Douglas Merchant

The apartment is Mateo's, and it is one minute old to you. You are standing in his kitchen in his body, and the light through the window is flat San Francisco afternoon, and there's a smell of citrus solvent on the counter from cleaning tattoo gear that his hands know and yours don't. You spun for him only sixty seconds ago and already the wanting is back, that itch under the sternum that has nothing to do with Mateo at all, that started long before him and will outlast him too. You don't dislike this one. He's young, strong, good hands, a whole life of ink and noise ahead of him that some version of you could enjoy for a while. But a minute is not enough to feel anything but the hum of the site still open on his phone, the wheel still spinning lazy behind your eyes, and you know — the way you always know now, two hundred and seventeen times deep — that the feeling doesn't go away by staying still. It goes away by spinning. So you don't even finish looking around his apartment. You thumb the phone, the site loads, the wheel is already sort of a friend by now, and you pay, and you spin, not for anything in particular, just for the drop of the floor before the catch.

The floor drops.

You are behind a different face, mid-motion, hands at ten and two, a road unspooling black under white lines, a dashboard glowing up into somebody else's knuckles. Freckled knuckles. A wedding band catching green light off the speedometer. The car drifts a foot toward the shoulder line and you correct — no, it corrects, some old animal competence in the arms doing it before you've caught up to owning them — and your hands come off the wheel and go back on it lower, wider, more comfortable, the way a man sits when he's driven this road four thousand times. The blinker clicks on. Not for his exit. For the wrong one. Nobody in the car notices, because there's nobody in the car but him, and now you.

The shirt is what gives you the first of it — a plaid flannel, soft at the elbows from wash after wash, and touching the wheel through its sleeve you get a flash of a bedroom this morning, gray early light, a woman's back turned in sleep, and the quiet care of a man dressing without waking her. Sleeve, then the other sleeve. A shirt his daughter bought him two Christmases ago because she said the old one had a hole under the arm, and he'd worn the old one anyway, most days, but not today — today for some reason he'd reached for this one, and there's a small pleased vanity in that, a fifty-eight-year-old man wanting one soft flannel shirt to feel decent in.

The wheel gives you more — twenty years of it, cold gripped rubber under palms, the fly rail up in the flies of a theater, blue running light down on a floor far below, ropes counterweighted and singing faintly under his hands during a scene change, the particular calm of knowing exactly when to pull. Not glamorous work. He loves it anyway, the invisible competence of it, the way nobody in the seats ever thinks about who moved the wall.

The ring says a marriage, twenty-some years running now, second one, hard-won after a first that ended loud and young when the kids were small — an ex-wife's voice still surfacing sometimes in dreams, not unkind now, just a chapter closed. Three kids, more than three, grown or getting there, a phone full of texts about braces and car insurance and one who calls just to talk. A church on Sundays, folding chairs and a worship band, a faith that isn't loud but is load-bearing. A blood pressure pill every morning with orange juice, swallowed without thinking, same as breathing. Freckles under his own fingers — his hand keeps drifting to his face at red lights, an old unconscious tic, checking himself the way other men check mirrors.

The cul-dac is close now, three miles becoming two, the heavy Atlanta evening air pressing even through the glass, cicadas somewhere unheard, porch lights starting to come on for people he's known for a decade. Home. Wife inside probably starting dinner. A whole warm ordinary Monday closing down around a man who does not know he has already left it.

You look down at your hands on the wheel — freckled, steady, a plain gold band catching the dash light — and something in you that isn't him and never will be turns them over slow, like checking they're really there.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to no one, to the empty car, to the wrong exit already ticking its blinker into the dark. "Okay, Doug."

You don't know yet how long you'll let the blinker run before you correct it, or him, or yourself. You never do.