Denny Osterhaus

Colin Petrakis's dorm room smells like instant ramen and unwashed sheets, and the moustache above your borrowed lip itches in a way that has stopped being funny around spin four hundred. You are sitting on the edge of a twin bed that is not yours, in a body that is not yours, twenty-two minutes into being a forty-five-year-old man who apparently has a chemistry exam he is never going to take, and the itch on the lip is the thing that decides it. Small, stupid, real. You have been Colin Petrakis for less time than it takes to microwave something, and that is already too long to be somebody whose life you did not choose and whose face makes your face itch. The laptop is open on the desk, the wheel still spinning lazy circles of color from the last time, vessel.cards patient as a slot machine that never has to ask twice. You reach for the trackpad with a hand that has a moustache's worth of nothing to do with you, and you spin.

The copier is warming up with that low mechanical throat-clear it always makes, and your hand — his hand — is walking through a folder of invoices for the ten-thousandth time, and then it isn't. The motion goes wrong. A page turns before the last one is squared, and the correction happens slow, deliberate, like a man double-checking his own competence for the first time in years. You are standing at a front desk in gray Pittsburgh light, wet leaves visible through the window on a concrete stairway outside, a folder heavy and warm from body heat in your left hand, a wedding band cold and thin on the third finger. The next ten pages get checked. Every one. Behind you the office keeps humming, nobody looking, because nothing to see has happened.

The shirt is what opens first — pale blue, short-sleeved, the cotton gone soft at the collar from a hundred washes — and it comes with the specific ordinary weight of this morning: standing in a bathroom with the fan too loud, buttoning it one-handed while the other hand held a mug of coffee already going cold, a bathroom too small for how long you — he — stood there, running a palm over the bald scalp out of habit, not vanity, checking for stubble that never comes in right anymore. Denny Osterhaus has shaved his head since he was twenty-six and stopped noticing it was a choice sometime around thirty. The birthmark on his neck comes with its own weather system entirely — decades of people's eyes sliding to it and then away, decades of not caring anymore except on dates, except once, with Wendy, in a restaurant that had good light, who touched it with her thumb like it was nothing, and it undid him a little, right there over appetizers, in a way his wife stopped doing years before either of them said so out loud.

The folder in your hand brings the job — eleven years at this desk, the copier's smell of hot toner and dust, the particular tedium of being good at something nobody thanks you for. The pants — khakis, a little loose at the waist, the skinny-fat give of a body that drinks more than it lifts — bring the drink: not a crisis, just a fact, bourbon most nights after the kids are down, a cigar on the back steps on the ones when the noise in the house gets to be too much, three kids, maybe four, a wife who married the tattoos on his arms when they still meant something rebellious and now mostly just are there, black tribal ink gone soft-edged with age like everything else about him. Wendy left eleven months ago and still texts sometimes, late, and he still answers, and neither of them has said why out loud, and his wife maybe knows and maybe doesn't and he has never once let himself find out for certain. Under it all, plain and physical: a leg that will not stop bouncing, has never stopped bouncing, not now, not through any of the ten thousand identical mornings that made this man who checks his own work without needing to.

You look down at your hand on the folder — his hand, tattooed, ringed, bouncing knee tapping the desk leg through it like a metronome nobody wound — and you turn it over slowly, watching the birthmark's shadow move across your own jaw in the copier's dark glass.

"There you are," you say, to no one, to the glass, to him, and you do not know yet if that's true for an hour or for years.