Douglas Merker

Five minutes in Sammy Nassar's skin and already the shine is gone off it. You're standing in his condo with the blackout curtains still drawn against a Sunday morning, some ring light cooling on its stand, and this beautiful body feels like a rental car — the metabolism that won't let you sit still, the phone that won't stop buzzing with people who love a face you didn't earn, a diet you didn't choose, six thousand strangers waiting for a man who isn't in here anymore. You spun for young and got restless. That's the joke nobody tells you about the wheel: the good bodies are loud. You want quiet. You want weight that stays where you put it. You open the site on his phone with his own too-smooth hand and you spin, not for anything, really — just to get out of the noise for a while.

The fork stops an inch from your mouth.

You feel it before you see it — the pull in a lower back that already aches, a knee that clicks going down, the particular tiredness in a body that has been carrying itself carefully for a while now, like it's proving something to a doctor. You set the fork down. Your hand does it slower than you meant, like the hand already knew this counter, this container, this exact tired end of a day that, for him, hasn't started yet. Cold rice and chicken. A jacket still zipped. A window in front of you gone black with night while, underneath, some other clock — his — insists it's barely past breakfast.

You shrug the coat off. It's the coat that opens first — canvas gone soft at the elbows, a weight in the left pocket you know without looking is keys, a lighter he doesn't use, a receipt from a gas station forty miles from anywhere. The zipper going down drags a whole morning up with it: him pulling this same jacket over a gray sweater in a bedroom with the blinds already yellow-hot, his wife still asleep, him easing the door so it wouldn't click, because Sundays she sleeps and he goes to the office anyway, even now, even six years past the diagnosis he doesn't tell people about unless they ask twice. The band on his left hand is warm before you notice you're wearing it. Twenty-six years of a woman named Carol who stopped asking him to slow down because she learned, the hard way, that slowing down was never the deal — he negotiates, he doesn't rest.

Sitting down at the little dinette, the vinyl seat cold and cracking under legs that are shorter than the ones you had this morning, brings the rest of him up in pieces, the way a deposition does — out of order, and truer for it. A courthouse in Elko with his name on a plaque he had to pay for himself. A daughter at Reno who calls on Sundays, a son who doesn't call much at all and it eats at him more than the chemo did. Twenty-two months of infusions he drove to alone so Carol wouldn't have to watch, and the scan that came back clean, and how he cried in the truck in the parking lot for four minutes exactly and then drove home and didn't mention it. The leg under this table is already going, bouncing on the ball of the foot, an engine that never got the message the danger passed. Money enough now that he doesn't need the trailer, the sagebrush yard, the blocks under the frame — but leaving would mean admitting something he's not ready to admit, so he stays, and the practice pays for a lake house he visits four times a year and doesn't love.

You eat in his even mouthfuls, not tasting it, watching your own reflection do nothing in the black glass. Whoever he is, he does not perform his life even alone in a kitchen at night. He just finishes what's in front of him, because that's what got him through the two years he doesn't talk about.

You set the empty container down and look at your hands — the left one heavier for the ring, the right one still smelling faintly of the lighter he carries for no reason he'd tell you, the fingers of a fifty-one-year-old man that already know how to hold a pen a jury believes.

"Okay," you say to the dark window, to nobody, to whatever's next. "Let's see what you're worth."