Craig Hollenbeck

The apartment is a rental Craig Hollenbeck doesn't own the furniture in, and he is fifty-eight years old, bald by choice rather than nature, sitting in a body he did not have nine spins ago, feeling its heartburn and the bad knee it walks on. He has been Craig for less than a minute this time — long enough to sit down, long enough to notice the sales numbers on the laptop screen are somebody else's problem now, somebody else's mediocrity, and that the boredom of it arrives faster each time, like a held breath let out sooner and sooner. There was a woman on the phone twenty minutes ago who called him by this name like she'd known him twenty years, and he had nothing to give her back. That's the thing nobody warns you about the wheel: not the guilt, there isn't any left in him for that, but the flatness of arriving somewhere and finding it already furnished with a stranger's life you have to fake your way through until you're bored enough to leave. He opens the laptop. Closes it. Opens vessel.cards instead, and the wheel is already spinning under his thumb before he's decided anything, the way it always is.

The couch takes your weight before you understand you have weight again, a heavier build than the one you left, a warmth in the chest that is beer and a full stomach and something on the television going into extra innings. Your mouth is open. There is a can in your hand, aluminum gone warm, tilted just short of spilling, and your thumb finds the volume before your eyes are all the way open, some old reflex moving the hand before the mind is caught up to it. A goal, a run, something — the color commentator's voice rising — and you are sitting forward now with a precision that does not belong to the drowsy slump you arrived in, watching the replay instead of the score, and nobody in the room noticed anything happen because nothing, from the outside, did.

The shirt is what gives him to you first — flannel, worn soft at the elbows, and the memory comes in with the smell of fabric softener and the particular ordinary weight of getting dressed this morning, before the sun was fully up, in a bedroom with the blinds already slatted with light. His hands buttoning it, second button always giving him trouble because his fingers are thick and blunt and used to keyboards more than buttons now. He'd stood in front of the mirror a half-second longer than he needed to, not vain, just tired, forty-five and looking every year of it in the fluorescent bathroom light, the scar through his eyebrow catching the light the way it always does — a childhood thing, a bike, a curb, nobody remembers the story anymore including him.

The can in your hand brings the rest of the evening back whole: the drive home from the office with the AC rattling, the strip mall gone amber in the dusk, a stop for the beer he wasn't supposed to buy because his wife had said something about cutting back and he'd bought it anyway, small defiance, the kind marriages run on. Marissa. The name comes with the ink on his forearm — script, her name, a date neither of them talks about out loud because it's the wedding day and also, quietly, the day her father died, the two things stitched into the same hour of his life so he put them both under his skin rather than choose between grieving and celebrating. Nineteen years married. No kids, and there'd been a season where that had been a wound between them and now it's just weather, something that used to storm and now just sits gray sometimes on a Sunday.

The wedding band on the left hand is warm from his own skin. It brings the office — glass walls, door propped open on purpose because he'd read somewhere that an open door makes you a better manager, and he wanted, badly, embarrassingly, to be a better manager than his own had been. The people under him. A woman named Denise he'd had to write up last spring and had lost sleep over. The tithe he writes every month without being asked to, a discipline more than a devotion some days, if he's honest with God, which he tries to be on Sundays and mostly fails to be the rest of the week.

Underneath all of it: this body, forty-five, six feet of it gone a little soft in the middle the way desk life does to a man, a lower back that complains on cold mornings, a right shoulder that clicks when he reaches too far behind him. Strong enough hands, a hard grip from twenty years of yard work he does himself instead of hiring out. Half-asleep still, muscle heavy, the couch cushion memorized by his own spine.

You look at your hands. The right one still around the can, knuckles thick, and you feel the old habit rising in them before you decide anything — that itch to crack them, his tic, not yours, arriving anyway now that you're the one holding the joints. You do it without meaning to, one hand and then the other, and the small sound of it in the quiet room is the loudest thing that's happened since you arrived.

"Huh," you say, out loud, to no one, in his voice, watching the replay loop again on the screen — and underneath the word is the whole other question, unasked, unanswered, already loose in you: how long you'll let this one run before the wheel starts pulling at you again.