Danilo Restrepo

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The apartment is dark except for the laptop, and the laptop is bright with a wheel you have looked at maybe forty times this month without paying. Tonight you pay. It is stupid o'clock, everyone in your building asleep, a Tuesday nobody will remember, and you have wanted this — not a version of this, this exact thing, a stranger's skin, no warning, no ticket back — since before you could have said why. The button says SPIN. You spin.

There is no in-between. There is no you standing somewhere watching yourself go. There is a mask over a mouth and a light directly above and a voice counting down from ten that has just, impossibly, from inside, hit seven — and then it is your mouth, if you can call it that yet, and the seven never finishes.

You are on your back. Fabric snags where an IV tapes it down. Somewhere to your left a masked woman is saying something soft and procedural that means nothing yet. Under the lids — his lids — your eyes drag once, left to right, checking the room out of some instinct that isn't yours and is now the only instinct there is. The hand on the table, his hand, opens. Closes. Opens again. Testing the fingers like a man checking a lock he already knows is broken.

You are not panicking, which surprises you. You are too busy arriving.

It comes in through the gown first — thin cotton, hospital-issue, nothing in it, and yet under it your chest already knows the particular tightness of a Monday evening in October, the wheeze that starts high and small before a show and has to be walked down with three slow pulls off an inhaler kept zipped in a guitar case pocket for eleven years. Asthma, then. Yours now. You feel it the way you feel a held breath — present tense, ongoing, patient.

Then the ring finger. Bare, but the tan line is still there under the tape, a pale ghost band that the skin remembers even with the metal long gone, and it opens like a door: a kitchen in Logan Square, a woman's back to you at the sink, her saying *you were never actually here, you were always at the venue, even at the venue you were somewhere else* — and it isn't cruel, it's just true, and that's almost worse. Marisol. You get the name before you get the divorce, and you get the divorce before you get why. Ten years of load-ins. Ten years of "after this tour." You feel the specific, dumb ache of a man who loved his wife and loved the stage more consistently, which is its own kind of answer.

The tattoo comes next, half-buried under a gown sleeve instead of a T-shirt sleeve — tribal black, done at twenty-three in a shop on Milwaukee Ave with a guy named Frank who talked through the whole thing about the Cubs. It doesn't mean anything. He got it because his brother had one first. You get the itch of old healed ink, the particular numb patch three inches above the elbow where the needle went twice over the same line.

And under all of it, the body itself, plain and unmistakable: forty years old, five-eleven, a build that isn't gym-built, just road-built, guitar-strap-built, the kind of average that comes from decades of hauling gear up back stairs. Hands that don't like sitting still — you feel that immediately, an animal restlessness in the fingers even flat on a hospital table, like they're hunting for six strings that aren't there. Dimples set into the face at rest, so permanent that even under anesthesia, even scared — because now, underneath the calm, there is fear starting to surface, his fear, arriving late — the face looks like it's about to smile.

The shirt. Not this shirt, the gown, but the shirt gives you the shirt: a gray one, ROAD CREW 2008 cracking across the chest, pulled on this morning — his morning, a Monday, hours before this — over a flannel because the club under the L tracks runs cold at soundcheck, brick sweating, steel groaning every eight minutes when a train goes over. You get his hands buttoning two buttons and leaving the rest, get the guitar strap looping over his head like a ritual older than the marriage, older than the tattoo. Denim gone soft-black with wear. Boots that have been resoled twice. He dressed for a Monday show like every other Monday show of his life, and somewhere between the second set and the load-out his chest seized up wrong, worse than the inhaler could argue with, and an ambulance took the rest of the decision out of his hands.

He doesn't know that's what's happening to him now. He never will. There's nothing left in here to know it.

You feel the monitors more than hear them, a rhythm that was his and is now just a rhythm. Church on Sundays with his mother when he visits her, a rosary he doesn't use but keeps in the truck. A song half-written on a napkin in his back pocket that he was going to finish tonight, after. Small things. A life, going by in touches, the only current that runs.

The hand on the table stops opening and closing. It's steady now. It's yours.

You lift it off the sheet, turn it over slowly under that flat surgical light, and look at the lines of a stranger's palm like they might tell you something they can't.

Then you find the camera — the one over the bed, black glass, recording nothing that will ever get watched by anyone who matters — and you look straight up into it, dimples showing even though nothing in you, in him, in this, is smiling yet.

"Okay," you say, to no one, in his voice. "Okay."

You don't know how long you get to keep saying that in it.