Danny Kowalik

You are standing in a back room in Honolulu that smells like formalin and carnation lilies, and Rafael Guanzon's hands — your hands, for the last fifty-some seconds — are folded in front of you the way he taught himself to fold them for grieving families, and none of it is enough. Less than a minute in this one and already the itch is back, the old familiar nothing-is-happening, because this body does its whole life at the volume of a hallway, and you spun 291 times to feel things, not to stand very correctly next to a casket rack doing math about drainage tubes. Rafael Guanzon is calm and useful and will be calm and useful forever, world without end, and that is exactly the problem with him. You want weather. You want something with a pulse still arguing against you. So you don't even finish forming the thought as a sentence — you just want it, the way you always do, and the tile floor under his good shoes tips half an inch, and the room goes.

You are behind a wheel that is not the wheel, both hands coming down off the top of it and resettling low, wide, wrong, the muscle memory of some other man's decades correcting your grip before you have a body to call yours. Dash light the color of a gas-station receipt washes green up through your knuckles. Your — his — thumb finds the turn signal and clicks it down for an off-ramp you have never seen, and somewhere in a chest cavity that is thicker than the one you left, a low ache flares in the lower back, immediate, familiar to whoever owns it, meaningless to you. The seatbelt is snug over a gut that has some give to it. There's a smell of coconut air freshener gone stale and, under it, an old ghost of cigarettes nobody's smoked in this car in years.

The wheel gives itself up first — foam grip gone shiny in two spots — and with it comes a flash: mitts, not steering wheel, mitts and the particular fat smack of a good hook landing clean, some kid named Eddie grinning around his mouthguard, *again, again, don't drop the hand.* Then the watch. Cheap black digital, scratched crystal, and it brings back a whole morning: alarm at five, the bathroom mirror doing him no favors, the eye that won't quite look where the other one's looking, seeing it and not caring anymore the way you stop caring about weather. He'd stood there working the dye through gray roots with two fingers, same brown-out-of-a-box he's used since the divorce, because Cheryl once said the gray made him look like somebody's uncle and some sentences just live in a man's head rent-free for a decade after the woman who said them is gone. He thought about texting her. He didn't. He hasn't in four months. He still knows her number cold.

The shirt is next, plain black cotton gone soft, and it gives you the whole morning ritual, unhurried, his: t-shirt over the shoulder that clicks when he raises it too fast, jeans worked up over knees that complain on the stairs but never in the ring, somehow, never once in the ring. Sneakers by the door, already broken into the shape of his feet. He'd stood a second in the kitchen doorway with his ring binder of a boy's amateur record, proud in a way he'd never say to the kid's face, then locked up and gone to work twelve hours on feet that ached by hour four and didn't stop aching by hour twelve, because that's what fifty-four is, an argument your body wins by never ending it.

The gym comes back in pieces off his palms — the wrap on the bag posts, chalk dust, the particular give of leather mitts he's had resewn twice, Eddie's father shaking his hand too hard at the door, some other trainer's joke he still hasn't figured out if he liked. He drove Eddie home once when the kid's ride fell through and didn't think twice about it and never mentioned it again to anyone, and that's the kind of thing nobody puts in an obituary and it's the truest thing about him anyway. He has never once, not one time in fifty-four years, quit smoking and started again — quit once, for good, when a doctor used the word *before it's too late* and he took it literally the way he takes most things literally, and never touched one since, though some Tuesdays in traffic his fingers still go looking for one in a shirt pocket that's never had it. His hands are doing that now, without him, a phantom errand, worrying at a nail instead, the same bitten-down half-moons he's had since he was nine.

There's a woman's name sitting warm somewhere under all of it — Cheryl — not urgent, just there the way a bruise is there, and a small back office with a space heater and a card table and a life that adds up to something modest and unspectacular in a bank three miles from here, and none of that matters to you yet, none of it is yours, but for one more second it sits in the body like a room you've walked into with the lights still on from whoever left last.

Your hands come off the wheel completely now, and you hold them up in the dash glow, turning them, watching the tendons work like you invented the idea of tendons. Bitten nails. A callus at the base of each finger, permanent, leather-shaped. A watch that isn't yours ticking against a wrist that isn't yours, attached to an ache in the lower back that will apparently be with you every single hour from now on unless you leave before you have to feel it get worse.

You say, out loud, to no one, in his flat unbothered voice, "Okay. Okay, that's — okay," and you let the wheel find itself again under palms that already know exactly how much correction this exit needs, while behind your eyes, patient as weather, the wheel at vessel.cards keeps spinning without you, waiting to see how long you decide fifty-four years of somebody else's aching back is worth staying inside.