Everything in this room is touching. That is the first thing. Where I am, the nearest something to any something is a walk of ten thousand years at the speed of light, and here there are twenty bodies inside a space you could cross in six steps, warm ones, breathing ones, each one leaking heat into the others like it costs nothing, like there is more where that came from.
There is more where that came from. That is the part I keep turning over.
The air here is so thick you could not fall through it. It presses on every one of them at once and they do not even mark the wonder of it. It carries salt, and rubber, and someone's citrus, and the specific mammal warmth of exertion, three smells laid one atop another in a single mouthful, when out here a single stray atom is an event I would remember for an age.
They pedal wheels that go nowhere. It does not matter. They are already everywhere that matters, which is to say: near. A voice at the front counts them together so their legs rise and fall in one motion, forty legs, one rhythm, forty lungs pulling from the same shared soup of air, hearts drumming so close I could hold the whole chorus in a cupped hand.
One of them, in the back row, feels alone. I have checked the distances twice. She is eleven inches from the next warm heart, and eleven inches from another, boxed in on all sides by the loudest, densest, most crowded joy in ten billion light-years.
I cannot solve her. But I can name what she is standing in the middle of, whether she counts it or not:
the jackpot.
The whole impossible jackpot.