Anthony Morales

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Gary's hands don't work right for this, is the problem. Thick knuckles, a tremor that isn't nerves so much as fifty-four years of nights, a bald head sweating under the stage lights of a memory that isn't even his anymore, is it, it's yours now, you've had it six minutes and already you know it the way you know all of them — from the inside, borrowed, temporary. You are standing in Gary's kitchen at whatever hour this is, phone in Gary's hand, the blue wheel already loading on the cracked screen, and the guitar callus on Gary's left index finger catches on the glass when you scroll. Gary is a good one. Gary plays bar chords with his eyes closed and has a daughter who doesn't call and green eyes that water for no reason at 2 a.m. But six minutes in and you already know the shape of the rest of it — the slow bald-headed decline into a green room nobody's booked, and you didn't come this far, spin after spin, to sit still and get old in a body that was already getting old when you got here. You paid for this one same as the others. You spin because there's a version of tired you haven't tried yet, because Gary's life is a known quantity in six minutes flat, and because somewhere it is easier not to ask what it means that you keep needing a different weight to carry. Your thumb — his thumb — taps the wheel.

It goes from ragged to even. That's the whole event: air changing its mind in a chest that isn't remembering to be scared. The hanging arm — heavy, tanned, a wedding band catching what little light comes through the curtain gap — draws itself up off the carpet like it was always going to, like the sleeper decided this on his own, and you roll with it, shoulders first, until you're on your back with your hands folded on your chest like a man laid out for a viewing. Somewhere a fitted sheet has come half off the mattress. There is a smell of laundry done too long ago and someone else's cologne gone stale in a shirt on a chair. Streetlight comes through a gap that somebody — him, before, in a life you don't have yet — never bothered to fix with a second curtain hook.

The shirt on the chair, when your hand finds it in the dark without your permission — because his hands know this room even if you don't — brings the first flash: an alarm at four fifty-five in the afternoon, cursed at, silenced, the particular ache of a body that sleeps in daylight hours and calls it Friday morning anyway. Anthony. The name arrives with the shirt, stitched in thread above the pocket, *A. Morales*, and with it a whole decade of getting dressed in this exact half-dark, sleeve, sleeve, the collar snap that always catches wrong on the second try, buttons that his fingers do without looking because they've done it four thousand times, the radio clipped to the shoulder loop last of all, always last, like a period at the end of a sentence.

His body under your hands is bigger than you expected to feel from inside it — six-three, and it costs him nothing to be that tall, average weight sitting easy on a frame built for lifting men off floors and stretchers into trucks. There's a permanent low ache in the lower back that isn't injury, just twelve years of bending the wrong way at the wrong angle for other people's emergencies. The forearms are stronger than they look. He can find a pulse with two fingers before he's fully awake, has done it half-conscious more times than he'd admit. None of that is memory yet, just structure, the plain fact of him settling into you like a coat that already knows its own sleeves.

Then the ring. Left hand, plain band, and it opens wider than the shirt did — a whole marriage falls into your borrowed chest in a rush that isn't yours to feel and you feel it anyway: her name is Denise, was Denise, is Denise, married in a rowhouse backyard with folding chairs from the church basement, six years now, her hand always cold in winter and always finding his under the blanket for exactly that reason. And under that, older, quieter, an ex-wife's name that still sits somewhere behind his teeth without malice, just history, a woman named Carla and a son, eleven now, who has Anthony's exact dumb laugh and lives four blocks from here with her on the weeks that aren't this one. He loves the boy uncomplicatedly, the way you love a thing before it's had the chance to disappoint you. He has never told anyone that the job scares him some nights more than it used to, not the blood, the blood he can do standing on his head, but the doors — the not knowing what's behind the next one they knock on, code four, unresponsive, and the two seconds before you find out.

He quit smoking the year his son was born and still, nine years later, wants one every time the truck idles too long outside a hospital loading dock at dawn.

None of this is anywhere near a church. He never once thought there was anyone listening. That part, at least, makes this easier — nobody up there to explain yourself to.

You open your eyes on your own dark ceiling — his ceiling, his life, the streetlight seam still cutting the curtain the same stubborn way it does in the picture that will end up on a card nobody but you will ever see. You lift the left hand off your chest, the one with the ring on it, turn it slow in the thin light, watch the band catch what there is to catch.

"Hey," you say to no one, to the empty rowhouse room, to Denise asleep down the hall who doesn't know she married a stranger four seconds ago, "I gotta get up for work in a minute."

You don't move yet. You have him now, and there's no clock on that, no telling if it's years or if it's till the wheel calls you back before the alarm even goes.