Desmond Alcindor

The tow truck cab smells like old coffee and someone else's cigarettes even though you quit them years ago in a body that no longer belongs to you. Colton Vasek's hands are on the wheel at a quarter to three in the morning, engine off, phone light washing his face blue in the empty lot behind the garage. Ten minutes you've had him. Already the itch is back — that specific boredom of a body whose ceiling you can already see: twenty-one years old and nothing in the bank, a busted knee he complains about like it's a war wound, a white streak in his hair he's vain about and shouldn't be. You spun for youth last time and youth turned out to be thin. You want weight again. You want somebody with a life stacked up inside him like furniture in a house you get to walk through. You open the site on his phone with his thumbprint, which still works, funny how that carries over, and you watch the wheel spin without waiting to see where Colton goes when you're not wearing him anymore — you never do — and it lands.

Between one breath and the next you are on your knees on a bedspread you have never touched, in a room you have never seen, with your forehead already low and your hands still loosely laced in front of you the way they were a half-second before, when he was the one holding them there. The knees are the first thing — not the transition, the knees, a deep old ache in both of them that has opinions about kneeling on hardwood floors at any hour. Then the low back, a persistent low hum of complaint that has clearly been going on for years, the furniture-in-a-house feeling arriving all at once and heavier than you bargained for. A ceiling fan turning slow overhead. Salt air coming through a cracked balcony door. A digital clock on the nightstand reading a small red hour that does not match the dark outside it, because outside this window a Saturday is already most of the way to another Saturday's night, and somewhere in the muscle memory that isn't yours yet there's a reason he's up at this hour and not asleep like the rest of the building, something about a job that starts before the sun and never quite lets him keep normal time.

The t-shirt against your back is what opens first — worn thin at the shoulder blades, softened by a hundred washes — and it comes with a whole morning: him pulling it over his head in this same room with the light coming up gray through the blinds, the good ache of a shower already loosening what sleep tightened, his boyfriend's voice from the kitchen asking if he wants the good coffee or the other coffee, and him calling back that there is no other coffee in this house anymore, we agreed. That gets a laugh out of somewhere that isn't quite you. The jeans, when you register them against your knees, bring the belt going on last, a habit thirty years deep, tucking the shirt with two fingers the way his mother taught him though she's been gone eleven years now and would not recognize the man doing it. The boots by the door — not on him now, bare feet on hardwood instead, but the memory of them anyway, the particular give of steel toes broken in over decades — bring the shop: the storefront glass going up on the vacuum cups this afternoon, his palms flat against the pane feeling for the shift in weight before it's fully seated, a job he still loves after all these years in a body that increasingly resents doing it. A callus map across both palms that reads like braille if you knew how.

Then the hands laced together bring the actual kneeling — not the shape of it now, the history of it. A meditation cushion he never uses. A temple he goes to twice a year and feels guilty about the other fifty weeks. This isn't devout, this praying, it's closer to a habit he picked up from somebody once and kept because it settles something before sleep — except it's not before sleep, it's the middle of a working night for a man whose shifts run backward from everyone else's, kneeling here half out of ritual and half out of nothing better to do with his hands while his mind runs its numbers: money owed that keeps him up some nights worse than any hour ever could, a hole he dug slow over years and can't seem to climb from. Somewhere past that, lighter, is a name — his boyfriend's, asleep two rooms over probably, or maybe on shift himself — and past that, further back, an old ache with a different shape, an ex he still thinks of on nights like this one for reasons he'd never say out loud to anyone currently breathing in this apartment. Two children who are grown now and call on Sundays, whose photographs are somewhere in this room you haven't found yet. A cigarette he hasn't had in nine years and still sometimes reaches for at moments exactly like this one. A drink he decided, a long time ago, he was done with, and has stayed done with through things that would have flattened someone less stubborn. Underneath all of it, older than any single memory, the low grinding hum of joints that have laid glass and swung tools for four decades and intend to keep complaining about it for the duration.

The jaw is already clenched. It was clenched the second you arrived and you didn't notice until now, an old unconscious habit running on its own before you'd even finished getting your feet — his feet — under this body's history.

You get to the amen early, half-laughing at your own math about the money, and start to rise — and stop. Come back down onto both knees instead, because something in you that is not fully you yet wants one more second here before whatever the night is going to ask of him.

You look at your hands. Broad, freckled across the backs the same as his face is, knuckles swollen slightly at the second joint, a callus map you didn't earn and now, apparently, owns you as much as you own it. You turn them over once, like you're checking they're real, then lift your eyes to the room — the lamp, the clock, the cracked door letting in the ocean's noise — and say, quiet, mostly to yourself:

"Well. Guess I'm not done praying."

Nobody answers. Nobody's supposed to. Somewhere behind you, tomorrow is not yet decided, and the wheel is not going anywhere.