Shannon hated his name, the way it lay flatly on the paper, how a person reading it didn’t know if he was a boy or a girl, his mother reminding him that it didn’t matter, that she wanted him to choose how he wanted to be in this life. But once school started, she was no longer there to provide this explanation to the cautious adult, looking over buzzcuts and ponytails and trying to find this “Shannon” in the group of rowdy six-year-olds. He learned quickly that he’d rather make them shake their heads at his behavior, the way he spoke with his fists, how he’d stomp on bugs, and twist his foot, so the green blood stuck to the cement next to the side door they used to return to the classroom, how he was always loud, boisterous, and teasing the girls by standing too close to them in the line for the drinking fountain, how he cut his hair when he got bored in class, how he tried to take up as much room as he could on the choir risers during rehearsals, his voice a growl of inappropriate parody lyrics that made the mothers frown and the fathers hide their smiles behind their grease-stained hands.

In high school, he found a crowd of kids just like him, boys so afraid of not becoming the men they watched in action films and military documentaries that they ragged on each other mercilessly, expecting a fight whenever their bodies collided, the intimacy of breath and blood their drugs of choice, because anything they smoked or swallowed left them dull and tired, and they hungered for something active, a throttle of their constantly running motors, to strike, to explode, to act as if they were remote controlled, an invisible foe pushing the buttons. Shannon cussed and bit and kicked his way through the halls, a sly slickness to his movements to avoid the cameras, to violate in the shadows and disappear like cash into a street magician’s hands.

Rumors weren’t evidence, and he learned to slink through the shadows, exerting control and then disappearing. He had one of those faces no one could remember.

He took a job in the first factory that would hire him, hoisting radiators onto a line so they could be steamed and painted. College might have been an option, but he couldn’t imagine paying money for books, trying to get the ink to line up into words he understood, sleeping on a twin bed with another jerkoff above him, sharing a room where they had to negotiate over windows open or closed, who would watch tv and who would play their music. He surrounded himself with men, older, their bodies bloated in the stomach and chest and arms, the same jokes, the same way of trying to get each other to crack, to clench a fist, knowing finally, at this age, how much a thrown punch would cost them, how so many came in hungover, half-buzzed from the night before, cussing out their supervisors over rules about safety goggles and leather gloves, wasting another second chance, threats swallowed by the threshing of multiple machines, each pumping out another part of the product puzzle, these men rarely even a memory as the work continued. Shannon laughed at it all: the sweltering temperatures, the sweat running down the side of his razor-stubbled face, the way the greybacks told dirty jokes about his mother, his sister (he didn’t have one, it didn’t matter), his name until they started calling him Chuckles. So original, right? But he didn’t care. It grounded him, like caught lightning, all his energy reserved for the job, for cashing his check every Friday, waiting until he was old enough to go to bars and clubs, where he could escape himself, his bedroom in his parents’ house.

The bars were next, the same women, over-decorated with makeup, the kind that flared in the near-dark, their elbows planted on soiled tables, waiting for men like Shannon to get drunk enough to have enough courage to take them home, to feel the heat of another body, pretending for an hour, that bodies slick with sweat was a kind of love, that one of these men would stay, would know how to fix the satellites, to set-up the Wi-Fi, to keep the twenty-year-old cars running, even on those cold mornings when the sun mirrors in the ice-rhined windshields. Shannon fixed it all, except the silence, his voice, and his thoughts raced like oil through a block engine but never jumped the track to his mouth. The timbre of his voice was slight, not the throaty rumble of these women’s ex-husbands, who mistook him for a cousin or their daughter’s boyfriends, his cheeks flush with peach fuzz, a fruit unripe, he’d never be a threat. Not so long as the women kept these men from their bedrooms, from the soiled and tossed sheets, the mistakes of drunken nights that wrote themselves like bad poetry, the rhythm gone after another sunrise.

Another night, a month or year later, the women checking their faces in the compacts plucked from wide open purses, the back bar lights reflecting the old promises of youth, Shannon, with that unremarkable face, sliding next to them, already knowing what to say, already knowing when and where to touch, the cupping of an elbow, the glancing of shoulders, the neg about a set of small earlobes, the praise of a pointy chin, or a pug nose, saying why don’t you take me home, saying I can make us feel young again, his features never entirely aging, a yearbook photo of the boy these women always wanted to know, saying tell me his name. For you, I’m him.