Brendan Kowalczyk

The screen is small and blue-white and it is the only light in your room, wherever your room is, and it does not matter, because none of that is a fact worth keeping. What matters is the tab that has been open for three days: vessel.cards, a wheel rendered in flat gold, a price, a button that says SPIN. You have wanted this since before you knew there was a word for it — every film where someone wakes up wrong, every thread at two in the morning about waking up as someone else, every long private hour imagining a different weight in a different chair. It was never for sale before. Now it is a Friday, early, before the day is anything yet, and you are still up, and you pay, and you put your thumb on the wheel, and it spins gold into a blur.

It stops.

You are sitting down. That is the first thing — weight dropped into cushions that give more than you expect, a body wide through the shoulders and the middle, heavy in a way that isn't unpleasant, just settled, like furniture. A remote is loose in a right hand that is not yours and now is. The television in front of you cuts from a dim scene to a bright one, a laugh track swelling, and the light of it moves across a face you are only just arriving behind. Thursday evening. Pittsburgh. The end of somebody's ordinary day, the beginning of your very first one. You sit up straighter without deciding to. The remote gets set down on the couch arm, deliberate, like a man arranging himself before he remembers why.

You do not laugh at the joke. He would have. You don't know that yet — you only feel the shape of where a laugh should be and isn't.

Then the room starts arriving through his skin.

The couch under you is worn soft at the armrest where a hand has rested a thousand nights — his hand, and for a second it's still partly his, dense fingers, a wedding band riding loose-tight on the fourth finger, warm from body heat. Touching the remote's rubber buttons gives you nothing, just plastic. But the couch cushion, the particular give of it against the base of his spine, opens something: an ache low in the back that has been there for years, older than it should be at forty-two, a joint thing, a blood thing, something with a name he only half-listens to when the rheumatologist says it, prednisone some months, fine other months, a body that occasionally turns on itself for reasons no one can hand him. He knows its weather. He has learned to sit in a way that doesn't provoke it.

The t-shirt against his back — thin, soft-worn cotton with a chest pocket — gives you the morning. Sleeve first: his right arm going in, the fabric catching for a second on the raised lines of the eagle tattoo at the bicep, ink he got at twenty-three in a shop that isn't there anymore, faded now to the blue-green of something bleeding gently into skin over two decades. Then the left sleeve, the heart with the banner, done the same year, a girl's name under it he had lasered half-off once and then just left the rest, because covering it costs money he'd rather spend on a lens. He remembers standing in the bedroom this morning — his morning, Thursday, ordinary — pulling this shirt over his head, sweatpants after, because the shoot ran long and his knees were done being cargo pants and boots by six p.m. His wife's voice from the kitchen, something about dinner, something warm and unremarkable, the kind of exchange you only miss once it's gone. No kids' voices under it. Just the two of them and the dog that isn't in this room right now.

The remote again, and this time it gives you something: hundreds of nights just like this. The lights off on purpose, not sadness, just economy — a day spent hauling gear, adjusting a reflector against somebody's brick wall for the fortieth time that afternoon, saying hold still, good, good, one more, and then coming home wanting nothing lit and nothing asked of him. He is a photographer. His hands, when they are not thinking about themselves, drum a rhythm against whatever's near — steering wheel, café table, the arm of this very couch — a habit from waiting on other people's faces to be ready.

Further back, deeper, unbidden: a woman who isn't his wife. An ex who still has a room in him somewhen, not guilt exactly, more like a hallway light left on in a house he doesn't live in anymore — a laugh of hers, a fight in a car, the specific quiet after it ended that he has never described to anyone including himself. He carries it the way he carries the tattoo, faded, still there.

The wedding band gives you the wedding. Small church, his mother crying more than his wife, the two of them evangelical enough that the pastor's blessing mattered to both of them more than either admitted beforehand. Vows. A cleft chin some best man joked about in the toast, the same chin you can feel now, distinct, the one thing a stranger would notice first.

The body itself, underneath all of it: heavy through the gut in the way of a man who social-drinks on weekends and otherwise doesn't think about his weight much; big forearms; the particular deep-set tiredness of feet that stood on concrete all day angling light. Nothing here has ever touched a cigarette. Hazel eyes adjusting slow to the TV's flicker. Platinum hair he started dyeing at thirty-five when the gray came in wrong and he decided to just go all the way silver on purpose, and it became the thing people mention first, after the chin.

You look down at the hand still holding nothing, fingers already starting, without asking you, to drum once against the couch arm.

You lift it. Turn it over. The band catches the TV light.

You look up into the dark front room, past the screen, toward wherever the nearest thing to a camera would be, and you say, out loud, in his voice, "Huh. Okay."

Nobody hears the difference. There isn't a next line yet — there's no telling how long this one is yours, or when the wheel calls you again.