David Amano

Gary Petrowski's kitchen smells like microwaved chili and the dish soap his ex-wife bought before she left it and him both. You have been Gary for eleven months of a life that is not yours and you are tired of his knees, tired of the way his back seizes getting out of the car, tired of the particular grief of a man whose direct reports do not respect him and whose body agrees with them. Tonight there was a work email, small and stupid, a project handed to someone younger, and Gary — you, wearing Gary — sat at this laminate counter feeling something in his chest that was not quite a heart attack and not quite nothing, and you thought: not this. Not one more Tuesday of this. The laptop is open to vessel.cards, the wheel already spinning on the screen with the sound off, and you do not wait to see Gary's face doing whatever it's doing when the light takes it. You are already gone before it lands.

It lands sitting upright on a couch that is not Gary's, in a room that is not Gary's kitchen, with a remote loose and light in one hand and a body under you that does not ache anywhere you can find yet. The television throws blue across a coffee table crowded with mail. Your spine — his spine — is straight in a way Gary's hasn't been in years. Somewhere behind your sternum a jaw is already clenched, out of habit, before you've thought a single thought in it.

The couch fabric under your palm is the first key: a flash of a delivery truck, two guys carrying this thing up a Brooklyn stoop in the rain, a wife — Miyako, the name arrives with her face, laughing at the men for scraping the doorframe — pointing where it should go. Gone eight years now. The ring is the second key, cool and worn thin on the left hand, and it opens wider than the couch does: a wedding in a backyard in Fort Lee, her sister crying louder than her mother, the two of them dancing badly on purpose because dancing well felt like a performance neither of them wanted to give. Decades folded into that thin gold circle — an argument about money that lasted a year in slow motion and then resolved itself the way real arguments do, by both people getting older and tireder of being right. Two kids raised in this apartment and the one before it: a daughter in Portland who calls on Sundays, a son who doesn't call enough and feels bad about it in a way that never quite becomes a phone call.

The gray sweatpants against your legs bring back nothing dramatic — just years of them, the specific comfort of clothes that owe you nothing. The remote in your hand is heavier with memory than it has any right to be: decades of evenings, some with her beside him doing the crossword and heckling the news, most now without her, the television turned to something with a laugh track because silence in this apartment has a shape he doesn't like being alone with. He quit drinking somewhere in there, quit smoking before that, both times for her, both habits outliving neither vice nor wife but somehow the wanting to quit stuck around after she didn't. Under the sweatshirt: a body that swims three mornings a week at the Y on Court Street, strong in the shoulders, a little stiff in the left knee from a ski trip in the nineties nobody warned him he'd still be paying for. The retirement came four years ago from something in finance he was good at and never loved, and the money sits now mostly unspent, mostly unmentioned, in accounts his kids don't know the size of.

There is a show playing. Something with a studio audience. He'd laughed thirty seconds ago — you can feel where the laugh should have gone, a groove in the muscle of the face that isn't firing — and now the same joke lands and nothing in this face moves for it, because the thing sitting behind David Amano's eyes has never found that show funny and doesn't intend to start.

You look down. The hand on your knee has age spots you didn't design and a wedding band you didn't earn, and you turn it palm-up under the blue television light like you're checking it for a seam.

"There you are," you say, to no one, to the ring, to the empty half of the couch — and you have no idea, sitting up straight in a dead man's good posture, how long you intend to let him stay dead.