Dennis Okimura

The site loads slow on purpose, like it wants you to think about what you're doing. A wheel, spokes going gray to gold, a button that just says SPIN. You've circled this fascination for years — every movie where somebody wakes up wrong, every forum thread you read at two in the morning and never posted in — and always it was a thing you watched other people want. Tuesday. Late morning where you are, nothing on, the kind of dull you don't notice until something breaks it. You pay. You spin. You do not expect it to take.

It takes.

There is a bench under a squat rack, and your knees are under your forearms, and your breath is going out through your teeth on a five-count that isn't yours but that your chest already knows how to run. A water bottle sweats on the floor by a boot. The bar is two inches wider in your hands than it should be — you don't know that, but the shoulders do, correcting without you, the last rep grinding down slow and even, no grimace, no finish-face, like whoever was driving this the second before decided not to make a show of the end. Fluorescent light. Rubber floor smell, chalk, the low clang of somebody else's plates two racks over. Early morning in a city you've never stood in, and your body — his body — is heavy in a way that isn't fat, isn't weak, is just old and used and still willing.

The denim shirt is against your back and it opens first, small and stupid: a Sunday, sleeves rolled past the forearm, a cigar on the porch rail and turquoise paint peeling under his elbow, no one calling him inside because no one lives there to call him. Then the shirt's buttons under fingers that already know their order without looking — that's a year, that's every morning, cuffs first, always cuffs first, an old habit from cold garages before dawn. The mole on the cheek isn't a thing you see, it's a thing his own hand has touched a thousand times shaving around it, careful, a groove worn into the motion.

The bar's knurling bites the same callus it's bitten for eleven years. The knees know the bench. The bad eye in the left knee flares on the last inch of the rep and gets ignored, the way it always gets ignored, because Dennis Okimura has never once in sixty-three years stopped a set for something that only aches. His leg starts bouncing the second his hands are free of the bar, has been bouncing his whole life whenever his hands have nothing else to do, a tow-truck man's tell, three kids' worth of waiting rooms and unemployment offices and one ex-wife's lawyer's office, bounced through all of it.

There's a tan line on the ring finger that isn't touching anything right now, but it doesn't need to — it's already open, a whole marriage in it, twenty-two years, the fights about money that were really about the drinking, the drinking that was really about the highway at three a.m. and every wreck he'd ever pulled a stranger out of and never told her about. And after the marriage, a woman younger than the marriage was long, who left four months ago and took the good coffee maker and left the bad feeling, and he still reaches for his phone some nights before he remembers not to.

The chain from the yard is heavier in memory than the water bottle is in the now, both his, both proof of the same hands: hands that wrap chain around an axle in the dark on a shoulder with headlights blowing past at eighty, hands steady around a job that would panic somebody younger. Diabetes sits low and quiet in him, a thing he manages by ignoring half of what he's told, a thing that makes his fingertips a little numb right now on the bar, which is why gripping it wider felt, for one second, like nothing at all.

You sit in all of it — the marriage, the kids grown and scattered and calling on birthdays only, the turquoise house with the chain-link gone crooked from monsoon, the cigar smoke, the whiskey he isn't supposed to have and has anyway, three sets deep into a Tuesday before the sun's even up because sleep stopped coming easy somewhere around fifty-five.

You look at your hands. Thick, spotted, a callus map of thirty years of chain and cable, a pale stripe on the ring finger like a scar that never broke skin.

"Whose gym is this," you say, out loud, to nobody, and it isn't really a question about the gym.