David Han-Yoon

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Jaylen Okonkwo has been you for one minute, and already the forklift's cage smells like somebody else's sweat.

That's the thing nobody warns you about the site. Not the spin, not the flash, not the arriving — the smell. You are eighteen years old in a body that isn't the one you grew up dying in, standing on a warehouse floor in Houston with a moustache itching your lip and a nose that has been broken and reset slightly crooked, and the forklift is idling under you like it's waiting for a decision you don't want to make. Your phone is in this kid's back pocket. vessel.cards is still open on it from an hour ago, the wheel spun down and sitting fat and gold on his card — the one with the face you're wearing now, an eighteen-year-old with a dad bod and brown eyes and a habit, you can already feel it in the jaw, of clenching when he's bored.

You are bored. That's the whole reason. One minute in and the forklift's beeping reverse tone is already the worst sound you've heard in either life, and some other man's shift stretches out ahead of you for six more hours that aren't yours to want to finish, and the phone is right there, and the wheel doesn't care that you just landed. It only cares that you pay again.

You don't examine it harder than that. You have never been a man who examines things harder than that. You put it in park, badly, and you spin.

—

The turn signal is already ticking before you understand it's your arm that turned it on.

Your hands — his hands — are lower on the wheel than they were a half-second ago, off ten-and-two and resettled loose at the bottom, and the dash light is green-gold across two knuckles and a wedding band, and the highway is dark on both sides and coming at you through a windshield spattered with the ghosts of gnats. Three miles from a house you have never stood in. The car has drifted a foot and pulled itself straight without you, the way a body does things a half-beat ahead of whoever's driving it.

He does not fight you. There is nothing in here to fight you. There is only the smell of the car — leather going soft with age, a coffee cup gone cold in the console, a fry container from a drive-through three nights old — and your own held breath in a chest wider and heavier than the one you just left, this one carrying its weight low and comfortable, a belt notch loosened one hole past where it used to sit.

—

The wheel comes first. Warm from his palms, worn smooth on the inside curve where thumbs go a thousand times a week. And with it — his hands at ten and two, always, drilled into him at the academy twenty years ago by a training officer who's dead now, who he still hears sometimes on quiet stretches of road. *Hands where they belong, Han-Yoon.* The dimples come with the memory, the way they always come, pulling at the corners of a mouth that is doing nothing at all right now — they show even at rest, his mother used to say, God gave that boy a smile he doesn't even have to use.

The uniform shirt. Not the one he's wearing now — he's in the flannel, off shift, the shirt's home in a locker with his name tape peeling at one corner — but the shirt anyway, arriving through the ghost-memory of his own shoulders knowing its weight: the mic clip at the collar, the two chest pockets, the plate carrier underneath in summer that turns every shift into a slow-cooked thing. Twenty-two years on patrol. A parking lot at dusk, leaning against a cruiser's warm hood, watching a strip mall's lights flicker on one by one, waiting on a call that never came, laughing with his partner about something that isn't in this car with you.

The seatbelt cutting a familiar line across a familiar softness at the stomach — dad bod, the kind you get from good years, and there have been good years. Three kids. Maybe four. The van's car seat clips still bolted in the back of the SUV he drives on weekends, this truck is his, the one he drives alone, the one that smells like his own coffee and nobody else's chaos. A wedding band, plain, no stone, chosen at a shop in Montrose eleven years ago with a man named Peter who cried at the counter because his own parents wouldn't come, and David — you have the name now, it comes with the ring, David Han-Yoon — David held his hand right there under the fluorescent lights and didn't care who saw.

Before Peter there was someone else. Younger, angrier, a name that still surfaces on nights like this one, alone on the highway with the radio off — a boy from the academy days who David loved first and loved badly and let go of for reasons that felt like cowardice for a decade before they started to feel like mercy. He doesn't think of him often. He is thinking of him right now, or you are, through the wheel's grip, through the specific quiet of a car with no one else in it.

The clothes: this morning, his own hands buttoning the flannel over a plain white tee, standing in a bathroom with three toothbrushes not his own crowded into the cup, one kid banging on the door about the bus, Peter already gone to drop the youngest at daycare. The cuffs rolled twice, out of habit, because his forearms run warm even in October. Jeans he's had since before the third kid. Shoes he didn't bother lacing all the way because he was already late leaving the station.

Under all of it: a body that carries twenty extra pounds like it earned them, that gets up slower than it used to, whose lower back complains on long shifts and whose hands — broad, sure, a cop's hands — still know exactly how much pressure a good handshake needs, how to hold a radio mic without looking, how to reach for a seatbelt buckle without breaking eye contact with the road. Heavy drinker, some nights more than others, though not tonight — tonight he's clean and driving and three miles out and thinking, before you arrived, of nothing more complicated than whether Peter waited on dinner.

—

You lift your hands off the wheel the way he never would, and look at them in the dash light — his hands, not yours, the ring catching gold for half a second — and something in the dimples softens the whole face without your permission.

"Sorry, babe," you say to no one in the car, testing the voice, testing whose it is now, "traffic."

Behind that, quieter than the words, is the wheel — spun once already tonight, warm still, waiting for whenever boredom finds you again in this life too.