Gary Trawick

The gym bag sits open on the bed, and you're still deciding whether to fold Marcus Duvall's shirts or leave them for whatever comes next. Less than a minute in this one and already you're bored of it — the ache in the knee that isn't yours from a deployment you didn't earn, the discipline of a body that wants to run stairs at eleven at night. It's a good body. Strong. That's the problem. You spun for strong so many times that strong stopped being the point. You want the version of the wheel where you don't know what you're getting until you're standing in it. You sit on the edge of the bed that belongs to a man you've been for less than a minute, open the laptop, and go back to vessel.cards, because the itch was never really about the last body. It's never about the last body.

The wheel spins. Something in the light of the screen goes white, then nothing.

Then: fluorescent light, flat and constant. A counter at hip height, laminate, cool under your palm. A pen in your other hand, capped, resting against a paper chart you don't remember picking up. Your — his — hand is already moving to initial a box, and the motion goes wrong, jerks half an inch off the line, and you feel the whole arm freeze and then walk itself back, slow, deliberate, and do it again, correctly this time. You are fifty-nine years old inside this pause. Your knees know it before you do. There's a looseness at the belly, a stiffness low in the back from standing since before midnight, and the specific tiredness of a body that has already decided it is going to be tired for four more hours no matter what anybody does about it.

You look, without meaning to, at the badge clipped and reeled to your chest pocket. GARY TRAWICK, RN. The plastic is warm from your own skin. And it comes — not all at once, but in a pull, the way a smell brings back a kitchen — the reel clicking against the counter ten thousand times, the particular weight of it swinging when he leans.

The scrub top is against your back and it gives you the locker room at 10:40, the fabric still creased from the dryer, pulling it over his head the way he's done since scrubs were assigned by hospital and not chosen — this exact grayish blue, chambray-soft, a color he never picked and has stopped noticing. Both arms up, head through, that little grunt when the collar catches on an ear. Threading the badge reel through the buttonhole. Checking the pocket for a pen, patting it flat once, an old habit from the shirt-and-tie office job he never had and always pictured anyway.

The shoes underneath — black clogs, broken in past the point of support — bring back standing at the edge of the bed at 10:15, sock in hand, the low buzz of a television left on in a house with nobody else awake in it. Divorced eleven years now. The house is his in the settlement and too big for one man's noise. Three kids scattered to three area codes, a group text he checks more than he says he does. His ex-wife's name comes up warm and worn smooth, like a stone handled so long it doesn't cut anymore — Denise, and a version of himself that used to bring her coffee before nights like this one, before nights like this one were the only kind he had left.

The waistband, elastic, no belt — gives you the doctor's office, blood pressure cuff biting his arm, a nurse practitioner half his age saying "we'll keep an eye on that" in the voice they use, and him joking about it to nobody in the car after. A drink most nights, never two too many, poured into a glass he's had since the marriage. No cigarettes ever, he tried once at twenty-two and hated the taste of his own mouth after.

The pen in your hand travels back further — nursing school, a wife who believed in it before he did, three A.M. feedings alternated with three A.M. rounds for years that blur into one long corridor of fluorescent light very much like this one. Freckles across the nose from a childhood outdoors he doesn't think about, a face that hasn't changed as much as the rest of him has. Fingernails bitten to the quick — his hand finds its way to his mouth now, an old motion nobody's home to comment on. And the ring finger — pale strip where the band used to sit, worn nine years by muscle memory that outlasted the marriage, still touched sometimes like checking a wound.

The paper under your palm — vitals for a patient two doors down, ordinary, unremarkable, a Monday almost gone into Tuesday.

You look at the hand. Freckled, spotted, the tan line still faint on the ring finger after all this time, the nails chewed down past where they should be. You turn it over once, like checking it's real, then look up — past the counter, past the charts, into whatever is watching.

"Okay," you say, to the room, to nobody. "Let's see what you've got."