David Chen

The garage smells like brake cleaner and the particular sweat of a Nashville Wednesday that has not cooled off at six p.m., and you are standing in it wearing Elias Marroquín's hands, looking at a transmission you fixed three minutes ago without one wrong thought. That's the trouble. Three minutes in and you already know the whole shape of him: the ex-wife who calls about money, the girlfriend who wants a ring he can't afford, the ache low in his back from a lift he shouldn't have done alone. It is a good body. It is a body with problems you already understand completely, and that is somehow worse than a body with problems you don't. You didn't spin seventy times to arrive somewhere legible. You wipe your hands on a rag that isn't yours and you think: not this, not tonight, and you are already reaching for the phone in his pocket before you've decided anything, already at vessel.cards, already watching the wheel spin on a cracked screen in a dim garage while somewhere a man you have never met sleeps through the end of his own day.

The wheel lands.

You are face-down and then you are on your back, and the difference is the whole world. The arm that was hanging into open air draws itself up like something remembered rather than decided, and your hands — his hands — fold at your chest as if in a coffin, which is not a thought you would have chosen and which the body seems to have offered on its own. Streetlight comes through a two-inch gap in heavy curtains and lies across the ceiling in a blade. The room smells like fabric softener and something faintly medicinal. Your breathing, which was ragged a half-second ago for reasons that belong to someone else, goes even, the way a held note resolves. It is eleven in the morning here, you will learn, though the body doesn't know that yet and neither do you — only that the light is wrong for sleep and nobody in this house seems to care.

The wedding band is the first thing. It's cool and it's tight over a knuckle that has swollen slightly with sixty-one years of living, and touching it — just the weight of it against the finger next to it — opens a door: a woman's laugh in a kitchen that smelled like ginger and scallion oil, her hand flat on his chest at two in the morning after a bad night, the specific gravity of Linh saying his name like it still meant something twenty-six years in. Not young love. Worn-in love, love that has done dishes and split shifts and sat in waiting rooms. He works nights — that's why the room is dark at this hour, why the curtains are the good blackout kind, why sleep is a thing scheduled around a route sheet instead of a sun. The high blood pressure lives in this arm too, a small persistent hum under the skin, a doctor's voice saying watch the sodium, David, and him nodding and not really watching it.

The shirt is folded on the chair by the window and touching the memory of it — because his hand is not on it now, but the body remembers the putting-on of it hours ago before this sleep, remembers everything a body remembers — gives you a whole morning before the morning: the brown polo with CITY EXPRESS stitched white over the pocket, CHEN on the tag his coworker Deb sewed on crooked two years ago and he never had it fixed because fixing it felt like admitting he cared. Pulling it over his head in a bathroom with the fan broken, one arm first out of habit, the collar catching a little on the left ear the way it always does. The cargo shorts, broken in soft at the thighs, the scanner holster clipped on before he's even had coffee because putting it on early means one less thing to remember later. His hands know this ritual so well they do it half-asleep, literally, some mornings — a man dressing for a shift that starts while other men are still eating dinner.

There is an ex-wife in here too, arriving through the ring finger somehow, through absence more than contact — a woman named Grace, tired arguments about money and about a son who stopped calling either of them for a while, the particular grief of a marriage that didn't fail loudly, just wore through like a sole. And there are two kids, one grown and distant and one still at the house sometimes, a daughter's voice on the phone asking if he's eating enough vegetables, ba, and him laughing because she sounds so much like her mother when she nags.

His body: skinny fat, soft through the middle where the muscle used to be denser, but the forearms still ropy and quick from fifteen years of boxes, hands that know without asking how to angle a package through a doorframe, how to read a porch for a dog before the dog reads you. The knees complain a little even lying still. The high forehead is bare and cool against the pillow where the hair used to be. One eye behind the closed lid sees the room faintly blue-tinted from habit, the other faintly warm — he stopped noticing the difference himself decades ago, but the body hasn't, it just sees in two slightly different keys and calls that seeing.

You lift the hand off your chest and look at it in the blade of streetlight — spotted, ringed, the nail beds a little ridged with age — and it is such a plain, unremarkable, entirely lived-in hand that something in you, still faintly Elias, still faintly seventy other men, goes quiet in a way it hasn't in a while.

"Linh," you say to the empty room, quiet, testing the name in his voice, not sure yet if you mean it as her husband or as a man borrowing the word to see how it fits.