Dwight Mercer

You spin because you've spun this exact fantasy in your head a thousand times before there was ever a wheel for it — every movie where someone wakes up wrong, every thread at two in the morning where strangers described what it would feel like, in someone else's weight, for even a minute. Thursday afternoon, nothing on, the kind of dull you don't notice until you're clicking through it. vessel.cards loads slow on a bad connection. You didn't think it would work. You paid anyway. You spun anyway.

The wheel doesn't spin so much as it decides, and then you are bent over a sink that isn't yours, in a bathroom that smells like drugstore shaving cream and old grout, with a razor pressed flat against a jawline you've never worn. Half the face in the mirror is still lathered white. The other half is bare and pink and freshly scraped. The razor is already moving — up, against the grain, past the corner of the mouth without the little catch, the little pause, that this face has made every morning of this man's life. You don't know that yet. You just feel the blade go where it's told, faster than it should.

The apartment holds its evening light the way small-town Ohio does at this hour — gone gold, gone quiet, one stoplight down the street doing nothing for nobody. But this body doesn't know evening. It knows dawn. It's been up since three, and some cellular clock in it is confused in a way you can't yet name, because his shifts run backward from the world's, and his showers happen when other men are having dinner.

The tank top is the first thing that speaks. Undershirt, worn thin at the ribs, tugged on this morning — his morning, ten hours behind you — in a truck stop bathroom with a bad lock, hurry up, hurry up, gotta log the hours. It comes back in his hands, not yours: the reach behind, the practiced twist to get it over a belly that's gotten bigger than he likes to admit, the little grunt he doesn't hear himself make anymore.

Then the razor handle, and it opens wider. Thirty years of bathrooms like this one. A trailer he rented after the divorce that never happened, because there was no marriage to end, no ring to take off — just Dwight, alone by choice more than by loss, and fine with it, mostly. A rig he's had for six years, cab smelling of pine tree air freshener and instant coffee, three days out and two days back and a route that takes him past cornfields he could describe with his eyes shut. A doctor in Mansfield telling him about his blood sugar in a voice like he'd said it before, because he had, and Dwight nodding and not changing much of anything, because what's the use, out here, alone, eating what the truck stops sell.

The tile under his bare feet is cold and familiar, and it gives you the sound of his knuckles — cracking, one hand then the other, a tic that isn't nerves so much as something to do while the coffee brews, while the weigh station line doesn't move, while he waits for anything. His hands know backing a fifty-three-foot trailer into a dock in the dark without a spotter. They know how to check a tire by kicking it, actually feel the difference. They do not know, will never know, what just happened to the rest of him.

The mirror gives you his face last, and it gives you the nose — broken once, decades back, a parking lot outside a bar in Zanesville over something he can't even remember the reason for anymore, only the sound it made. Set crooked because he never got it fixed, never saw the money as worth spending on vanity. He's spiritual about it, in a way — figures it happened for a reason, figures most things did, without needing a church to tell him so. He doesn't drink anymore, doesn't smoke, never much did either, and some nights alone in the cab he thinks that's the reason he's lasted this long out here, whatever "lasted" means for a man with sugar in his blood and nobody waiting on him at the end of the route.

You feel all of that arrive in pieces, sink water running, foam drying tight on the untouched half of his jaw. Fifty years old. Heavy through the middle, strong through the forearms, tired in a low, permanent way that has nothing to do with sleep. It is, you think, a good body to be new in.

You set the razor down. You look at your hands — his hands, blunt-fingered, a callus riding the base of each thumb from a wheel bigger than any car's. You turn them over like they might tell you something they haven't already.

"Huh," you say, out loud, to the mirror, to no one. "Okay."

Behind you, the shower drips. Somewhere ten hours away, a screen is still glowing, waiting for you to decide you're done.