Danny Rusnak

The conductor's cap is on the hook by the door where he always leaves it, and you have been staring at that hook for eleven seconds by the clock in the hall, which is the longest you have stood still in this apartment in the six weeks you've worn Kenji Ashida. Tokyo is asleep. His wife is asleep. Tomorrow he runs the 6:14 out of Shinjuku the same as every day of the thirty years before you took his seat behind his eyes, and that is the trouble with him, the whole trouble: he is a man who runs on rails literally and in every other sense, and there is nothing left in him to discover. You learned his marriage in a week. You learned his one affair, decades gone, in a night. You have worn him past the last thing he was keeping from himself and now the apartment is just an apartment and his hands on the doorframe are just hands, and somewhere under the boredom, plain and a little ashamed of itself, is the wanting, the itch that only the site answers. You open the laptop at his kitchen table. The wheel is already loaded from last time, the way you left it. You spin it in the dark so his wife doesn't wake.

The turn signal is already ticking — tick, tick — for an exit that does not exist on this stretch of road, and your hands are not at ten and two anymore, they have dropped low and wide on a wheel that is smaller and cheaper than the one you just let go of, and the dash light is green instead of blue, and there are tattoos crawling the forearm in front of your face that were not there a half-second and eleven thousand kilometers ago. The car does not swerve. It comes back onto the line like it was always going to. Behind you, houses you don't recognize slide by dark on both sides, wet leaves on somebody's porch steps caught for a second in the taillights of the car ahead.

The wheel itself gives you nothing — it's dead plastic under your palms until skin remembers skin. Then it comes: ten thousand mornings of this same wheel, cold in November, sun-hot in July, his palms sliding into the grooves worn into it by his own hands over four years of the same truck he doesn't own, a beater Malibu bought used off a guy named Pruitt who used to run with him on the same crew. The crew. That comes next, riding up through the wheel into your arms — the back step of the truck at six a.m., cold enough that his breath used to hang in front of his face like something separate from him, the hydraulic groan of the hopper, the smell that never leaves your gloves no matter how many times you wash them, a smell his girlfriend has stopped mentioning because there's no changing it, it's just Danny now, that's what he smells like, and she kissed him anyway this morning before he left for the day shift that turned into a double.

His shirt is a green tank, sweated through at the collar though the night outside is cool, and it gives you the morning he put it on — reaching into the drawer half-asleep, the girlfriend still under the blanket, her voice muffled asking if he took his pills, meaning the ones for the headaches, and him saying yeah even though the bottle's been empty since Thursday and he keeps forgetting to stop at the Rite Aid. The migraine that's been building behind his left eye since two this afternoon flares now, dull and familiar, a hot wire behind the socket, and you know without being told that it will be worse by the time he's parked in his own driveway, that he'll sit in the dark car for a minute before going in just to let the light stop moving.

The tattoos on his arm are a unit crest, and touching the wheel with the forearm that carries it gives you heat and dust and a friend's name you're not going to think about right now, the way he doesn't either, most days — four years overseas folded down small and kept in a box behind his sternum, unpacked only late at night with a drink in his hand, which is most nights, the girlfriend not loving it but not leaving over it either, not yet, not the way the one before her did, the one whose photos are still in a shoebox in his closet that he tells himself he'll throw out.

The exit sign ticks past, wrong, and some reflex of his own hangs on in the muscle for a half second — a frown starting at the corner of a mouth that isn't yours yet, not really, not the way it will be in a minute — before your foot corrects, easy, unhurried, and the signal clicks off and the right one comes on, and the car settles for the actual exit, his exit, three miles from a woman standing at their kitchen counter right now not even looking at the clock.

You look down. Hazel eyes tracking hands gone rough and scarred across the knuckles, a life's callus you didn't earn, gripping a wheel that is not the one you left eleven thousand kilometers and one whole marriage behind. You turn one hand over on the wheel, slow, watching the tendons move, feeling the migraine tick behind the eye like a second clock nobody asked for.

"There you are," you say, to no one in the car, and take the exit that is his.