Danny Kowalchuk

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Gerald Piotrowski's knees ache on the ridge where the sleeper cab meets the seat, and you feel every one of his fifty-seven years in that ten-second climb down to the pavement. You have been him less than a minute. That's the joke of it, the thing nobody warns you about the wheel: you get a whole life poured into you at once, wife who left in '09, the bypass surgery, the grandson in Peoria he sends birthday cards to and never calls, and none of it belongs to you, it just sits there like luggage in a stranger's trunk. You didn't ask for any of it. You feel the unibrow when you rub your own forehead, feel it like a stranger's eyebrow, and that's enough. That's always enough, eventually. Somewhere around the four hundredth body you stopped pretending you were looking for anything in particular. Now it's just the itch. The seat is hard. The parking lot smells like diesel and wet salt. You take out your phone — his phone — and open vessel.cards with his thick fingers, and something in you that is not him at all leans forward like a man leaning toward a slot machine he has beaten six hundred and seventy-five times and cannot stop feeding.

You spin.

The toothbrush is between your teeth and the foam is going cold on your lip and the tap is running and you are not thinking anything, because a half-second ago you were somebody else's ache in a Chicago parking lot and now you are here, mid-stroke, back molars, a mouth you didn't choose full of mint and a stranger's tongue moving out of pure habit. You finish the stroke. You start again on the other side, slower now, because some part of the machinery under you is still running on its own rails and you are only just now taking the wheel of it. You rinse. You rinse twice. You stand the brush up bristles-first in a glass that has gone grey with mineral scale, out of long unthinking custom, and only then do you look up into the mirror and see dimples set into a face at rest, like the face was built around them.

The bathroom is small and the tile is old and cold under bare feet, and that coldness is the first thing that isn't yours — his feet know this floor, have known it for six years, the loose tile third from the door that clicks if you catch it right. The joggers you're wearing are soft at the knees from wear and when your hand brushes the fabric at your hip you get an afternoon: him on the couch two winters ago, half a beer in, flipping through hockey highlights with his girlfriend's feet in his lap, her laughing about something, you don't know what, the memory doesn't hand you the joke, only the warmth of the room and the specific tired satisfaction of a Saturday off. That's Priya. You didn't know her name until the memory gave it to you along with the smell of her shampoo on the couch cushion.

The T-shirt is Danny's from three years back, navy, soft at the collar from a hundred washes, and touching the hem where it meets his tattooed arm opens something bigger: the tattoo shop on Queen Street, nineteen years old, his mother two months dead, the needle going into skin that flinched but held, the cross and the praying hands because she used to make him kneel with her Sunday mornings even after he stopped believing any of it, and getting it felt like keeping a promise to someone who couldn't check on him anymore. He has never once, in sixteen years, regretted it, though he hasn't set foot in a church since. His jaw is doing the thing it does — you feel the muscle bunched tight at the hinge before you even notice you're clenching it, an old habit sitting there under everything, worry with nowhere to go.

More comes, unbidden, the way it always does through whatever you're touching: the keys on the dresser in the next room, hooked to a carabiner, and just thinking toward them gives you the school corridor at eleven at night, buffer machine droning, fluorescent lights half off, the particular loneliness of being the last living thing in a building built for children, and how he likes it anyway, likes the quiet, likes that nobody needs anything from him for eight hours straight. The uniform shirt on its hanger in the closet gives you the ex — Marisol, four years gone now, the fight in the parking lot of a Canadian Tire that ended it, and how he still, stupidly, checks if she's liked anything of his sometimes, though he'd never say that to Priya. The blood pressure cuff in the medicine cabinet, cheap and Velcroed, gives you the doctor's flat voice last spring, the number that came back too high twice in a row, the way he shrugged it off and told nobody, not even Priya, because thirty-five feels too young for that particular fear and he'd rather not know it's already started.

You stand there another second in a body that is not sick, not hurt, not anything but slightly tired, average in every measurement, dimples sitting in his cheeks like they were carved in for good. Outside the frosted window a streetcar grinds through slush toward the glass towers, and somewhere in this apartment a woman who loves this face is probably texting him something about dinner, and you feel, distantly, the shape of a whole ordinary Monday evening he was walking toward before you got here.

You lift your hands — his hands, blunt-nailed, a callus riding the pad of the thumb where a mop handle sits — and turn them over slowly under the bathroom light, front, back, like you're checking them for a fault that isn't there.

Then you look up into the mirror, into his own eyes looking back out of a face you didn't build and don't owe anything, and you say, out loud, to no one:

"Okay. Let's see what you've got."