Derek Vansell

Karim's client cancels at two, and the gym goes quiet the way it never does, all that rubber-and-chalk smell and nobody in it but you, resetting a bench nobody used, wiping down a rack nobody touched. That's the thing about ninety spins in: you start to notice the space between clients more than the clients. Karim is twenty-four and his shoulders never stop aching in the good way, and his heart doesn't have anything wrong with it, and none of that is the problem. The problem is that you already know the exact shape of every afternoon Karim has. You know where the sun hits the mirror wall at 2:40. You know the regular who always asks the same question about creatine. There is nothing left in him to be surprised by, and you have started keeping the phone open to the site the way some men keep a bar open on a tab, thumb over the wheel, telling yourself you're just looking. You are not just looking. You spin.

The dark comes first — not a room, a pressure, a pillow smell — and then air moving into lungs that are not doing what you told them to. The arm that should be dangling off a bed draws itself up on its own, unbidden, before you've even caught hold of the wanting to move it, hands folding at a chest you don't own yet, breath dropping from a ragged thing into something slow and even like a held note. You are face up in sheets that smell like fabric softener and someone else's sleep. Streetlight cuts a blade through a gap in curtains you've never seen. It is bright out somewhere past that gap in a way that doesn't match the dark of the room, and you don't know yet that it's the wrong kind of bright for a man lying down, that somewhere a clock says early afternoon.

The sheet under your fingers gives you the first of it: a bad night, grading essays until midnight, the particular ache of standing in front of twenty-six ninth-graders for six hours behind a body that isn't built for standing still. You didn't sleep because you don't really sleep well anymore, not since Tammy Lynch left three years back and took the two kids on alternating weekends, not since the doctor found the thing in your heart that means you're not supposed to run stadium stairs the way you used to when you coached JV track. You feel that first — a tightness low in the chest, old and familiar, a thing this body has learned to live around the way you learn to walk with a limp.

The mattress gives you more: this is a spare bed, not the one Danielle sometimes stays over in — Danielle, who teaches art two doors down, who laughs at your bad jokes in the copy room, who you haven't told about the heart thing yet because you don't want to see her face do the thing it'll do. This bed is the one in the room you moved into after the divorce, in the house with the one stoplight and the diner that closed in '19 and never reopened, boarded windows staring at the school bus stop every morning like a rebuke.

Your palm finds the tattoo on your own forearm without meaning to — script, a name, a date — and it opens like a door: Eliza, seven pounds two ounces, the worst and best night of your life, your ex-wife's hand crushing yours in a hospital room that smelled like bleach and fear, and then years later a second name inked lower down for your son, a smaller anchor beside it because you used to say your kids were the only thing keeping you steady. You remember getting both done at the same shop in Zanesville, gritting your teeth, thinking about how young you were and how sure.

Sleeve memory comes distinct from all of it — this morning, or some morning very like it, pulling the blue chambray shirt on one arm at a time in front of the closet mirror, buttoning it with the particular economy of a man who's done it four thousand times, clipping the lanyard over his head last because he always forgets it until he's halfway out the door, patting the pocket for the key that unlocks the supply closet nobody else has the code to. The chinos are the ones with the bleach spot from a spill in the chem lab down the hall. The boots are the ones Tammy Lynch used to say made him look taller than he was, said it like a compliment, said it in a voice you can still hear.

You feel the whole architecture of him now, standing in it: thirty-eight years old, a body that still moves like it played some kind of ball in high school, a pen he clicks without noticing when he's thinking, grading papers at his desk after the last bell in a room gone empty and echoing, a habit so worn into the hand it doesn't feel like a habit. A weekend drink or two a month, nothing more, never smoked, sits with his legs crossed at the ankle in meditation some Sunday mornings at the little rented room above the hardware store because it's the only quiet he gets. A man who loves his kids with an ache that has outlasted the marriage, who still keeps something for the ex in a drawer he doesn't open, who has a girlfriend now who is kind and doesn't ask about the thing in his chest, who buys her flowers from the gas station because the flower shop closed with everything else on that street.

The room comes into focus at last — gray curtains, a window too bright behind them, dust in a stripe of light — and none of it is where he thought he'd be lying down at this hour of a Monday. He doesn't know that. He is not here to know it.

You bring the hand up in front of your face, turn it, mole-shadow on your own cheek somewhere just out of sight but felt, the shape of a stranger's knuckles that are already starting to feel less like a costume. Eliza's name catches the thin light. You say, to the empty room, in his voice, "Okay," — not an answer to anything, just the sound a man makes finding himself somewhere new — and you do not yet know for how long.