Dominic Okafor

The apartment is quiet the way it always is after work, after the scroll, after nothing. You have had this particular hunger for years — not the wanting-to-be-someone-else of a bad day, but the older, stranger one, the one that made you stay up watching threads of strangers describe waking up in other skins, made you rewatch the same three films about swapped faces, made you close tabs quickly when someone walked past. There was never anywhere to spend it. Now there is a wheel on a screen, gray and patient, and a button that says spin, and a price that you pay without letting yourself think about it, because thinking about it is how you talk yourself out of things you have wanted since before you can remember wanting.

The wheel turns. It stops.

There is no falling, no tunnel, no light. There is a jet bridge, brownish carpet, a window with cold gold light coming through it low and long, and a heaviness that is not yours settling all at once into a stance, weight low in the hips, weight in a gut that did not used to be there, weight in a wide flat stance built for standing all day. A binder is open under your — his — hands. Your right hand is turning a page it has turned ten thousand times, and it turns wrong, catches, thumbs it back, does it again slow and careful, and the pilot standing here would not have noticed, except that for a fraction of a second nobody was steering, and now you are, and every checklist item after that comes out read twice.

The shirt is against your back, tucked, short-sleeved, and it gives you something first, before anything else does — a bedroom before dawn, an alarm at 4:40, buttoning this exact shirt bottom to top by feel in the dark so as not to wake her, epaulets slid on last, the little brass weight of them settling on shoulders that already ache some mornings from nothing at all. Marisol's voice, half-asleep, telling him to eat something before he goes. The smell of her hair on the pillow he didn't roll onto. He never says goodbye standing up; he leans down. That's this morning, sleeve by sleeve, coming back through cotton against your skin that isn't skin you grew.

The tie is a small tight knot at your throat and it brings the mirror in the hall, the one with the crack in the corner they never fixed, seven years now, him tying it three times because the ends kept coming out uneven, laughing at himself a little, nobody there to see it.

The tattoos on your forearm — cross, praying hands, faded now, thicker lines than they used to be because skin stretches — don't bring faith, because there isn't any in him, hasn't been since a funeral fifteen years back that emptied it out of him quietly and without drama. What they bring instead is the tattoo parlor itself, nineteen years old, a friend who is dead now holding his other arm steady, laughing, the two of them thinking it meant something bigger than it turned out to mean. He kept it anyway. Some things you keep the way you keep old furniture — not because you believe in it, because it's already yours.

The ring is the heaviest thing on you and it isn't heavy at all. It brings a wedding fourteen years back, a backyard, folding chairs, his mother crying more than his wife did. It brings two kids, a boy who plays trumpet badly and beautifully, a girl who used to sleep on his chest when she was small enough to fit there, who doesn't anymore, who is thirteen now and has stopped needing him to carry her anywhere. It brings the house that is not paid for and will maybe never be paid for, a hundred thousand dollars of hole under it that he does not tell Marisol he thinks about at 4:40 in the mornings, in the dark, buttoning this shirt.

Your chest pulls on an inhale — not panic, just the old tightness, the inhaler in the flight bag he has never once been without since he was nine — and pulls fine, this time, air going where it's supposed to.

Your left hand finds your right thumb without being told to and starts working at the cuticle there, worrying it the way it has for forty-five years, an old habit older than the ring, older than the faith he lost, older than any of it.

You look down at both hands — his hands, wide, a nick on one knuckle from a cowling three years back, cuticles ragged, ring dull with wear — and you turn them over slowly in the jet bridge light like you've never seen hands do that before, because you haven't, not these.

You look up, out through the glass at the nose of the plane, at the tarp-covered shape of a snowmobile behind the plywood wall in your memory that isn't in front of you now, and you say, quiet, mostly to yourself:

"Okay. Okay — I'm here."

Nobody answers. Nobody ever finds out he isn't. And somewhere behind your borrowed eyes is a wheel that will spin again — not tonight, maybe, not tomorrow, no one knows — and until then, and only until then, he is yours.