Denny Fasano

The screen is the only light in the room and it has been for an hour, maybe more. You don't count anymore, on nights like this — the ones with nothing scheduled inside them, no reason to stop scrolling except that your thumb gets tired before your head does. You have wanted this specific thing for so long it stopped feeling like wanting and started feeling like a fact about you, the way some people just know they'd like to fly, or breathe underwater, or die and come back. You have read every thread about it. You have watched every movie that even gestures at it, the freaky Friday of it, the invasion-of-the-body of it, and you have always come away hungry in the same unscratchable place. Nobody has ever been able to sell it to you before tonight. The page is plain, almost insultingly plain, white and a wheel and a price, like it's ashamed to be doing what it's doing. You pay anyway. You spin anyway. You do not expect anything, which is its own kind of lie you tell yourself right up until the wheel stops.

There is no sensation of going. There is only arriving, already in motion — a hand, not yours yet, drawing a razor up a jaw against the grain, no hesitation where hesitation usually lives, at the corner of the mouth. The stroke finishes clean. Foam is cold-warm against a cheek that isn't yours and immediately is. You are bent at a sink you have never seen, one bare foot up on a toilet lid for the height of it, water ticking somewhere in old pipes, a bulb overhead throwing hard yellow light across cracked white tile. The weight of a body settles onto you like a coat put on by someone else's arms — shorter than whatever you pictured, compact through the middle, and there's an ache low in the right knee already, old and uncomplaining, the ache of a man who has knelt on hard floors for twenty years doing close work.

The razor is what gives him to you first. It is worn smooth along one edge where a thumb has run over it a thousand mornings, and it hands you, without asking, the size of this bathroom — a single-wide, sun-warped paneling, sagebrush pressing gray-green up against the step outside the window that you cannot see yet but already know is there. Denny. The name arrives with the razor too, the way your own name would just be there if someone said it in a crowd. Denny Fasano, and the shift he pulled last night was an overnighter — a walk-in at two in the morning, a kid crying about a breakup wanting his ex's name lasered off with something bigger inked over it, and Denny sat with him for three hours because that's what you do, because eleven a.m. is midnight when you've been up that long, because the body doesn't know sun from moon once you've decided the day is backwards.

The sink's chipped porcelain edge is under your left hand, gripped for balance, and the ring on that hand wakes something bigger than the bathroom. A wedding — outdoor, folding chairs, a friend's guitar instead of a real band, his wife in a dress she found on clearance and swore she'd never tell anyone the price of. Twenty-two years, near enough, of her elbow finding his ribs in sleep, of arguments about money that never got mean, of two kids now taller than her, one of them with her chin exactly. Somewhere further back, worn soft at the edges like a photo handled too much, there's a girl from before all that — an ex whose name comes with a particular color of evening, a porch, a version of himself that never quite closes the door all the way even twenty years on. He doesn't dwell there. He never lets himself dwell there. The ring corrects the drift, pulls the feeling back home every time, and it does now too.

The jeans are already on him, worn in at the knee from kneeling over strangers' skin, and they bring the shop with them — fluorescent hum, autoclave smell, a chair kept reclined between appointments because the next guy's always fifteen minutes out on high-desert time. Your own forearm, when you glance down mid-shave, carries a black-and-gray face rendered so real it looks like it's about to speak — someone he loved enough to put permanently under his own skin, done years ago in another man's chair, the pain of it a bright memory arriving with the ink like a smell. Your hands know things you didn't teach them: how to hold a machine steady above a stranger's shoulder blade for four hours without a shake, how to read a wince and know if it means stop.

Under your feet the linoleum is cool and cracked. Against your back, nothing yet — the shirt's still folded somewhere else, this morning barely a shirt at all, just skin and foam and the freckles scattered warm-pink across a nose that has burned in this sun every summer since childhood and never once tanned properly. There's a looseness low in the belly that's just age doing what age does at forty-eight, and a leg — the left one — that starts up its old bounce the second you stop consciously holding it still, some motor in him that runs whether or not he's driving.

You look at the hand holding the razor. It is not your hand, and it is the only hand you have, and for a second both of those things are exactly as true as each other.

"Huh," you say, out loud, to the cracked mirror, in a voice that isn't the one you don't have anymore. "Missed a spot."

You didn't. You know you didn't. You just wanted to hear what his voice does with a joke nobody else will ever get.