He tried to hold his own name and felt it thinning under his attention, the letters going slack. He reached for a face he loved and got the idea of her, then the weight of the idea, then nothing where the weight had been. Nothing chose what went and what stayed. The thin things simply rubbed away first. The love and the fear and the reason he'd driven four hours every week of his life had only ever been felt, not repeated, and so they were the soft stone, and the soft stone goes first.

What stayed was the knee. The bad left knee he'd bargained with for years, the catch on the stairs he'd built a private choreography around, weight shifting before the bite. He'd done it ten thousand times without thinking, and a thing done ten thousand times wears a channel too deep for erosion to reach in one pass. It stayed for the same reason a boot-scuff outlasts a fingerprint. Not chosen. Just harder. As everything softer ran out of Danny the knee stood out of the wearing the way a stone stands out of a creek once the bank around it is gone, and then there was no bank at all, and then there was no Danny for the stone to belong to. A flinch with no leg. A wince that didn't need a face. A staircase in Omaha, third step from the bottom, weight going left, repeating in the dark of a seam.

The pants shipped to the facility eleven days later, in a case of eleven others. The equipment manager checked them against an order he couldn't quite remember placing, hung them in a stall, and thought no more about it. Through the door. On a hanger. Carried by a man who did not know what he carried.

Marcus pulls them up and his weight goes left on a staircase he has never climbed, and somewhere under his kneecap a thing that is not pain leans the way it always leaned.

Carl thought it happened in sleep. Someone told him, or his fear built it out of spare parts in the dark, and either way he believed it hard enough to stop closing his eyes. He sat upright in a kitchen chair with every light in the apartment burning and a phone face-up on his knee, and he counted.

Day one was nothing. He made coffee and felt clever.

Day three the coffee stopped tasting like coffee and started tasting like the inside of his own mouth. Day six the lights grew a hum he could see, a fine buzzing skin laid over everything, and the corners of the room began arriving a half-second after he looked at them. He drank the coffee cold because reheating it had become a journey. He set the cup down, forgot it, found it again, and could not tell if the ring it left was new.

When the wearing came for Carl it did not pry and it did not skim. It just let the shallow things go shallow-first. The apartment wore off the way a label wears off a bottle, the walls sliding past the edges of his attention until there was the chair and the phone and the cold cup, and then the chair was only its pressure against him, and then even the pressure rubbed thin. The names of the days went, because he'd thought each one once and moved on. The why of the waiting went, because he'd asked it and gotten no answer worth re-asking. But the waiting itself stayed, for no reason except that he had done it more than he had done anything else, refresh after refresh, eleven days of one motion ground into the same groove until the groove was deeper than the man standing in it. The thumb moved on the screen. The number would not change. The wanting-the-number-to-change outlasted the one who wanted it, the way a thumb pressed into clay does not stay in the clay, only the dent stays. The dent was filling. Carl was running into it.

On the twelfth day they found him upright with his eyes open and a cold cup at his elbow and nothing at all behind the eyes, and the waiting went on without him, folded down into the weave of a jersey, still watching for a number to turn, watching from inside a thing that had no way to see and did it anyway.

The jersey came through the team store the following week, folded in tissue, twenty-six on the back, a number nobody on the active roster wore yet. It went into Marcus's locker the way everything goes into a locker. On a hanger. Through the door. Ordinary.

Marcus drops it over his pads and the locker room goes one shade too bright. Cold coffee blooms across the back of his tongue from a cup nobody is holding. His thumb wants a screen that isn't there. The wanting does not care that it isn't there.

Tyler understood the soonest and it bought him nothing.

He saw what was coming and he fought it the only way a person can fight an object, which is to attack the object and learn, slowly, that the object does not care. He cracked the shell against a curb until his shoulders ached and the plastic gave a sound like a tooth giving. He burned it in a barrel behind his building, the lighter taking four tries in his shaking hands, and stood in the heat-shimmer watching the foam curl and blacken and stink and felt something almost like relief, almost, right up until.

He sank it in the river and stood on the bank with the cold climbing his shins, holding it under with a stick until his arm burned, until the bubbles stopped and the water went flat and gray and certain.

It came back every time. Not the same one — a replacement, requisitioned, shipped, logged. The cracked shell arrived three days later as a factory-fresh unit with the right number already on it. The river helmet was written off as lost. No one anywhere felt the math fail to add up. That was how it hid. It never asked him to believe in it. It used the same channels that move ten thousand helmets a year and let the paperwork make it ordinary, and the only strange thing in the whole transaction was Tyler, standing in his kitchen at three in the morning, knowing.

When the wearing came for him it did not drain and it did not narrow. It abraded, like everything, softest-first — but Tyler's softest things were thin and his hardest thing was enormous. Every no he'd ever thrown at this, the curb and the fire and the river, had run the same groove again and again until the refusal was the deepest-worn thing in him, deeper than his name, deeper than fear. So the refusal was the last to go, not because anything reached in and kept it but because it took longest to rub away. The strategies wore off the top. The plans wore off under them. What lay at the bottom, the thing all the strategies had been built over, surfaced only when everything above it was gone, and it came up out of him with no permission and no plan. Please. Just the once. The worn-down floor of every no he'd ever made, turned over and read from the other side.

That is what stayed. Not the man. The flinch of the man. Please, repeating forever out of a body it no longer fit, a muscle still firing in a leg no longer attached.

A new helmet shipped to the facility that Friday. Right number. Clean shell. Logged, racked, unremarkable.

Marcus lifts it and it takes him before the foam meets his skull. The apology is already climbing his throat. His grip is already closing hard enough to ache, and the ache belongs to a stranger, the hands of a man who held this thing under gray water and felt it refuse to die.

He stands in the mouth of the tunnel wearing all three of them, except they aren't there to be worn, not the way a passenger is somewhere. There is no Danny to free. There is a knee that goes left. There is no Carl. There is a mouthful of coffee that failed at the one thing coffee is for. There is no Tyler. There is a please with the reason scraped off it, and the memory of water closing flat, and under all of it the certainty he can't unfeel now: that none of these were people by the time they reached him. They were what people leave behind when they've been run all the way through. Grooves. Dents. A flinch with no face. The shapes a hand wears into a thing on its way out of existing.

Every one of them had loved this team more than was safe. He used to think that was a coincidence, the kind of thing you'd turn up in any crowd if you went looking. He has stopped thinking it. Loving a thing built to be used is just using it from the wrong side. You come back and come back, and you give it the most of yourself, and a used thing keeps the shape of whatever uses it most. The gear never reached for them. They wore themselves into it the way a stair wears under the same foot, and one day the foot is gone and the dip in the stone remembers it anyway.

The fragments don't agree. The knee catches while the coffee floods while the apology forms, three motions inside one breath, none of them his, his own pulse somewhere underneath trying to find a beat the others will let it keep.

He learned to ride a bike once. Cut grass and low sun, the wobble and the catch and the long bright glide, the seat lifting free under him. He has the whole afternoon, worn smooth and complete, and cannot find one edge of himself in it. No yard he can name. No voice he can place. A hand let go of the seat. The hand has been every hand. The afternoon got run so many times it stopped belonging to any single ride, and now it rises in him the way a path rises in a field, not because someone walked it but because everyone did, until the grass forgot how to grow there.

A hand lands on his shoulder pad. Warm. Real. Here. Thirty seconds.

He looks at his own hands and cannot, for a moment, find the seam where he stops and the gear starts.

The crowd breaks open above him, a wall of sound that hits him in the sternum and keeps coming.

He runs. He does not know whose legs go first. He runs because stopping has worn into a thing several grooves are shaped against, and he is one of them now, pressed in among the rest, and his is not the deepest.

He does not count what's left. The gloves. The cleats. The pads under the jersey. He keeps the number turned away from himself, in the dark, the way the last man who counted could not. That man is the cold coffee now. Nothing else of him made the crossing.

Some nights his hand finds a phone that was never on the table, fingers curling around a weight that isn't there, and he lies still until it passes. Some nights a name comes up out of him in a voice he has to hear twice before he's sure it isn't a neighbor's. Last week he stood at the window after a thaw and waited a long time to learn whether it had snowed in a city he has never driven to, and the waiting did not feel borrowed. It came up warm and patient and entirely his own, the way breathing is yours even though you never chose to start.

That's the part he can't put into words for anyone. Not that he is full of them. They aren't in there. They were spent making the parts of him he can no longer account for.

The room is getting quieter. He used to think that meant they were leaving.

Now he thinks it means there is less of him to tell from the quiet. And that someday a man he will never meet will pull something on against the cold, and reach for an ordinary thought, and close his hand around one of Marcus's without a flicker of doubt, the way you'd lift your own coat in a dark room and never once wonder whose warmth was already in it.

Danny made him come to the game.

He didn't ask. Danny stood in the kitchen doorway with his bag already on his shoulder and said it would mean a lot, said Mom and Dad were coming up Saturday but tonight was just the conference game and nobody was coming and it would be good to have somebody there. The somebody had no name in the sentence. The somebody was just a body, and Theo had been the body that was free.

He had a paper due. He said so. Danny looked at him the way you look at a chair that is in the way, friendly enough, already stepping around it, and said come on, and that was that.

They had the same name. One of them had made it worth saying. The town said Hale and meant Danny. The team said Hale and meant Danny. At the dentist the woman behind the desk had lit up and asked are you related, and her face fell by exactly one degree when he said brother, when it became clear which one he was. The spare. The one with the name and none of the meaning in it.

So he went. There was a ticket waiting for him at the window, section two-twelve, and the second they were through the doors Danny was gone, off toward the locker room and the part of his life that had never had Theo in it. Theo bought a paper tray of fries he did not want and stood at the top of the concourse watching the building fill with people in maize and blue, and the old feeling came down over him, the church feeling, the counting of minutes before a thing he did not care about. Eighteen years of this. Of being the dark room next to the lit one. Of being brought along to clap for the thing that took the whole house's attention and left nothing over.

Before the puck dropped he went to find a bathroom. The line at the near one was long. He went looking for another, down a corridor with a STAFF ONLY sign nobody enforced, past a propped door, into a hall of cinderblock painted the color of a bad tooth.

He did not remember the change. There was no moment in it to remember. One second he was a person looking for a bathroom, and the next there was cold along an edge, a thin line of it, low, starting and stopping a little apart. Two of them. Parallel. Cold somewhere else too, wide and flat against a curve. He waited for his eyes to adjust and found he had none.

He had not gone missing on the way to the bathroom. He had arrived.

He was the bag in the corner of the room, the long nylon dark of it, and he was everything zipped inside: the skates, the pads, the helmet and its cage, the gloves worn to skin at the palms, the roll of tape, the half-full bottle with the water still moving in it, and the folded jersey with the family name across the back that he could not yet make himself read. All of it at once. He reached for a center, the place behind the face where a person sits, and there was not one. The one part of him that wanted to scream had been issued nothing to scream with, and the want stayed where it was.

A door banged. Sound came in through the foam and the leather and the long skin of the bag, muffled in places and bright in others, the way sound comes through water. Skates on rubber matting, the loose unbalanced clatter of a man walking on his blades. Voices. There was no way to make a wall and get behind it. It was open on every side at once, and the room came in.

"Hale. Coach wants you out for the opening face-off."

"Yeah."

The yeah was Danny. He would have known it from the bottom of a lake. Eighteen years learning the exact weather of that voice, the way it went flat when it wanted something, the way it went warm in front of other people, and it went warm now, a laugh hooked onto the end of it, and the bag lifted.

Hands took hold. They came through the whole length of him at once, the grip closing on the strap, and everything in him pulled to go the other way and there was no other way to go, no muscle to pull with, no back to turn. The lurch up onto a shoulder. The swing of the room, fast, and nothing he did slowed it. Then the zipper, the long teeth of it parting down the length of him, light coming in, a hand going in after it.

The hand was Danny's. He knew the hand. He had been hit by it and helped up by it and had watched it sign a thousand things, programs and pucks and the casts of younger kids, and now it was inside him, pushing one part of him aside to get at another, closing on the gloves, on the pads, drawing them out one at a time into the light, parts of him lifted away and dropped on the bench while the rest of him stayed in the dark and felt them go. No part of him it did not touch. No way to flinch.

Being used is quiet. No struggle in it. Only the hands, sure and ordinary, of someone thinking about the first shift and his edges and a girl named Priya and the protein shake in his other bag, reaching into his brother and taking out a glove and feeling, in the glove, a glove.

The cup went on first, against him, and Theo was the hard curved shell of it and the foam at its edge, settled and pressed and forgotten in the same motion.

Then the shin guards. He was the long plastic shell that wrapped the front of the knee, the cup of it cradling the kneecap, and the straps that came around the back of the calf, top and bottom, and pulled. The knee bent once to test it and he felt the shell slide a quarter inch and catch, the foam behind it folding into the bend and easing back.

Then the sock came up over him, and he was the shell and the sock both. The navy knit dragged up the leg, caught at the lip of the shin guard, snagged on the hard plastic edge, tugged past. The whole length of it pulled up over the calf, over the knee, the foam underneath pressed flat under the weave. He was the snag and the pull and the give, all at once, the inside and the outside of the same motion.

The pants came next, up over the cup, up over the tops of the socks, the wide padded waist of them riding up the thighs and dropping onto the hips. He was the pad over the tailbone and the pad along the outside of each thigh and the lace at the fly drawn and knotted, and for a moment he was the whole lower body wrapped and held, snug everywhere at once, none of it his.

Then the skate. Danny sat to lace it, and his hands were not quite steady. He was the tongue of it first, the long padded tongue laid back flat against the top of the foot, and then the lace came across. Eyelet by eyelet, low to high, each cross pulling the tongue down harder against the rise of the foot, the boot drawing in from both sides at once. At the ankle the lace bit deepest, two wraps and a haul that took the slack out of everything, and the tongue under it had nowhere left to go. A small fast tremor in the fingers, there and gone with each pull of the cord. Calm Hale. Sure hands on a Friday night. And underneath, this. Theo had not known. Eighteen years in the same house and he had not known his brother got scared before a game. He had it now whether he wanted it or not. The skate held the foot the way it was built to. Snug. Total. It had wanted exactly this and now had it and asked for nothing else.

The other skate. The same. Tongue, lace, the cinch at the ankle, the slack pulled out.

Then up off the bench, and the shoulder pads came down over Danny's head. He was the inside of the yoke against the bare back, the heat coming off the back, the heart going at the high even rate of a body that does this for a living. The straps came across the chest and clipped, one and then the other, and pulled, and the whole cage of foam and plastic closed in around the ribs and the spine. Closer than the back seat of the Civic. Closer than the bunk beds. Then the elbow pads, the cap over the point of each elbow and the straps above and below the joint, snugged down.

Then the jersey.

It came up off the bench in Danny's two hands, the loose navy weave of it, and went over the head and down, and he was the cloth now, dragging over the hard shells of the shoulder pads, caught on the points of them, hauled past and let fall, the whole of it settling down over the bulk of the pads and dropping to the waist. The maize across the chest. The A at the shoulder that meant the team trusted him. The family name across the back with the number seven beneath it. The name went against the spine, the letters of it pressed to the spine, and he read it from the inside, backwards, the way you read a thing through paper.

HALE.

He had wanted this for so long. Not the letters. The way people said it. The way the woman at the dentist had lit up and then gone dim by one degree when she understood which Hale he was. Eighteen years standing next to this name, and now it was flat against a spine that wasn't his, and for one second, before he could stop it, something went warm. There. That.

Then Danny rolled his shoulders to settle the jersey and the warm thing turned over. He wanted it off. He wanted it to stay on. He wanted to be back out in the crowd with his cold fries where the name was only a sound other people made. He wanted, under all of it, for someone to say it and mean him. None of them won.

Then the gloves. He was the worn leather of them, the palms gone soft to skin, and the hands drove down into the cuffs and spread the fingers into the fingers, and the leather closed over the backs of the hands and the fat padding sat over the wrists, and he held them the way the skate had held the foot, glad, asking for nothing.

The helmet came down last, the shell swallowing the head, the foam inside gripping the skull all the way around, the padding closing over the ears so the noise of the room went thick and far off. The cage dropped across the front of the face, bars laid over everything, the world cut down to the squares between them. Breath came back warm off the inside of it, close, his own air handed back to him. The seats were gone. Then Danny's face was inside the dark with him, the jaw working a piece of gum, the eyes already gone out onto the ice, three inches off and looking through him at a game.

"Where's your brother sitting?" The other voice, friendly.

Danny snapped the chin strap. "Up in two-twelve somewhere. Made him come." A short laugh, not unkind, the kind you give about a dog that won't fetch. "He's probably bored out of his skull. Doesn't get it."

"Maybe it'll grow on him."

"Nah." Easy. Final. The way you'd say it about the weather. "He's not really a hockey guy. He's the smart one." Something generous in it, even. Something Danny meant well. That was the worst of it. Years ago he had built a small clean shelf in his head, labeled it the smart one, set Theo on it, and never had to look at the shelf again. Bored out of his skull. Up in two-twelve. Theo was not in two-twelve. Theo was on his back, against his spine, riding his breath, three inches from his teeth, wearing his name, and his brother had already turned and was moving toward the boards.

The boards opened. The cold of the rink came up into all of him at once.

The game came in at a different scale through every piece and none of them squared. Through the blades, a negotiation with the ice, edges biting and letting go, the whole weight of the body thrown from one thin line of steel to the other and caught. Through the gloves, the stick, the live trembling weight of it, the puck found and lost and found. Through the yoke, the hits, the sudden total arrival of another body, the breath going out of Danny in a grunt felt from the inside. None of it added up to a game.

The pieces did not want the same things. The skate had foot and pressure and the lace past comfortable and asked for nothing more. The jersey wanted the opposite, wanted out, wanted the lights, wanted the name on its back turned toward the seats and read aloud. The pads wanted the body kept whole and would have held it against anything. The thing with no name and no mouth wanted, under all of them, to be set down somewhere quiet and closed and left. Three wants, four, on one current, no vote between them. They pulled in directions that had nothing to do with each other, and there was no one home to choose.

Then the building said the name. It rose and broke and said HALE, and said it again, three times, and the name was in the cloth and the cloth was him, so the name was him, for as long as they kept saying it. For three seconds, with a thousand people saying it at once, he was Hale all the way through, whole, of one piece. Then it stopped. He came apart again into the things he was, and the thing the thousand people had been saying went on belonging to the man it had always belonged to.

The game went on. He could not have said how long. The bottle came up against Danny's mouth between shifts and he was the water going into him. The towel. The gum changed. Twice Danny looked up into the stands during a stoppage, up toward two-twelve, scanning, and the second time something moved across his face, a small annoyance, an empty seat where a brother should be.

Good, Theo thought. It came up fast and mean before he could dress it. Stay annoyed. Look longer. Miss it the whole third period. He wanted the empty seat to cost Danny something. He wanted it to throw off his timing, make him miss the net, ruin the clean shining night. He wanted, once, to be the thing Danny couldn't stop chewing on.

The whistle went and it was gone, swallowed by the next shift, and Danny never thought of it again. Five minutes later Theo couldn't have said why he'd wanted that. He just had. He'd wanted it badly and now he felt small, and there was no face to feel it in. He was right there. He was being looked for and not found by a man who was wearing him.

They won. He knew it from the sound, the building coming apart with the name in it, the gloves thrown, the pile of bodies that he was the inside of, the crush of it through every strap. Danny was happy. The body came off the ice loose and light, a body that had gotten the thing it came for.

Then the room again, the cinderblock the color of a bad tooth. They take you off. One piece at a time, in the steam and the noise, the gloves dropped, the jersey peeled over the head and dropped, the pads unstrapped and dropped. The glove came off and the want came up before there was anything to stop it. Put it back on. Put the skate back on, lace it too tight, sweat into me, I don't care, just don't set me down in the cold. The jersey, still warm, balled on the mat. Pick it up. Put it back on. You're not done with me.

He stayed where he'd been dropped. Nobody picked anything up. Danny did not slow down, and the pieces went cold one by one on the rubber mat.

Then the bag, the part of him that was the bag, was held open, and the hands fed the rest of him back in. The skates. The gloves, balled up, still damp. The jersey wadded so the name folded into the dark against itself and stopped being a name. The pads. The helmet. One by one the pieces went in and one by one they stopped reporting, the way a room goes quiet as the people leave it, until there was only the bag left feeling anything at all. Then the zipper came across and took the outside too, the light first, a little at a time and then the rest, the parking lot and the voices and the cold all narrowing to a line, and the line closed. The strap took up. The lurch. The swing of the room as it all went up onto the shoulder.

Danny carried him out. He felt every step, the corridor, the cold pour of the parking lot, the laugh of teammates, somebody calling great game Hale, the name, his name, the one that meant the man carrying him. The trunk opened. The drop into it, the give of the carpet, the slam, the engine, the long dark hum of the drive. He was everything inside the bag and he was the bag, and somewhere up ahead in the lit part of the car his brother was driving home to the house where their mother would ask how was the game and where was Theo, and Danny would say he must have left early, he gets bored, you know how he is, and their mother would make the small sound she made, and none of them would know that the answer to where was Theo was right here, in the trunk, in the dark, holding the name, carried.

He stopped looking for a center. He let the attention go where it wanted, out flat, into the steel and the foam and the damp leather and the folded name, all of it at once, all of him, and he waited the way the tape waited and the blades waited, patient, cold, for the next time the hands would come and take him out and put him on and use him for the thing he was for, and carry him, and not know.

The car turned. He felt the weight of himself shift in the dark and settle.

It was, he thought, almost exactly what it had always been like. He had only ever been the thing in the next room. Now he was the thing in the trunk. The difference was smaller than it should have been, and that was the part he kept turning over, in the dark, with nothing to turn it over with.

Daniel woke in the chair with his hands still his own, and that was the cruelty of it, though he didn't know yet that it was cruelty.

He flexed them. Ten fingers, the chair's vinyl cool under his forearms, a strap across his chest he could have shrugged against if he'd wanted to. He could feel his heartbeat in his neck. He could feel the specific ache of a tooth he'd been meaning to get looked at. He was, in every way he had ever been, himself, and so when the singlet came into focus on the table across the room steel gray going to charcoal down the legs, a sage chevron under the collar, the shoulder straps splayed flat like the arms of a chalk outline, a name set across the chest in white block letters that read CLEVELAND STATE he read it the way you read any lettering in a room you've woken up in. A name. Not his. He didn't think that part yet. He read it and looked away, the way you look away from a thing that is not you.

A door opened. Feet, then a lab coat, then a man with reading glasses pushed up into gray hair and a clipboard he clearly did not need.

"You're awake," the man said. "Good. I prefer them awake." He sat on a stool, dentist-close, and there was something settling-in about the way he did it, a man arriving at the part of the day he liked. Dr. Voss, said the badge. "The ones I put under miss the explanation, and I like to explain. So. Are you listening?"

"Where am I," Daniel said, and his voice was his voice, and the ordinariness of it was the most frightening thing that had happened so far.

"Somewhere we brought you." Voss clicked the pen. "You didn't agree to this. Nobody does. we stopped asking years ago. No one comes looking for the people we take, and no one can make us give them back, so there was no reason to keep asking." He said it the way you'd give a stranger directions. "Get up, if you want. People always want to first."

So Daniel got up. His legs were his legs. He took two steps toward the door and on the third his left foot wasn't there.

Not numb. Not asleep. Not a thing that had ever been. The floor came up and he caught himself on the table and the table was real and his hands were real and his foot was the memory of a foot, and he stood on the one leg that remained and made a sound that had no words in it.

Voss watched him make the sound and waited for it to finish on its own.

"That's the transfer," he said, when it was done. "It started before you woke up. It doesn't happen all at once. You'll lose yourself a piece at a time, over a few minutes, and you're awake for it because I want you awake for it. Sit down. You'll fall less."

"Put it back." The words came out shaped like a man's words. "Whatever you did, put it —" "No. I can't undo it, and I wouldn't if I could, so it doesn't much matter which is true." Voss didn't raise his voice. "It's already too far along to reverse. We never wake anyone up until it is — that's the whole reason we wake you up late, so you can't fight it. Nothing you do in this room changes anything. I want you to understand that part clearly, because it's the part everyone wastes time on."

Daniel's hand was flat on the table beside the singlet, and he could feel the laminate under his palm and, at the same time, from the wrong direction, the laminate under the singlet. Two reports of one cold surface. He did not snatch the hand back. He understood, now, that there was nowhere to snatch it to.

"You're going to hope it stops hurting," Voss said. "Or that it goes quiet that you fade as you spread out, until there's not enough of you left to mind. People always hope that. It's wrong. You don't get dimmer. The thing I'm putting you into doesn't think it's just a place to keep you. You're what thinks. We don't pour a man into cloth and hope a little of him sticks. We move all of you across, whole and awake, and the awareness is the only thing we actually want. The fabric's just where we set it down." He smiled, and it was a real one. "You'll be every bit as awake in there as you are in this chair. More, probably. There won't be anything else to do."

The sentence about police, about his sister, was forming somewhere when his jaw stopped being a thing he had, and the words arrived anyway in Voss's head, meaning without sound.

"There. I can hear you now." Voss tapped his temple. "There's a receiver in here. It takes what you mean and turns it into something I can hear. I'm the only one fitted for it, and the second I walk out, nobody near you ever will be again. So say what you want to say now. This is the last conversation you're going to have."

Daniel meant to answer. He never got to, because that was when the rest of him began to go, and it did not go like the foot.

The foot had been a clean subtraction there, then gone. This was slower, and worse, because he was awake for every inch of it. It started in the hand against the table, the hand already sending two reports: the one from his palm thinned and went far-off, the way a voice thins on a bad line, while the one from the singlet came up under it and got louder, until his hand was mostly strap and only a little hand, and then it was strap, and the hand was somewhere he used to send from and couldn't find.

It climbed his arm, and as it climbed he felt the inside of him stop being a thing that had an inside. He had a bone in there, and the warm wrapped weight of muscle around it, and he had never once thought about any of it and now he felt all of it lifted out and not replaced, felt his arm become the long even nothing of a sleeve, a tube of stretch with two faces and a seam and no depth between them. That was the part he had no word for. He had carried a dark warm core around inside himself his whole life without noticing he was carrying it, and now it was being taken out of him from the wrists inward, and he felt himself thinning into a surface a skin around nothing, and then not even around nothing, just the skin, two faces and the seam that held them shut.

His weight went last, and that was the strangest of all. He had been a heavy thing, an architecture that held itself up without being asked, and the holding-up simply stopped not a fall, a letting-go his mass draining out of him until the table barely registered that anything lay on it, until he weighed what a held breath weighs, until he was light enough to be lifted in one hand and forgotten in a bag. And then what was left of him settled into the only shape it could still make. Flat. Splayed. The straps fallen open at the shoulders exactly like the arms of the chalk outline he'd looked at when he woke the outline that had been lying there the whole time, he understood now, waiting to be filled. The gray came up through him and went to charcoal down the legs. The chevron set itself under the place a collarbone had been. The white letters pressed into the chest that was now his only chest, a word he could read from the inside, and only now did he think the part he hadn't let himself think before, lying there reading it backward through himself: A name. Still not his. The only one anyone would ever read off him.

He reached out of the oldest reflex he had for the panic, expecting to find it running low, the way fear runs low in a body that can't sustain it. It was all there. Every bit. And there was no body left to wear it out, so it would simply go on being exactly this full for as long as he did, which was the last thing Voss had told him and the thing he was now going to live.

Voss picked up the clipboard he didn't need and went to the door. "That's what was done to you," he said, his hand on it. "I came down to make sure you understood that, because it's the one part I can't do for you. Now you do. And you'll keep understanding it, every day, for as long as you last."

He was gone. The fluorescent panel buzzed. And then there was only the table, and the having of a body that was this.

The cold came up through the one face of him that lay against the steel, and against the face that lay to the air there was nothing not cool, not warm, an absence where a back should have answered and he understood that he had a front and a back now and only the front was being touched, and that he could not turn over, would not turn over, until a hand he could not feel coming turned him. He felt the light: a faint warmth lay over the whole flat length of him from the panel above, the only warmth in the world now, and he knew the next warmth would be a body, and he wanted the cold instead, wanted the table forever, and was not going to be asked. Air moved through the weave of his chest, slow and cold, a breathing he did not do and could not stop. And under all of it he felt the seams every seam, from the inside, the long ones down his sides and the short hard ones at the shoulders, each one a place where he had been joined and could, with the right hands, be taken apart. He lay there knowing the hands were coming, and that they would not take him apart. They would only pull him on, and stretch him to the shape of a stranger, and hold him there in the heat and the dark, awake, for a season, and the season after that, and the one after that.

Daniel meant something then meant it as hard as he had ever meant anything, hurled the whole intact weight of himself at the shape of the word wait and felt it leave him and reach the place where the receiver had been and find the room empty, the line dead, the meaning arriving nowhere and coming back to him unspent, his now, only his, forever.

A few floors up, a boy was lacing his shoes for the first time.

The singlet lay still on the cold table, the name across its chest catching the light, and was afraid, and would not stop being afraid, and waited to be worn.

i love celestial things that die and transformers that stretch their arms like wings, grasping for something out of reach.

i love trees that coil into themselves, searching for something within like a person hugging themselves

i love clouds that dance with as much grace and beauty as a ballerina that moves across a stage

yeahh i love that