Gary Halvorsen

Kevin Zhu's apartment is quiet the way apartments only get at three in the morning, and you are standing in his kitchen in his body not sleeping, phone light on your face, the site already loaded because you bookmarked it four hours ago like a coward. Nineteen years old, bald head cool under the ceiling fan, brown eyes dry from staring at the screen too long. You have been him for three minutes and it was enough to know: this body is fast and it is bored and it does not want to steam milk for a living at any age, including this one, including forever. The freckles on this face are the same freckles you keep getting, apparently, a joke the wheel likes to make. You don't examine why that's the third time. You just don't want small hands and a shift at six. You want to feel old for once — not this coiled, caffeinated young, but the settled kind, gray at the temple, something behind it. You spin because Kevin's life is a life you could live and you don't want to live it, not tonight, and there is a page with a wheel on it that does not ask you to want a good reason.

The wheel lands on gray.

You are crouched, and the crouch is wrong before you understand anything else — knees complaining in a way nineteen never complained, a low tightness across the chest that isn't pain yet but is thinking about it. A sock is in your hand, damp-warm, one of a mismatched pair. Fluorescent light hums somewhere above you, cheap and endless, and the room smells like dryer sheets and old detergent and concrete that never quite dries. Your hand — his hand, long-fingered, a little raw at the knuckles — is still inside the dryer drum, and warmth is coming off the tumbled clothes in a wave against your forearm. You pull the sock free. You do not know yet that it is Saturday, or that it is the middle of the night here too, or that the man whose eyes you are behind should by every normal accounting be asleep.

The shirt is against your back first — a soft, thinned-out blue T-shirt, worn at the collar — and that's where it comes in: not a thought but a temperature, the feeling of pulling it on hours ago in a dark bedroom before a shift that starts at midnight and ends when the sun is already ugly on the bay. Gary Halvorsen cuts hair on the overnight side of a schedule that stopped making sense years back — a shop that does late fades for club kids and cab drivers, cash only after eleven, and he took the shift because the tips are better and the days are his to waste, which is its own kind of relief when you don't especially like being looked at in daylight. He came home a few hours ago, showered off the smell of forty heads of hair, and instead of sleeping he came down here because the laundry had been sitting wet and souring in the machine since yesterday and it would needle at him all through his one day off if he let it.

The dryer door frame under your palm gives you the years of this basement — the upstairs neighbor's washer that bangs off-balance, the one bare bulb that burned out for a month before anybody fixed it, the two a.m. loads because it's the only time the machines are free. The sock in your fingers unspools a whole marriage without meaning to: Renee, folding towels on this same cracked concrete floor eleven years ago, laughing about something neither of you can now remember the words to, before the drinking got to be a thing said out loud instead of around. She's an old ex now, not even bitter anymore on his end, which somehow aches more than bitterness would. You feel where that sits in him — low, permanent, the shape of a life that could have gone on and didn't.

Your knees know how to fold from a crouch a thousand times over; your back knows the particular ache of standing eight, nine hours a day at a chair, weight always shifted onto the same hip, the ball of your foot gone half-numb by hour six most nights. There's a tightness two breaths deep, a familiar catch — asthma, an inhaler somewhere upstairs in a nightstand drawer, a thing he's managed since he was a kid and stopped being afraid of decades ago. The freckles across your nose came from a childhood on a boat with an uncle who didn't believe in sunscreen. The ink at your shoulders, edges just brushing your collarbones under the shirt, is a name and a date you can feel more than see — someone gone, something marked so it couldn't be pretended away. You don't get the whole story. You get the ache of not wanting to look at it directly, even from inside.

You pull the load out warm, drop it into the basket balanced against your hip, and your hands — his hands, long and raw-knuckled, scissor-steady — start folding before you've decided to: corners squared, sleeves crossed flat, a T-shirt collapsed into a rectangle in four moves like the fabric owes him nothing else. It is the fastest, most exact thing you have felt a body do without you asking it to. Upstairs, you understand without being told, there's a drawer with eight shirts crumpled into it that he never gets around to, because the folding down here in the humming light is its own kind of meditation and what happens after doesn't need to be neat, it just needs to be done.

You look down at your hands — his hands, moving on their own — and you make them stop.

You turn one over in the fluorescent light, freckled knuckles, a faint white scar you don't have a story for yet and never will, and something in it wants to crack, wants the small violent comfort of it, and you let it, one knuckle at a time, and it sounds enormous in the concrete room.

"There you are," you say, to no one, to the socks, to the light — and you don't know yet if that means an hour or a year.