Desmond Fairweather

Warren Oxendine has been sitting in the leather chair for less than a minute when the boredom finds you again, the way it always does — quicker in him than in most, because this body has never had to want anything twice. Sixty-one years old, bald by choice, a beauty mark on a jaw that has signed things for thirty years, skinny fat under a suit that costs more than some men's cars. You feel his heartbeat, a little arrhythmic from something he never mentions to his cardiologist, and you feel how little it moves him to be him. There is a satellite feed of a board meeting still open on the laptop in front of you, muted. You do not close it. You just open the site, the way you always do, and Warren Oxendine's manicured thumb — bitten cuticles would embarrass a man like this, and his are perfect — finds the wheel and spins it, because winning at everything, forever, in a body that never wanted for anything, turns out to be its own kind of nothing at all.

The wheel stops on Wednesday afternoon, Seattle, a cleanroom you've never stood in.

Your hand — his hand — is between two of your fingers, holding a tool so small the name of it hasn't arrived yet, poised above a satellite panel the size of a briefcase. The motion breaks. You feel it break, a stutter in something that was gliding, and then it corrects, slows, checks itself against a memory that isn't fully yours yet. White light. A coat pulling at the shoulders, longer than a coat should be. Something missing at the front of your mouth where your tongue keeps going to touch it and finding air.

The lanyard is the first thing that gives you anything — a lanyard against your sternum, plastic warm from his body — and it comes back as a name badge photo taken four years ago, a receptionist telling him to smile with his mouth closed, and him laughing at that instead, the gap on display anyway, because Desmond Fairweather stopped trying to hide it around year two. A dirt bike, fifteen years old, front tooth meeting handlebar on a gravel lot in Rainier Beach. His mother crying more than he did. His father saying at least it's not a real one, boy, real ones don't grow back — which was not true, not exactly, but was the kind of thing his father said instead of are you okay.

The coat holds the next flash — not this morning, an ordinary one, the kind that doesn't announce itself: standing in his kitchen at some pre-dawn hour buttoning it over a checked shirt he'd already buttoned once, badge already looped, keys already in the coat pocket where he always puts them so he stops patting himself down at the door. Coffee left two-thirds full on the counter because he always makes too much and never remembers that about himself until the mug is already full again. The rain doing its Seattle thing against the window, neither storm nor absence of one. He'd thought about texting Renata — not his ex-wife's name yet, just a warmth attached to a shape — then hadn't, because it had been eight months since the divorce and he was trying, actually trying, to let a Tuesday go by without her in it.

The tool in your fingers gives you the job: nine years at this bench, longer at this company than most engineers stay anywhere, and none of it because he lacked the numbers to leave for somewhere flashier. He stayed because he liked watching a thing built for the vacuum of space get handled like it was made of eggshell by people who cursed and joked and ate lunch twelve feet from a payload worth more than the building. He liked being one of maybe four hundred people on the planet who could feel, through a gloved hand, whether a solder joint was going to survive a launch.

Renata is in the safety glasses somehow, or in the memory the glasses drag up — her voice, years back, asking him why he needed glasses for something that looked like sitting still with tweezers, and him laughing, the gap showing, telling her it's not the falling that gets you, it's not looking. She left two summers ago for reasons that were hers and his both, mostly quiet ones, the kind that don't have a villain in them. He still has her number saved under her first name only, which he thinks about sometimes and does nothing about.

The beard against your own touch — you register it without meaning to, your fingers migrating there on their own the way his do — three days since it was last trimmed close to the jaw, evangelical mother's voice still in his head from a phone call this week about church on Sunday, a promise he intends, mostly, to keep. Church is one of the steadier rooms in him. It was there before Renata and it is there after her.

The ache is small and specific: skinny fat, a body he has made peace with rather than fought, shoulders that get tight from bending over benches, a lower back that complains on the drive home, hands — his hands, small and quick — that go to his mouth and bite when nobody's watching, a habit he's had since he was nine and never managed to starve out of himself no matter how much money sat in the account that could pay for someone to fix it.

You look down. His fingers are still closed around the tool, hovering a half-inch off the panel, exactly where the check stopped it. Nail beds bitten short. A missing tooth you can feel with your tongue before you ever see it in a mirror. A small silver hoop warm against your own earlobe.

You set the tool down, careful, the way nine years taught these hands to be careful with anything, and you look up into the window's reflection, coffee shop glow smudged gold against the wet street behind it, and you say, to no one, in his voice: "Okay. Let's not rush this one."