Craig usually got to work early so he could buy a coffee and stare at the slot machines. He’d recently been spending time at “Munchkinland,” which was a newer machine within walking distance of the Krispy Kreme. Its display was a pair of large curved screens arranged in a T pose with, Craig guessed, probably some kind of subwoofer underneath. The bottom screen ran the game and the top one displayed a CGI town where the Munchkins walked in and out of shops or greeted one another on the street. Craig would look at the colors and drink his coffee and he wouldn’t think about anything. The nice thing about the casino was it made it hard to think. He would walk in in the morning and go straight to the Munchkins and their rote lives and he would feel a little scared and a little amused by the thought he’d gotten stupider since he graduated college.

One morning, Craig walked in on another man sitting at his machine. He thought this was funny. If there was someone playing “Munchkinland,” it was typically an old woman or a couple, but here he was, some guy in an UnderArmour shirt. Eventually, the screen said, “Big Win,” and thousands of dollars flooded into his account. It took almost a minute for the animation to play out: first the Dorothy and Toto symbols began to explode, then a troupe of flying monkeys descended upon the village and the screen read, “Wild.” Though the graphic felt like a “Game Over,” the balance kept going up. The guy sat there with his elbow on his chair until the fanfare subsided, then started in on the same series of motions.

Sometime later, when Craig made it to the office, he already had some issues assigned to him. Two of the tickets looked hard, so he decided he would start with the Wi-Fi in the casino’s smoke-free area: “The Hall of Lost Tribes.” The fix was a thoughtless one. Only a few things can go wrong with an internet router and, if it was an actual network problem, that was a job for another team. With an issue like this, he could let his hands fuck with the cords until, without thinking about it, he knew what was wrong. These fixes were his favorites; they just happened.

That morning was all easy tickets, though, which made it tough to feel strongly about anything. He’d get a notification, then he’d play with some wires and look at people. He liked looking at people, and he thought that meant that he liked people, generally speaking. His first day on the job, Craig watched a bald man’s head turn red in an argument and it felt like a singular, dramatic moment in his life. Now, though, such characters were the local color. The nurse chugging casino-branded water bottles, the glum couple sharing a slot machine, these people were noteworthy but not remarkable. Still, he felt his time with the customers was of some value to him. He was younger than them, but they looked better than he did when they were his age.

At one machine near the router, an old woman played “Conan the Barbarian.” She wore orthotic shoes and reading glasses with peeper-keepers and her posture was very dignified compared to everyone else at the casino. Craig looked at her and thought something fetish related, then got a little queasy. He imagined being confronted for leering at someone’s grandma: They’d say correct things about him in an indignant tone and he’d just stand there like an evil bug until it was over or something even worse happened. It was also important to him that he had a job and that he not get fired. He stood there for a moment feeling horny and serious about his life, then walked back to the office because the router seemed to have fixed itself.

“I think I told you about my uncle,” said Craig.

His boss remembered what he had said and told him to enjoy his lunch. When Aunt Elizabeth was still alive, she and Uncle Ted always celebrated their anniversary downtown. Ted booked his reservations a year in advance, always at the Capital Grille. Craig once asked his mom why, if they liked it so much, did Uncle Ted and Aunt Elizabeth go out so rarely, and she said something about “our responsibility to one another.” After Elizabeth died, the Grille gave Ted a yearly supply of meals-for-two, on the house. It was a cruel gift, but the food was good, and Uncle Ted always invited Craig. He also read a lot about history, a subject Craig greatly enjoyed. He always looked forward to these lunches.

On the way, he listened to a Youtube video about Cold War gadgetry. The host was the ex-Chief of Disguise for the CIA, an amiable middle-aged woman with large glasses and an express demeanor. She explained that spies used to hide transmitters in false ears while they did operations. Craig liked this idea. He imagined himself on a job, guided by secret intelligence. It seemed reassuring to know everyone was listening in on everyone else. Craig also liked the “Five Second Masks” used in the period, semi-flexible masks that could be applied and hidden on the fly.

“One second you’re you,” said the host, “Then you’re someone else.”

He thought about the woman at the Conan the Barbarian machine. He imagined himself looking at her then blinking his eyes and suddenly inhabiting her body. Burdened by her age, he would feel exhausted. He would go on and play the game so no one would notice what had happened. Her eyes would be weaker than his, so he would have to wear glasses. The woman, now young again, would keep his body, meaning he would be stuck inside of hers. He would live out her final years, taking on her personality until no one seemed suspicious and then he would die.

Craig imagined himself at the end of her life, having so acquiesced that he acted like her without thinking about it. He would go back to the casino and play the Conan slots and eventually he would notice the photo of Arnold on top of the machine. He would be attracted to the man in the picture, like she must have felt this afternoon. In that moment, he would realize that her body had changed him. Then he would go home to her husband and sleep with him, closing his eyes and thinking back to his moment with the machine. When he arrived, Craig walked around the parking lot until his erection subsided.

“I was just talking to someone about your IT,” said Uncle Ted. Craig thanked him and sat down. The menu was all bistro fare and the steak knives had varnished wooden handles. Craig ordered a diet coke with a glass of water, and Ted ordered a beer. He joked that he was losing money if both of them didn’t order real drinks, but Craig had a date tonight and he didn’t want to show up with a headache. It was his first time going out with someone he’d met on an app, which made his uncle smile.

“These days, a kid like you, it’s incredible,” he said, “Liz got that stuff like you do, but not me.” With her help, Ted used to post on message boards about his hobbies. He had taken for granted that less of your friends share your interests as you get older and that accepting this was a sign of maturity. He spent his time with neighbors, coworkers, and other peoples’ husbands, which seemed natural if he didn’t think about it. The forums were different: there, he could discuss the things he thought about for most of the day. He even drove out of state a few times to play tabletop games with his online friends. After Elizabeth died, though, the computer became opaque again. He had no idea how to use the thing or maybe he had no confidence in himself. He read his email, he used Facebook, and the instant he had a technical issue, he got so frustrated that he cried.

“A man like me,” he said, “Crying.”

“It’s my job and sometimes it’s so bad I think there’s something wrong with me,” said Craig. Ted thanked him. Really, Craig was a mediocre technician. His job was to troubleshoot issues and route them to the specialists, so he rarely solved anyone’s problems. In fact, he was frequently dinged for routing tickets to the wrong teams. The network engineers and the A/V workers had a kind of swagger. They were authorities in their fields, the only ones who knew what each other were talking about. Craig and the other Help Center employees did clerical work, which was necessary but comparatively replaceable. He could be laid off and find a job pretty quickly, but he sometimes thought about how little he would be needed in a better organized workplace.

What Craig would never say to his uncle was that spending time on the computer and being good with computers were completely different things. Though he had some tech-related intuition from playing computer games, his job demanded he access a pool of knowledge that he didn’t actually have. His parents told people their son got a job in technology; he was a stowaway in a bloated field. Sometimes, he would fantasize about getting laid off so he could draft a LinkedIn post about it in his head. When another casino terminated a quarter of its staff, their LinkedIn comments turned into a group lament. That was a scary day, but he checked back to catch all of the posts. It was compelling, a shadow cast on his phone by reality.

“Read anything good recently?” said Craig.

He looked at Uncle Ted and had one of his thoughts. Talking to his online friends, Craig once explained that he would give his left hand to stop thinking like this. Sometimes he wondered if cutting the porn from his life would make it go away. When he saw Freaky Friday as a kid, his desires gained dimension. No longer a matter of rote satisfaction, he learned his libido could take him places. Now, seen in reverse, he saw that the film was not an outlet but a bottleneck. There was no way he would enjoy the meal after that, so he just avoided eye contact and tried to stop an actual conversation from happening.

“Do you think virtual reality is the future?” said Uncle Ted.

“Like anything else,” said Craig.

They hugged in the parking lot afterwards, then Craig drove to his apartment and masturbated to anime porn. He felt stupid and insane when it was over, but he didn’t get out of bed. His Discord server was discussing his date. They wanted to see how he looked, so he rolled over and took a picture of himself smiling with his mouth closed. Beck thought he looked very handsome. Ken said not to talk about weird shit, then Alex scolded him for psyching Craig out. Eventually, everyone agreed that he was going to do great and that, whoever this woman was, she was very lucky. Craig curled up and smiled. He’d been conditioned to be whinier in the chat, a little more self-loathing, by the group’s custom of effusive reassurance. It seemed unlikely that thousands of messages, dozens of hours spent boosting his self-image, could pile up in his lifetime without making something happen.

Of course, the Discord sprung out of the body-swap forums, which he discovered when he ran out of results on Pornhub. The message boards were full of fake links and ads for cam shows so, until he joined the community, they felt aggressively unsafe. With time, though, he began to identify with the way the users talked about themselves. One tried to tie his fixation to human nature, to the fact everyone pretends to be someone they’re not. Another said body swapping turned his impulses inward: he would never spank someone he respected, but he fantasized about swapping into the masochist role himself. The forums had their share of psychotics and creepy grandpas, but there were also people who’d spent years of their lives thinking through the same problems as Craig. When he got the Discord invite, he accepted it eagerly.

Now, though, the chat was different. A lot of the leaders started dating in real life, so the only active users were the kink life-stylists and some fragile male perverts. Really, it was nice to act weak for them. The rule at the casino was to be on-guard, but the chat cultivated frailty; there, you got a treat when you showed your belly. Though Craig thought all the members were very nice, he wondered if any of them, himself included, would be a good person if they had the strength to be anything else. He assumed his own goodness as a kind of postulate, and he was sure that they did, too. As long as the right thing was easy and comfortable to do, he could be confident this assumption would go untested. Sometimes, he would fantasize about making a devastating sacrifice for others, but only if he was being mopey and wanted to feel sanguine.

“If you want my advice,” said Beck, now in a private chat, “forget everything you’ve said so far and just talk to her.”

“We haven’t said much,” said Craig, “but she seems nice.” He explained that his date was named Carrie and that she worked at a nearby middle school. Beck said that was a tough age and Craig agreed. His friend was right about forgetting everything: He didn’t know her at all. Whenever he pictured her face and got nervous, he was really thinking about himself. There had to be a way to look without obscuring his own view, without pulling back so his reflection blocked his line of sight, but everyone who could do so did so instinctively or else was as hopeless as he was. The conversation made him feel depressed, so he took an energy drink into the shower.

Afterwards, Craig put on a button-down shirt and some cologne, then killed a few hours playing videogames. It was ten-of when he got to the restaurant, so he played lo-fi beats and laid back in his car, breathing labored, self-conscious breaths the whole time. He fantasized about killing himself or bailing on her and playing strategy games on his computer or maybe drinking hard seltzers and making a big enough scene that the group chat would spend the night soothing him. He pictured himself swapping with her the second she sat down, then scaring her away so fast that she took his body and ran. At that point, he would cry at the restaurant bar and, inevitably, get drunk. Maybe someone would strike up a conversation, maybe things would escalate from there. He imagined her reaching out after a while with the intention of switching back, then losing interest when she saw what he’d done with her body. He was nervous about his date. It seemed very important that he not say anything weird.

Eventually, he grabbed a table and tried not to look like he was getting stood up. He ordered a drink, used the bathroom, and eyed the other couples with suspicion. When his date walked in, he smiled at her and looked back at the menu. He thought she looked a little confused, a little vindictive, like she forgot to close her tab the night before. She was also more attractive in person, which gave Craig pause. Maybe she was intimidated by his good looks, maybe relieved by the opposite. He attempted a sensible facial expression, but was checked by a thought: When he’d inspected himself earlier, he’d done so standing up. He definitely looked worse sitting down.

“Craig?”

“Yeah, how are you?” She was good, and so hungry, and so was Craig. He thought she seemed friendly and somewhat preoccupied. Sometimes, he would interrupt her then stop himself and insist she keep talking, only for her to mumble that “that was it” and sit there quietly, thinking. Half the Discord was women and they liked him fine but now, with one in front of him, he had nothing to say. He felt guilty for dragging her here: he didn’t know how to ask questions and he only ever thought of himself. The more discouraged he became, though, the more she came out of her shell. Soon, she was asking questions and making eye contact. It was appealing to think he could mope harder while she picked up the slack. He imagined himself catatonic in her arms, she awake and socially agile.

Things continued in that vein for some time. Really, he took pleasure in the bad faith of it all. He tried to make conversation but not to correct himself. If something she said offended him, he made a face. When she discussed her semester abroad or what her friends were doing in LA, he became insecure. She would ask, in a conciliatory tone, if he had traveled or what his friends were up to, then he would say, “no, not really,” or, “nothing,” and savor bathos that followed. This succeeded in drawing her out, but it was a dangerous game. She grew bored by him, a little depressed, and Craig decided he should actually try to make her like him.

It was hard to regain her trust, though. Her generosity was a defense mechanism; she made him look good to save herself the headache. Buoyed by food and drink, however, Craig pushed on to more equitable territory. He brought up teaching and mentioned that middle school was a very difficult age. She took this as a complement and a challenge. She said that a casino was an unusually difficult place to be an IT technician, that maybe casinos were the middle schools of his field. There’s a certain quality, she thought, a kind of obstinacy or maybe a passivity, that makes some workers able to deal with impossible people. Middle schools, dementia wards, casino floors: you work at these places because the difficulty denotes security, but also because this obstinacy is a muscle you can flex. Craig agreed, except that his job was incredibly easy.

“I could never do what you do,” she said. Craig said he could barely do what he does and got a laugh. They talked about the people they saw at work, the techniques they’d developed for keeping sane. There was a famous blog, “The Worst Three Years of the Rest of My Life,” that was, according to the rumors, run by a teacher at her school. The page published bilious accounts of student behavior alongside a vertical titled “The Confessions of a Bad Teacher,” a series of long, grievously subjective entries chronicling a life spent wrangling twelve-year-olds.

Craig asked if she knew who ran the page and she said she had her hunches, but that anyone could have written the posts if they wanted to. The administration didn’t have enough evidence to make a case against any particular teacher or even, really, to tie the blog to their school, but Carrie thought the reason they didn’t take action was that the middle school, as an institution, needed a release valve. Every few years, the high school hired a new choir teacher because the last one had an affair with one of his star soloists. She thought the blog was a better solution, and Craig agreed.

He found the site on his phone and read it aloud. He grinned maliciously, recounting the story of a boy who passed out from vaping in the school bathroom and the scene the paras walked in on: Stalls hanging open, pissy bile spattering the walls, and the same fat child they’d been sent to find laying cheek-to-tile on the bathroom floor. It wasn’t good dinner conversation, but it built a sense of complicity between them, which was more important. This was their world, or it was one they could claim. What mattered was the obstinacy she claimed they shared. The more he read, the more convinced he became that they each had the stomach for the other.

From then on, the night moved its own weight. As far as Craig noticed, the food tasted good. The eye contact was sustained and the conversation was colorful. When he told a joke, she usually laughed. When she asked a question, he usually had an answer. He listened to stories about her community theater group, her brushes with celebrity, growing up with all brothers. At one point, she let it slip that the subject of one of her anecdotes was her ex-boyfriend.

They sat there talking until the waiters started stacking the chairs, then she asked if he wanted to come to her place. He said they could also go to his place and she said alright, then they decided to go to hers. On the drive over, he imagined swapping with her and sharing a silence or holding hands. He would look at his body from her perspective and see how someone might be attracted to him. She wouldn’t know how to be his size, but he could give her lessons. He imagined the two of them swapping as they made love, bodies melting away to reveal a single rhythmic animacy. The morning after, he would go to work unburdened by the thing that got between himself and his life. Maybe he would play the slots.

“You made it okay?” said Carrie, opening the door. Her place was clean and, in spite of its precision, homey. The walls were lined with wood and metal armatures that spelled words like, “Breathe.” The trashcan was chrome with a sophisticated locking mechanism. When Craig went to the bathroom, the sink was an aluminum chute pouring into a large ceramic bowl. Her place felt humane, which was refreshing. Lowering himself onto her couch, he imagined he was a heavy, three-dimensional stain. She smiled at him. He put his hand on her shoulder.

She put on Ru Paul’s Drag Race. In this episode, one queen accused another of turning drag into a joke. The other said she would “rather be a rich clown than a broke diva” and joked that everyone knew why she was so worked up that day. One of them yelled that the other was a “fake bitch,” the other countered that she had “always been real.” Craig thought about how he wanted to kiss her and how he didn’t do it because he was scared. Eventually, she laid across his legs so her head sat on the arm of the sofa and he couldn’t make a move without contorting into an embarrassing, contrived position.

He resigned himself to sitting there with her and watching TV, which was a comfortable, pleasant thing to do. Besides, he thought it was important to have experiences in life. Here, things could go well or poorly instead of a little worse every day, forever. Something could happen that would change the way he spent his time. He watched Drag Race for a few hours until she asked him to kill a spider, then kissed him when he sat back down. He kissed back passionately and guilelessly but was challenged by her force. After a few minutes of escalation, she swung over his legs and straddled him. He pulled her closer, but for a second, he thought she was laughing. Actually, she was crying, so he stopped kissing her and gestured for her to sit on the couch.

“I’m sorry,” she said. That morning, she got a text from her ex-boyfriend saying he’d been diagnosed with MS. Apparently, many symptoms presented themselves during this attack, including erectile dysfunction. He said there was no one else he could talk to or he wouldn’t have bothered her. He saw his life receding already, curbed by acute pain and discomfort. He said that it was awful and that it made him reconsider the way he had treated her. There were so many times he chose his pleasure over her satisfaction. He understood why she left him. He said the worst thing was that this meant she would never love him again. Craig asked if she responded and she said she did, that she told him she was very sorry and that he could let her know if he needed anything. He said that was a nice thing to do and she agreed.

Craig sat there listening for the better part of an hour, asking questions about her ex or about MS or, sometimes, just sitting there in silence until she said, “it’s just interesting,” and started talking again. As things progressed, though, the talking took less time and the silences more, until he couldn’t tell if he was being a supportive date or if he thought they might still have sex. She said she needed some alone time. He moved for the door, having bailed on himself long ago, but was stopped by a hand on his shoulder. He turned around and she hugged him and told him never to tell anyone what happened.

He didn’t play podcasts or videos in the car. He imagined himself back on her couch, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. He imagined being propelled by someone else’s urges, satisfied by a pleasure he couldn’t, immediately, feel. He imagined a climax that didn’t bounce off his skull but resounded between the two of them. He wondered what it was like to spend time instead of killing it. When he stopped driving, he was at the casino. He sat next to an older woman at the bar and bought her a drink.