Amit Cherian

The whistle is around Derek Vollmer's neck when the boredom finally tips over into something you can act on. You've been him less than a minute — his knees already aching on the gym floor, his voice already hoarse from yelling at a kid who won't sprawl right — and you understand immediately why you came back so soon. Forty-eight years old, green eyes watering under fluorescent light, a body that used to be dangerous and now just complains. There's a mat burn healing on his forearm that isn't even yours and already itches. You spun the wheel less than a minute ago in some other life, decided this, and here you still are: the practice room smells like rubber and boys' sweat, and it is exactly as far from anything you want as it was yesterday and the day before that. You take the phone out of Vollmer's gym shorts, thumb the site open before the whistle even stops swinging, and spin.

The mirror is green-tiled and small and there is foam on half your jaw. The razor is already moving — up, against the grain, no pause where a mouth should hesitate at its own corner — finishing the second half of a shave you didn't start. Water runs warm over the fingers of your left hand, braced against a chipped porcelain sink. A gold band presses cold into that hand's grip. You are taller now, thicker through the middle, a body that takes up more room in a narrow bathroom built for someone smaller.

The washcloth against your shoulder is the first door in. It swings open onto a locker room — not this one, a real one, industrial carpet and Gatorade coolers — and a hand, this hand, taping another man's ankle before it undoes into taping his own, over and over, fifteen years of it. You are a lineman. Was. Are. The word won't sit still. There's a game in there, a Sunday that ended with a stretcher and a contract that quietly stopped being renewed, and underneath that a number — six figures, red, climbing — that comes with its own particular flavor of dread, private school tuition and a truck note and a bar tab that never once felt like a decision at the time it was made.

The razor's handle gives you more: three days of not smoking, and how loud the wanting is anyway, a hum under the sternum that has nothing to do with nicotine and everything to do with needing something in the hand and the mouth at the same time. Foam under your nose smells like drugstore mint and it almost helps.

Your own leg starts up before you've told it to — a bounce against the tile, heel drumming, some engine in you that has apparently been idling since before this morning started. A migraine sits behind the left eye like a held breath, not arrived yet, just promising. The band on your finger comes with a whole marriage folded into its plainness: a wife's voice on speakerphone this morning, patient in the specific way that has started to sound like something else, and past her, further back, someone from before her — a name you don't reach for, just a warmth at the ribs, unfinished business filed and never quite closed. A daughter's height marked in pencil on a doorframe. A locker with practice gear in it, waiting, dry-cleaned and hung the way this morning's clothes were hung — you feel that too, sleeve by sleeve, an undershirt pulled on half-asleep, these sweatpants stepped into one leg at a time in a hallway that still smelled like coffee, the whole ordinary architecture of a Monday that was supposed to end in a locker room at practice, foam still drying at the temple, before whatever this is.

The sink is cold under your palms. Steam has fogged half the mirror. Outside this small bright room, you understand without being told, it is the middle of a Houston day — heat already sitting on the strip malls like a hand — while somewhere behind you, in a body you left mid-whistle, it was still morning. Two clocks, one man standing between them.

You look down at your hands. Broader than Vollmer's, darker, a wedding band riding low over a knuckle that's swollen from something you'll never know the story of unless a doorframe or a locker gives it to you later. Freckles scattered across the backs of them like the ones on his nose, his cheeks, the one thing anybody would say if you asked them to describe this man in five words or less.

You lift your eyes into the mirror, into your own face wearing someone else's weather.

"There you are," you say, to no one, to him, to the foam still going, and reach for the razor again like you've done this every day of a life you didn't live.