He came awake the way a swimmer breaks the surface after too long under: all at once, mouth open, hauling air.
The ceiling was wrong. That was his first fully formed thought. It was off-white, water-stained in one corner, with a hairline crack shaped like a river delta. His own ceiling had a fan and a gecko. This ceiling had a smoke detector with a green light that blinked every forty seconds, and it was blinking now, patiently, as if it had been doing so for years.
He lay very still and took inventory.
Body: warm. Breathing: fine. Back: no ache.
That was the second thing. The ache was gone. He moved his hand up and touched his own chest, and it was not his chest. Broader than his. Flatter, harder, with a small scar under the left collarbone.
Okay, Dev thought. Okay. Okay, okay, okay.
He sat up. The bed was a queen with navy sheets and a gray blanket that had been washed so many times it had the texture of an old T-shirt. On the nightstand lay a phone, a pair of glasses, and a paperback with a cracked spine: The Remains of the Day. There was a half-drunk glass of water beside it. Someone had left it there last night.
Someone did. Him.
He picked up the glasses. They were prescription. He put them on and the room sharpened into focus, and his stomach did a slow roll. The lenses fit. His eyes, whatever they were now, had been shaped for them.
Then the memories started to come.
It wasn't like remembering. It was like a second language suddenly clicking, the way a word you've drilled a hundred times becomes a word you simply know. He didn't reach for the information; it was there, already unpacked, filed in the same drawers as his own.
Owen Calloway. Thirty-one. Born March 9th, Woodhaven Hospital, Queens.
Grew up on Fresh Pond Road in Ridgewood, second floor of a two-family house. Mother: Carol. Father: Frank, died of a heart attack when Owen was nineteen, at a Mets game, in the seventh inning, which everyone agreed was at least a decent way to go.
Went to Queens College. English major, then switched to Risk Management after a bad semester and a worse advisor. First job at an adjusting firm in Rego Park. Then Brightwater Mutual, nine years, senior claims adjuster, enhanced-event division.
Favorite food: Colombian bakery pandebono from the place on Roosevelt. Favorite book: the one on the nightstand. Fear: driving over bridges. Middle name: Francis.
Dev put a hand over his mouth.
He could feel Owen's father's death. That was the worst of it. It was not information; it was grief, aged and softened, sitting in the base of his ribs like a smooth stone. He'd never met Frank Calloway, and he mourned him.
I remember the smell of his jacket, he thought. I remember it and it never happened.
He got out of bed too fast. The floor was cold, and his feet knew it: the reaction was instant, unthinking, a flinch back toward slippers that were exactly where his toes expected them to be. He stared down at the slippers. They were brown, worn at the heel, and he was wearing them before he'd decided to.
Muscle memory. His muscle memory.
He walked out of the bedroom like a man walking through someone else's museum.
The apartment was a one-bedroom in Jackson Heights, and he knew it in the wrong way. He knew where the light switch was before he reached for it. He knew which floorboard by the bathroom door squeaked. He knew the radiator knocked twice when it kicked on. He also knew none of it had been earned.
The kitchen was small and clean in the way of a man who lives alone and cleans on Sunday. A dented moka pot sat on the stove. Above it, on a shelf, stood a row of mugs, and one of them read WORLD'S OKAYEST ADJUSTER in cracked white letters. Dev looked at it for a long time. He was almost certain that a man who owned that mug would have a sense of humor about himself.
I would have liked him, he thought.
He didn't finish the thought. He didn't like where it went.
His hands moved on their own: unscrewed the moka pot, filled the base with water, spooned in coffee, twisted it shut, set it on the burner, lit the gas with a single click. The whole sequence took nine seconds and required no attention. He watched himself do it with a kind of detached horror.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Whoever I am now, he thought, this guy still knows how to make coffee.
The blue flame hissed. He leaned against the counter, and his eyes fell on the fridge.
It was covered in magnets and paper. A takeout menu from a Nepali place on 37th. A dentist appointment card for Thursday at 4:15. A calendar from the Ridgewood Savings Bank with the third Sunday circled in blue pen and the words MA — DINNER in block letters. Beneath them, held up by a magnet shaped like a bagel, was a photograph.
Two people at a picnic table. A woman in her sixties with silver hair and a wide, unguarded smile. A man beside her who had Dev's face, or rather Dev's face had his: heavier brow, blunt jaw, hazel eyes, a slightly crooked front tooth. The man was laughing at something out of frame, his head tilted, one arm slung around the woman's shoulders as if he'd done it ten thousand times.
Dev studied the man in the photograph. It was strange to feel like a trespasser in a body he'd been handed, and stranger to feel jealousy toward someone who'd been erased.
Not to be assumed absent, the room had said.
"Are you in there?" Dev said aloud.
The apartment was quiet. The moka pot began to gurgle.
"Owen?"
Nothing. The radiator knocked twice.
He waited a full minute, then let out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding. He wasn't sure whether he was relieved.
The television was on the kitchen counter, a small flat-screen wedged between the toaster and a stack of unopened mail. Owen's hand found the remote before Dev's mind did, and the screen lit on a morning news broadcast already in progress.
"—and again, city officials are asking residents of Midtown East to avoid the area around Forty-Second and Third while Damage Control completes structural assessment. That's the third such closure this month. In a statement this morning, Mayor's Office spokesperson Renata Okafor said, quote, 'We understand the frustration, and we thank New Yorkers for their patience.'"
The camera panned across a plaza that looked like it had been hit by something enormous and angry. Sections of the pavement had been sheared away in a long diagonal groove. A bus shelter sat crumpled on its side. In the distance, a team in yellow-and-black vests was stringing tape across a lobby whose entire glass front had vanished.
"Sources at the scene say the disturbance began around eight last night when two individuals, described by witnesses as 'a large green person and something with a lot of teeth,' began an altercation near the—"
Dev's coffee cup slipped from his hand and hit the counter. It didn't break. He barely noticed.
A large green person.
He fumbled for the remote, changed the channel. A financial show: the Dow, Stark Industries up two percent on a rumor. Changed again: a cooking segment. Again: a local station, and a reporter standing in front of a police barricade in the rain, saying, "—the fourth incident involving enhanced individuals in the Borough of Queens since June—"
He put the remote down very carefully.
Then he turned and walked into the living room, and pushed the curtain aside.
Outside, Jackson Heights looked like itself. That is, it looked like a real place: a street of prewar buildings, a bodega awning, a woman pushing a stroller with a bag of oranges balanced on the handle. A delivery truck idled at the curb. A man in a Yankees cap was arguing with a parking meter.
And far in the distance, above the roofs, rising into the morning haze, stood a tower he recognized from a hundred thousand images. It was capped with a familiar shape. From this distance it looked small and bright and impossibly real.
He said, "Oh, no. Oh, no." He was grinning, and horrified at himself for grinning.
He was in the Marvel universe.
Not a version he had read. Not the one from the movies. A place where the news was full of green giants and city officials issued statements about them, where his apartment had a smoke detector and his job apparently had something to do with all of it. There would be gods here, and invasions, and alien technology in the wrong hands. There would be children on rooftops who ought to be in bed.
There would be, he realized, an unfinished obligation.
He pressed his forehead to the cool glass. His pulse was steady, which felt like betrayal. Owen's heart didn't know it was supposed to be racing.
Okay, Dev thought. Rules. What do we know?
One. I'm alive, apparently.
Two. I'm in a stranger's body with a stranger's life.
Three. That stranger may or may not still be here.
Four. There's a system coming, and I don't know what it wants.
Five. I have a job to be at in—
He turned and looked at the wall clock over the door. Owen knew, without effort, that the 7 train left Junction Boulevard at 7:52 and that missing it meant a forty-minute delay and a talking-to from Gerald Fitch about "reliability optics."
It was 7:31.
He almost laughed. The entire universe had been rearranged around him, and the first thing it asked was that he be on time.
The phone buzzed on the counter.
He picked it up with Owen's thumb, which unlocked it at once, and the screen showed a photo of the woman from the fridge, and beneath it, one word: MA.
Morning, honey. Just checking you're up. Don't forget Sunday. I'm making the brisket. Also, I saw on the news about Midtown, and I know you don't go over there anymore but PLEASE be careful. I love you. Call me at lunch if you can. XO
He stood in the middle of a stranger's kitchen with a stranger's mother's love glowing in his hand.
The thumb hovered over the reply box. He didn't know what to say. He knew how Owen would answer: Morning, Ma. Yes, I'm up. Love you too. Brisket sounds great. Those words were already in his head, fully formed, waiting.
But he was not Owen. He was a man from Pune who had not called his mother the week he died. He was a man who had stolen the last few decades of someone's son.
His thumb began to shake.
He typed, slowly:
Morning, Ma. I'm up. I love you too.
He looked at it. It was true and it wasn't, and both things were happening at once. After a long moment, he pressed send.
The moka pot began to scream on the stove. He turned it off, poured the coffee into the mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST ADJUSTER, and drank it standing up, staring at the photograph on the fridge.
"I'm sorry," he told the man in the picture. "I don't know what happened to you. But I'll try to be worth it."
The man kept laughing at something out of frame.
Dev finished the coffee. He went to find a shirt.