Gary Dembowski

The site loads slow, the way cheap sites do, a wheel rendered in gold gradients that look like they were made by someone's cousin. Vessel.cards. You have had the tab open for an hour, doomscrolling in the other one, the night gone thin and directionless the way Mondays get at this hour when there is nothing on and nowhere to be and the wanting — the old one, the one you never told anyone about because there was never a way to say it that didn't sound unwell — sits in your chest like a coin you keep turning over. You have read the threads. You have watched the films twice each. You have never been able to buy this before. You put the card number in like it's nothing, like it's a pizza, and you spin, and the wheel does what wheels do, and then there is no wheel and no screen and no you, not the you that was.

There is a fork in your hand, halfway to a mouth that is not the one you have never had, and the mouth is chewing, and the hand is not listening to you yet. The fork stops in the air. It comes back down. It sets itself on the counter with a small definite click, and you feel — not see, feel, from inside a body that is shorter and heavier and warmer than any idea of a body you ever carried — a coat come off both shoulders in one shrug, sleeves dragging over forearms with dark hair on them, and the man you are sits down at a two-chair table he already knows is there without looking, and finishes a plastic container of something reheated in three more even mouthfuls, looking at nothing in a window gone bright with a late morning that has no business being this bright given how his body feels — heavy-limbed, slow-blooded, the particular ache of having slept in the wrong hours.

The container goes on the counter. Your hand — his hand — comes up automatically and picks at the cuticle of the thumb, worrying a hangnail that has been there, you now know without knowing how you know it, for four days. The knowing arrives with the touch, the way the facts said it would: not given, not handed to you, but let loose sideways out of a thumbnail and a rasp of dry skin. His name arrives with it. Gary. Gary Dembowski. Forty-one years old, and the number lands in the give of his stomach against his own waistband, dad-soft, not unhappy about it.

The countertop under your palm is laminate, cool, a little tacky near the stove where something boiled over weeks ago and was wiped at rather than cleaned. Touching it: Sunday, and the particular flatness of a Sunday that used to mean something and now means the front desk at Halloran & Associates is dark and the phones are off and there is nowhere he has to be, except that his body doesn't believe it, because his body clocked out at six in the morning from a graveyard shift he picked up eight months ago when the rent went up and the girlfriend's hours got cut, and eleven a.m. is his midnight, and this container of cold rice and chicken is his dinner, eaten standing because sitting all the way down feels like giving up on the day before he's earned the right.

The hoodie is against your back, navy, zip half up, and it gives you the morning entire: him pulling it on over yesterday's undershirt because laundry's a Tuesday thing, the zip catching once on the fabric near the collar the way it always does, his thumb clearing it without a thought, an old motion his hands know so well they don't ask his head anymore. Underneath the hoodie, the belt — worn a shade paler where the buckle rides — cinched over jeans gone soft with age at the knee, and under that a body that carries itself low and wide, quick on short legs from a decade of covering ground between filing cabinets, hands that know eleven-digit case numbers and the particular give of a stapler that needs replacing, a moustache he has worn unchanged since he was twenty-six because his father wore one and it seemed like the kind of thing a man just has. The scar through his eyebrow — motorcross, nineteen years old, a rock and a bad landing, no drama in it now, just a pale seam he stopped noticing around age twenty-two — sits under your own eyebrow like it was always there, because it was.

There's a girlfriend somewhere in this apartment or due back from her own shift soon, and touching the counter's chipped edge gives you a flash of her laughing at something on that same countertop, months back, before this schedule ate both their evenings — small, warm, not yours to keep, already fading the way the good ones do when you're only borrowing the hand that remembers them.

You look down. The hand is stubby-fingered, sun-brown to the wrist and pale above it, a hangnail worried raw at the thumb, faint grease shine from the container's lid still on two fingers. You turn it over once, palm up, like it might have something written on it.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to the dark window and the empty kitchen, in a voice that is not the one you don't have, that is his, low and a little rough with the hour his body thinks it is. "Okay. Let's see how long this one runs."