Gary Nowak

Two minutes is not enough to know a body, but it is enough to know you don't want it. Colin Vasey's hands are eighteen-year-old hands, quick and small, and the bathroom he's standing in — his own, in Small-town Ohio, past eleven — smells like somebody else's cigarettes through the vent, and the mirror over the sink is somebody else's mirror, and the boredom comes up out of the floor like heat off a road. You didn't come this far to be a kid in a rented duplex on a Saturday night with nothing in his pockets and nothing on his mind. You open the site again with his thumb, feel his heartbeat pick up a little, not from fear — from you. Vessel.cards. The wheel is already loading. You pay with money that isn't going to be yours in a second anyway, because none of it ever is, and you spin.

The foam is cold going up instead of down. That's the first thing — not sight, not yet, just the wrongness of a razor moving the wrong direction under a hand that isn't asking permission, up the jaw against the grain, no pause at the corner of the mouth. Then the mirror resolves and it is not Colin's face in it. It is heavier, older, a hairline shoved back into a widow's peak on both sides like the tide went out and didn't come back, green eyes with weight under them. The sink is porcelain, old, a ring of rust starting at the drain. Fluorescent light buzzing very faintly above the medicine cabinet. Your other hand — his hand — is braced flat on the rim of the sink, and it aches, a dull hot line up through the wrist into the shoulder, arthritis or worse, old and familiar to whoever owns this body and shocking to you. You finish the stroke because the motion was already moving. The second half of his face, done faster than the first.

The razor is the first thing that talks. Chrome, heavier than it looks, a woman's hand having bought it for him once as a gift he never mentioned liking out loud — that comes fast and half-formed, a checkout counter, fluorescent light like this one, a Christmas six years back — and behind it, a name surfacing the way names do when you've said them ten thousand times: Gary. Sergeant Gary Nowak, and it comes with the weight of a badge that isn't in this room but is real anyway, pinned crooked more mornings than not because his fingers are too thick for the clasp.

The t-shirt against your back gives you more, and gives it in his feeling, not yours — the cotton soft from a hundred washes, a hole starting under one arm that his wife keeps threatening to throw out. Bonnie. The name arrives with a whole kitchen attached to it, a particular chipped mug, the sound of her key in the door at six. Nineteen years married and it still surprises him some mornings, the fact of her, the fact that it stuck. Before her there was Renee — younger, louder, gone fifteen years and still there anyway, a name that surfaces when a country song comes on the radio he didn't ask for and doesn't turn off. He does not think of her often. He thinks of her exactly as often as a man does.

The jeans on his legs remember themselves being pulled on this morning, the belt notch he moved out one hole last spring and hasn't said anything about, his knees complaining the whole way down and the whole way up because kneeling to help his daughter with a jammed bike chain last week put something out that hasn't gone back in. Two kids — a boy who wants to enlist and a girl who still calls him Daddy on the phone though she's nineteen — arrive whole and warm and worried, the particular ache of loving people you can't control.

His hands know things without him watching them: the weight of a duty belt riding low on the hip, the specific two-finger check for a radio clip, decades of it, thirty years on shift work that put his back out early and kept it out. Cigarettes he quit eleven years ago for Bonnie and still misses at red lights. A church on Sunday he goes to more for her than for God, though God's in there somewhere too, load-bearing, unexamined. He bites his nails — has since the academy — and there's a memory of his mother swatting his hand away from his mouth at a funeral, forty years gone and still vivid.

The foam is half gone now under your palm, cool where the air's got to it, warm where the skin still holds heat from the water. His face in the mirror is a stranger's face wearing thirty years of small weather — sun on patrol, squinting, worry lines banked up like snow against a fence. Heavy through the shoulders in a way that used to be muscle and is mostly just mass now, and strong regardless, a big man's strength that doesn't need calling on to be there.

You set the razor down. Look at the hand that held it — thick fingers, a plain gold band worn smooth, a life in the whorls of it that isn't yours and now is.

You look up into the mirror, into his own eyes looking back at nobody he recognizes.

"Bonnie," you say, quiet, testing the shape of it in his voice, "you still up?" — and you don't know if she is, and you don't know how long you'll be the one asking.