Dale Kowalczyk

Vikram Sethi's office chair creaks under you at eleven in the morning, and you hate this body already — not for what it is, sixty-four and gray and soft in the middle, but for how careful it makes you. Every motion costs something now. The knees announce themselves on the stairs. There's a deposition at two you have zero interest in attending, a paralegal named something you keep forgetting, and a persistent ache behind the sternum that this man's cardiologist has opinions about. You have been him less than an hour and you already know you're done. Three hundred and thirty-nine other men behind you and this is the one that taught you speed matters — pick fast, before the new body's aches become your aches, before its Monday becomes the only Monday you get. You open the laptop. The wheel is already loaded, spinning lazily behind the login, waiting for money you technically don't have to spend, in an account that technically isn't yours to spend it from. You spin.

—

The ring light gutters and swims. For a half-second there is no room at all, just brightness and a voice going on without you, syllables you didn't choose crossing a mouth you don't yet own — *so if you guys can see the coupling here, the reason it strips out is* — and then the sentence is yours to finish and you don't know how it goes. You slow it down. You make it careful, the way a man sounds when he's decided mid-thought to stop bluffing. The chat scrolls, four little colored names nobody's reading, and you lean toward the lens because leaning is something to do with a face while the rest of you works out that you have a face, that it has a chin cut so deep it might as well be a second mouth, that the room behind you is cardboard boxes and foam tile and it is louder outside than in — an L train somewhere close, going over.

The shirt is what opens first. Olive green, thin at the collar from washing, and your — his — right hand is resting on a desk edge scarred pale with cup rings, and touching that edge gives you a Tuesday from March: kneeling on a bathmat in a house in Logan Square, a woman standing in the doorway with her arms crossed watching him sweat over her P-trap, saying *my last guy charged half what you're quoting*, and him not looking up, just saying, *your last guy's the reason I'm here*, and something in his chest going warm and mean and satisfied at the sound of his own voice doing that. He liked being right more than he liked being liked. He is forty-four and he has been almost married once.

The overalls are the next thing, except he isn't wearing them — you are, in some other version of him an hour from now, kneeling under somebody's sink with a headlamp fogging up, but the memory comes anyway because the muscle under this thin arm remembers the weight of the wrench pocket dragging the strap sideways all day, remembers denim gone stiff with old pipe grease no wash ever fully lifted, remembers the particular ache of forty-four-year-old knees on tile that never warms up. He is skinny in a way that reads as tired rather than fit, forearms corded from twenty years of fittings that fight back, a body that has been useful to other people for so long it forgot to be useful to itself.

There is a woman in this — Carla, gone six years now, who used to sit on the closed toilet lid and talk to him while he worked because she liked the sound of him not-quite-listening. He still has her number. He has never called it. He tells himself it's pride. It's actually that he doesn't know what he'd say that wouldn't sound like asking for something.

The chair back against your spine gives you last night: him alone in this room after the actual jobs were done, boxes of returned fittings stacked to the ceiling because he sells used tools online now too, a little side hustle nobody in his life takes seriously, least of all him. Somebody sent him a link to this streaming app as a joke — *make money talking to your wrench, Dale* — and he'd laughed and then, at eleven at night with nothing else on, actually opened it. Four viewers. He'd told himself four was a start.

He is not thinking about any of that now, in this second, because in this second he is mid-sentence and the light is doing something strange and his own voice has slowed down without his permission and he does not know that this is the last thought he will ever finish.

You look at the hand on the desk — his hand, thin-veined, a plumber's callus gone hard along the first knuckle — and you turn it over once like you're checking it for a leak. Then you lift your eyes to the little glass circle that's still, impossibly, recording, four names still scrolling under a chat no one is reading, and you say, in a voice you're still fitting to a mouth you didn't grow:

"Sorry — lost my train of thought there."