Arturo Mendiola

The evening is nothing much, which is exactly the kind of evening that lets you do this. Work was work. The feed was the feed. You have scrolled through a hundred nights like it, and somewhere in the hundred and first you find the site again, the one you bookmarked and told yourself you wouldn't use, and you use it. A wheel on a plain page. A price that feels like nothing and everything. You have wanted this since you were young enough to still believe wanting something long enough was the same as a plan — the swap stories, the thread at two a.m. that everyone pretends is fiction, the question of what it would feel like from the inside, in someone, instead of just imagining someone. You pay. You spin. You do not expect it to catch.

It catches on a dark highway, three miles from a house you've never seen, your hands at ten and two before they are yours at all. The wheel is warm from another man's grip. The dash light sits low and green across knuckles that are not the ones you think of when you think of knuckles, because you don't have any to think of, not really, not before this. The car drifts a foot toward the line — not your doing, or maybe it is, maybe the arriving is the drift — and comes straight again in one pull, smooth as something rehearsed. Your hands come off the wheel. They resettle lower, wider, a different man's habit arriving in them half a second before you do. Behind you, a turn signal clicks on, ticking for an exit that isn't his.

It's evening here, Tuesday, late enough that whoever this was going home to isn't waiting up — or isn't waiting at all. Where you came from it was the middle of a Wednesday morning, nothing but gray daylight and a screen. The gap between those two clocks sits in your chest like a held breath you didn't take. He should be deep in a commute, dinner rattling in a bag on the passenger seat or his stomach already full from a diner booth alone — a man driving home from something ordinary, the ordinariness being the whole point of what you took.

The jacket is the first thing that talks to you. Navy, nylon, zipped halfway — and under your fingers, pulling at the cuff out of a nervous habit you didn't know you had until it was already happening, comes a flash: a closet, a Sunday, a hand reaching past three other jackets for this exact one because it's the one that doesn't smell like the apartment, only like outside. Arturo. The name arrives with the jacket, unasked, the way his own name would never need announcing to him — it just comes printed on everything he touches.

The collar of the shirt beneath gives you more: green knit polo, and under it, the memory of a woman's hands — Marisol's, the shirt tells you, though it doesn't say so in words, just in the particular tenderness of the memory — smoothing this same collar flat on his chest years ago before a Christmas photo neither of them smiles right in anymore, because by the time the photo got printed they were already something closer to over than together. The ring finger on the hand still on the wheel is bare, but the groove is there, a pale strip of skin that the steering wheel is currently pressing into, and touching it — just resting against the leather — gives you the year the ring came off: not dramatic, not a single night, more like a drawer slowly emptying, lawyers who were decent to each other, two kids old enough now to just send texts instead of needing to be picked up.

The tattoos on the right forearm are loudest of all. Bold lines, roses faded to the color of bricks in rain, a design chosen at twenty-three in a shop on Milwaukee Avenue that doesn't exist anymore. Touching your own arm — his arm — while it's still on the wheel gives you the buzz of the gun against skin, the friend who held his other hand, the mother who didn't speak to him for a month after and then just never brought it up again, the Catholic guilt that sat in him for years about it and quietly left on its own, the way guilt does when you get old enough that it's easier to carry other things instead.

Your jaw is smooth, freshly shaved — he did that tonight, before wherever he was coming from, a ritual at the bathroom mirror that the muscle memory supplies without a picture: razor, three strokes with the grain, the small vanity of a man who still wants to look like someone worth looking at even divorced, even broke in the places that don't show on a balance sheet, even with money enough that the broke parts are only ever about being seen. The crooked nose doesn't come from a mirror, it comes from the air against it, a fact of his face that stopped being news to him decades ago — a fight nobody remembers right anymore, not even him, mythologized down to a shrug at parties.

There's gum in his cheek, working on its own, jaw moving in a rhythm his body keeps without him, and your mouth finds the motion a beat behind, like stepping into someone else's dance already in its third measure. His body is fifty-four and carrying it the way a comfortable man carries weight — soft through the middle, strong enough still in the shoulders, a dad bod that was, once, actually a dad's — two kids, grown, who call sometimes, who he loves in the uncomplicated way you love people you don't have to manage anymore. His knees complain faintly from the drive, from standing all those years at jobs now behind him, retirement sitting on him light as the jacket.

The exit signal keeps ticking, patient, insistent, for a street he does not live on.

You look down. The hands on the wheel are wide, olive-brown, a thin pale ring of skin on the left one catching the dash light. You turn the right one over, slow, and the ink moves with the tendons like it's breathing.

"Whose turn is this," you say, out loud, to the empty car, and you don't signal it off.