Anthony Merced

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You are sitting in Gary Hollenbeck's kitchen in the middle of a Sunday morning, in the body of a man who has held a flashlight for a living for eleven years, and you have been him for less than a minute, and already you know you are not staying.

That is the thing nobody warns you about the wheel, not that it takes you somewhere else, but that you know so fast. It is in the fridge with nothing in it but hot sauce and a gallon of milk two days past its date. It is in the ache already sitting in this man's lower back, a permanent tenant, forty years old and telling you about it. It is in the framed photo on the counter of a woman who left in a year you can feel but not name, still up, because taking it down is its own decision and Gary Hollenbeck does not make those. You didn't even want this one. You spun for him blind, the way you spin for all of them, and got a bald man in a blue uniform with a bad back, and you have not been bored yet only because you have not been anyone yet. You are still sitting where he left the chair.

The laptop is already open. It is always already open, that is the joke of it, you never have to go find the site, the site is wherever you are the second you decide to leave someone. vessel.cards, the wheel sitting mid-spin from last time like it never stopped turning. Your thumb — his thumb, blunt, a scar across the knuckle from a fight nobody won — taps the button before the rest of him has agreed to it.

The wheel turns. Somewhere far past his back and past his fridge and past the woman in the photograph, it lands.

---

The wrench slips half an inch in your hand and you correct it before you know you're the one correcting it.

You are on a steel walkway over a basin of white water, the smell of it rising up thick and mineral, chlorine and something under the chlorine, and your hand is on a valve you have turned ten thousand times and turned wrong, just now, just for a beat, before turning it right again slow and careful like a man checking his own work for the first time in years. Ten more turns come out of you deliberate. Checked. On a job that does not need checking.

Orange headphones sit heavy around your neck. A bottle of water, half gone, warm from your grip, sits against your palm on the other hand. The sun here is low and coming down the alley of rowhouses behind you, afternoon light, and it does not match the hour it was in the kitchen you just left, but your body does not care what time it is anywhere else. It only knows this: you are short, and dense with muscle in a way that carries weight low, and your jacket is open over bare skin because the work runs hot even when the air doesn't.

---

The jacket is the first thing that gives him to you. Denim gone soft at the elbows, a smell of machine oil and cold morning worked into the collar, and it comes back to you sleeve first — his arm going into it in a dark hallway, a rowhouse kitchen behind him with the radiator clanking, his mother's voice already going about Mass, about whether he was coming this week or working through it again. He was working through it again. He zips the jacket one-handed, a motion so old it isn't a memory so much as a groove worn into the nerves, and you feel the small guilt of it pass through him and out, familiar, forgivable, forgiven.

The boots come next, through the soles, standing on the grating — how many mornings he has stood exactly here, this exact plank of steel, watching the basin turn from black to white as the air kicks on. He loves this part and has never told anyone he loves it, because who tells anyone that, watching filth get scrubbed into something that could go back into people's houses and be clean. His father worked concrete his whole life and never once said he loved anything about it, so neither does Anthony, but his hands know they're proud. Twenty-four years old and his hands already know a hundred small mercies — how to bleed a valve without soaking his sleeve, how to walk a wet grate without his boots betraying him, how to read a basin's foam like weather.

The mole on his cheek is his abuela's, she used to touch it when he was small and tell him it meant God had marked him for something, and he never believed her, not really, but he never once considered having it removed either.

There is a woman he half-thinks about, a cousin's friend at a cookout last month, and nothing has happened there yet and now nothing ever will, and you feel that future close like a door in a house you never got to walk through.

His shoulders are wide for his height, thick through the chest, and everything about him is compact and finished, no waste in him anywhere. High blood pressure sits in him quiet as a debt he doesn't check the balance on. He goes to Mass some Sundays and not this one. He has never smoked, tried a cigarette once at nineteen and hated it, and his last big night out was three weekends back, his cousin's birthday, too much rum, a headache that lasted into Monday's shift and made the basin smell worse than usual.

None of this belongs to you and all of it is filling you up anyway, the way water fills whatever shape it's given.

You know, too, without wanting to, where you have stood before in relation to this exact block — eleven bodies back, gray-haired, a lawyer's hands, a house up a dry hill in Nevada, and this boy's family two doors down from a life that was never this one, in a different state entirely, your memory of Douglas Merker's whole street coming loose and cross-threading with this one for just a second before you let it go. You knew this neighborhood once from a stranger's porch. Now you're standing in the middle of it as somebody's son.

---

You look down at the wrench still in your hand, then let it hang, and turn your palm up in the low sun to look at it — a callus at the base of each finger, a groove worn white where a wedding ring has never been.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to no one, in a voice that isn't sure yet whether it's asking permission or giving it.

The basin churns white below the walkway, patient, the way it will keep being patient long after you've decided how long you're going to let yourself stay.