Arturo Beltrán

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You are eighteen hours old in a body that aches like it's been worked since sunup, because it has — Colt Behrens, farmhand, patchy beard that itches when you sweat, hands that know fence wire and feed buckets better than you ever will. You've been lying in his bunk for six and a half hours doing the thing you always do after: staring at the ceiling, waiting to see if this one feels like enough. It never does. The boy's phone is dead on the nightstand, his body sore in a way that isn't yours to be proud of, and somewhere under his ribs there's a dumb animal contentment you can't make yourself feel. That's the itch. Not boredom exactly — more like being handed somebody else's good mood and finding it doesn't fit. So you get up in him, go to the barn computer because the kid doesn't own a phone with real signal, and you open vessel.cards again, forty-eighth time, telling yourself this is the one where it finally lands right.

The wheel spins somewhere outside of time and lands on a man in a bed in the dark.

You arrive already scrolling. The thumb is yours before anything else is — fast, flicking, surer than the rhythm it interrupts, and for half a second there's just the blue rectangle of light and the feel of a gut pressed soft against a wrinkled T-shirt, a body wide and heavy and settled into a mattress like a sandbag. The window across the room holds one sodium lamp, far off, hanging there like it's been waiting. The room smells like a dryer sheet and old coffee. You are lying on your side. Somewhere behind your face a man named Arturo Beltrán has already stopped existing, mid-thought, mid-scroll, and you are wearing the stillness he left behind.

The shirt is what opens first — gray cotton, soft from washing, and it gives you the morning he put it on: standing in a closet that still has a woman's perfume ghost in it two years after she took her clothes out, pulling this shirt over his head because it was the first thing his hand found, not caring, the whole getting-dressed a performance of not caring he'd been rehearsing since the divorce. Under that, his shoulders remember the weight of suspenders snapping into place five mornings a week, the particular ritual of it — striped shirt, the tie knotted by feel after thirty years of the same four-in-hand, the heaviness of a body that eats lunch at his desk and dinner alone. His hands remember two phones at once, one against each ear, numbers scrolling on a wall of screens, the particular adrenaline of a market moving against a client who trusted him, the practiced calm voice that doesn't match the sweat under the arms. That part of him is good at it. Has been for twenty-six years. It's the only room in the house of him that still feels furnished.

The phone in your hand gives you less — just tonight, just this: insomnia, a highlight reel of somebody's vacation photos that isn't his life, the particular loneliness of a king bed with a dead woman's — no, not dead, just gone — shape still pressed into the far pillow from habit more than memory. The ring finger notices itself before you do, the pale stripe of skin where metal sat for twenty-two years, and that brings the rest down like weather: Marisol's voice telling him it wasn't about another woman, it was about never being in the room even when he was in the room; the two kids, grown now, polite at Christmas, a son who calls the office line instead of his cell because he's forgotten which one is current; the gravel road outside this house, the water tower you can see from the kitchen window, bought because it was quiet and he has since learned that quiet and empty are not the same word. His nose aches faintly where it was broken — a brother-in-law's wedding, a disagreement about nothing, twenty years gone — and his free hand, without being told, drifts up to touch his own jaw, smooth, freshly shaved, because that's what these hands do when nobody's running them on purpose.

He is heavy in a way that isn't failure, just time — the gut that suspenders are built to accommodate, the knees that complain on stairs, the thinning crown he catalogs in mirrors without comment anymore. Nothing hurts tonight except the ordinary ache of a big man lying on his side too long. He was close to sleep. He was not going to find anything on that phone and some sealed-off part of him knew it and kept scrolling anyway, the way lonely men do at the ragged a.m. edge of a Sunday, waiting on nothing, hoping the glow would count as company.

You let the phone drop onto the comforter.

You hold your hand up in the blue dark and turn it over — the broad palm, the pale stripe where a ring isn't, the thick fingers that have dialed a thousand frightened clients down off a ledge and never once dialed his own kids first. You press two fingertips to your jaw, the stubbleless skin, like checking that the face is still there. Then you lift your eyes to find something to look at, and there's nothing in the room but the window and the one far light, so you look into the dark like it's a lens anyway, and you say, low, almost amused at yourself:

"Forty-eight."