Gary Trombetta

You are Justin Klema, and you are sitting on the edge of a bare mattress in a fourth-floor walkup, sixty-two spins deep into a life that isn't yours, and Justin's body is telling you things you don't want to hear at eleven at night. The lower back that never quite unclenches from ten hours up a pole. The ache behind the sternum from a cigarette habit you inherited and never asked for. He's twenty-seven and skinny-fat and there's a soreness in him that feels older than that, a tiredness that lives in the joints instead of the muscle. You spun the wheel sixty-one times looking for something and you keep landing in men who hurt in ways you have to carry around for however many hours you keep them. You are bored of the wanting turning into an ache before you even get comfortable. You get up, you go to the site glowing on the laptop balanced on a milk crate, and you spin, already leaving, already gone before the wheel stops.

The room changes without moving. Heavy air, close and wet, a smell of fabric softener and something mechanical underneath it, boiler grease maybe, old pipe. You are on your back with your hands folded on your chest like a man laid out for a viewing, which is not a posture your body — his body — has any memory of choosing. Breath goes even. Somewhere outside, a sprinkler head ticks against a paved cul-de-sac. It is deep night here too, though something in the joints of this body says it ought to be morning, says there is a boiler somewhere that needs its pressure checked before seven, and the confusion of that — night pretending to be almost-day — sits in the muscle like a held note.

Then the shirt against your back gives you the first of him.

Gray thermal, soft with a hundred washes, and your — his — hands remember pulling it on this morning, one arm through, the other catching on the plunger handle propped by the door because he'd set it there the night before, ready. Gary Trombetta, forty-seven years old, super of a building on Ponce that's older than his own parents were, dresses in the dark half the time so he doesn't wake anybody, except there's nobody left to wake. The flannel over it, red and black, buttons he does from memory, feels for the third button because it's always crooked otherwise. Keys on the belt clip, the weight of them a small orchestra against his hip, thirty-one units and a boiler room and a laundry room he treats like a chapel. His hands know a plunger by feel the way another man knows a guitar, the balance point, the give in the rubber before it seats.

More comes, unbidden, layered. A wedding that lasted eleven years and ended without violence, just erosion, some slow leak neither of them could find the source of, and her face — Denise's face — still surfacing sometimes when he's got his hands in a clogged trap and thinking about nothing at all. Three kids, one at Georgia State, one who calls only when the car won't start, one still young enough to want him at the games. Church on Sunday, a folding chair he keeps near the register because his knees don't love the pew anymore. The nicotine pouch riding under his lip most of the day, tucked there like a secret, because he quit drinking six years ago and needed to put the wanting somewhere. His hand, without him noticing, goes to his own jaw sometimes, feels the stubble, the deep grooves of the dimples that show even when he isn't smiling, dimples his mother used to say were God's thumbprints. A tenant in 4C who leaves cash in an envelope every Christmas. A dog that died four years ago and still has a leash hanging by the door he hasn't been able to throw out.

The body under all of it: heavy through the middle in a way that used to bother him and mostly doesn't now, a back that complains on ladders, forearms still strong from decades of wrenches and dead bolts and hauling bags of salt for the walk in winter, a knee that clicks going down stairs. Calluses on the pads of both palms, permanent as birthmarks. Two days of stubble because shaving is a Sunday and Wednesday thing and this isn't either.

Your hands — his hands — come up off his chest into the dark of the room. You turn them over, palm to knuckle, in the thin blue light through the curtain gap.

"I don't sleep like that," you say, out loud, to no one, and your voice comes out low and Southern and not your own, and somewhere behind the dimples that show even now, at rest, in the dark, something that was Gary and is no longer anyone sits very still, waiting to find out how long it has him.