Gary Tomczak

The dorm room is cold the way Maine is always cold at this hour, and you are sitting on the edge of Colby Marchetti's bed in Colby Marchetti's body, twenty years old, red hair flattened on one side from the pillow, feeling that particular ache that isn't the body's ache at all — it's yours, the old traveling itch that six hours in anybody never quite satisfies. His roommate is snoring through the wall. There's a lacrosse stick propped by the door you have no memory of ever swinging. You're good at borrowing the feeling of a life without ever wanting to live in it, and that's the tell, every time: the room starts to feel like a hotel. Six hours and seventeen minutes is nothing. You open the laptop, the site loads the way it always loads, patient and gray, and you spin before you've even decided to, because the decision was made the moment you sat down.

It gives you weight first. More of it than you've had in a while — compact, low-slung, a center of gravity that used to run six-ten in another body and now runs five-five and stays there, planted. Your hands are on a bar, gripping it two inches wider than habit, and your arms — thicker through the forearm than you expected, a dull throb already building in the shoulder — are driving it up. Fluorescent light. A rubber mat smell. Someone's phone playing music three benches over. The rep locks out and the bar comes down onto the rack with a clean, practiced clatter, and you are exhaling through your nose in a body that is not blowing hard enough for what it just did, not remotely, and some small mechanism in the chest you're wearing is already flagging that as wrong.

The tattoo goes first, because the sleeve is pushed up and your own — his — bicep brushes it: a stripe of ink he almost never looks at straight on, a rank chevron with a star over crossed rifles, and with it comes Bragg in July, twenty-two years old and folding at the waist under a rucksack that felt like it was full of wet sand, and a man named Ostrowski laughing at him for puking on his own boots, and the strange clean pride of being handed the insignia later by someone who meant it. That was a different back. This one, fifty-one years old, has a permanent low ache along the left side that a chiropractor in Garland charges too much to almost fix, and knees that announce themselves on the stairs, and a wheeze sitting one rib down that isn't asthma acting up right now but is always, always down there, patient, waiting for cold air or cat hair or a bad week.

The wedding band is next, plain gold, worn thin on the inside curve, and it gives you Denise — nineteen years of her, the sound she makes clearing her throat before she says something she's decided not to be nice about, the specific weight of her hand landing on your chest at 2 a.m. when the wheeze wakes her before it wakes you. It gives you the two of you painting the new-build's spare room the color she wanted and you didn't, and it not mattering at all a week later. It gives you your daughter, seventeen, the shape of her name arriving without the sound of it, a whole soft ledger of school drop-offs and one bad year in ninth grade and how she still, still, leaves her light on for you when you get home from a late call.

The gym shirt — a blue polo he wore instead of his gray one because the gray one was still damp on the hook by the washer — brings the morning back whole: waking at eleven because the night shift at the lockout call ran until four, Denise already gone to her sister's, the coffee he drank standing at the counter in his boxers with the local news muted, the specific annoyance of the top button not wanting to close over a belly that's five pounds heavier than it was at forty, the little private negotiation with himself about whether tonight's the night he actually eats the salad. Keys on the counter — his whole ring, the storefront masters, the one that opens the panel van — and just brushing the memory of them gives you this morning's job: kneeling on a strip-mall sidewalk at seven, cylinder in his palm, a pin tumbler he'd already half-diagnosed before his knee finished complaining about the concrete.

It is the middle of the night here and the middle of a normal workout there, and that's his life folded in on itself the way night-shift lives always are — gym at 2 a.m. because the calls run late and sleep comes whenever it comes, water bottle sweating on a rubber mat under lights nobody else needs on. You feel the last rep his body had already, unknowingly, finished — the twentieth spin's appetite reaching backward into a set that was never going to be his last after all, some ten-second window where the bar went up smoother and slower than any Sunday-night set of his has any business going, and nobody in the gym noticed a thing.

You look down at the hand still curled loose around the bar's knurling — thick fingers, a mole he can't see from this angle but you can feel like a coin taped high on his cheek, a wedding band catching the fluorescents — and you turn it over once, like it might explain itself.

"Little more in the tank than I thought," you say, out loud, to nobody, and put the water bottle to his mouth, and do not yet know, because there is no way to know, how long you intend to stay inside the answer.