Gary Truskowski

The fluorescent lights hum over the conference table, and you are sixty, Black, gray at the temples, a mid-level manager in a Miami office park, and you have been him for less than a minute when you already know you're done. It's the tie. It's the way this man's hand keeps going up to straighten a tie that is already straight, over and over, a nervous tell that isn't yours but that you're stuck twitching through anyway, four people waiting on you to say something about Q3 numbers you don't care about and never will. Someone spun you into a life that runs on spreadsheets and lanyards and you have thirty-nine minutes left in a meeting that will not end, and somewhere behind that boredom, quieter, older, is the thing you actually want, which is just the fall of it — the drop, the not-knowing, the stranger coming up under you like water. You excuse yourself. You find a men's room stall. You take out the phone, you find vessel.cards bookmarked like it's a bank app, and you spin.

The room comes up gray-blue and close, carpet under your knees, a nightstand lamp burning gold in the corner of your eye, and you are big — big in a way that surprises you, shoulders and gut and knees that ache faintly against a bedspread — and your hands are already coming apart from each other, already pushing up off the mattress, and a voice that used to be yours a half-second ago was saying amen a little too early, half a laugh caught behind it, and now the weight of that laugh is dying in a throat that is not the throat you had this morning. You get halfway to standing. Then something that isn't decision pulls you back down, knees finding the carpet again, hard, both of them, and your forehead tips forward onto the bedspread like a man remembering, too late, that he wasn't finished.

The bedspread is cheap cotton, a little pilled, and it smells like fabric softener and, underneath that, like him — and that's the first door. A wedding ring, plain gold, cool against your temple where your hand has come up without you asking it to, and through the ring comes a woman's laugh in a kitchen, years of it, her hip against a counter, her voice saying Gary, low, amused, exasperated, the specific fondness of someone who has decided to keep finding you funny. Gary Truskowski. The name arrives with the ring, the way a smell arrives before the thing that made it. Forty-six years of him come up through your knees next, through the carpet, through the mattress edge digging into your forearms — this body's weight, dad-soft in the middle, strong through the back and forearms from ten years of pulling totes off racking, a rebuilt left knee that clicks when the Chicago cold gets into it, one eye that has always slid a half degree outward when he's tired, so that people in meetings look just past his shoulder to find the eye that's looking back.

The t-shirt against your back is thin and worn at the collar and it gives you the morning he bought it, a three-pack from Target with Denise picking the colors because he never would. Denise. The name lands soft and complete, sixteen years married, the smell of her shampoo on a pillow he is not currently kneeling beside. Two kids down the hall, a boy who plays travel hockey they can barely afford and a girl who still, at eleven, wants him to check under the bed. The nightstand clock reads a time that doesn't square with any of it — early afternoon light behind the blinds, and him here anyway, home, kneeling, because the picking job runs him nights now, four-to-two on the floor under the L, and this is his morning, his church, this half-lit hour before his body clock says go and his shift starts and his knees start complaining under the racking.

There's an old ache in that, too, that comes up through the ring finger before you can stop it — a woman who isn't Denise, a name that surfaces and then won't quite resolve, an ex from a decade before the wedding band, filed away in the part of him that still, once in a while, wonders on a slow shift what she's doing now, and feels guilty for wondering, and prays a little more seriously the next night because of it. He is not a serious man about God most days. Tonight — this afternoon that is his tonight — he'd gotten down on the bedspread out of habit more than conviction, elbows loose, mind half on the clock, hurrying the amen because some part of him wanted to be done and standing and moving toward the coffee and the vest and the scanner on his wrist before the guilt of hurrying it caught up with him. It caught up with him anyway. That's why he came back down. That's the last thing of his you get, clean and whole: a man trying to mean something for one more second before the day took him.

You open your eyes into hazel that isn't fully yours yet, and you lift your head off the bedspread, and you look at the hand still tangled in its own fingers in front of you, ring catching the lamp, knuckles thick, a callus along the trigger-finger side from the scan gun's grip, and you turn it over once like you're checking it's real.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to the empty room, in a voice with a Chicago flatness you didn't have an hour ago. "Okay, big guy."

You don't get up right away. You just look at the door instead, listening for a wife and two kids you have never met, wondering how far off the next spin is, and whether Gary Truskowski gets to finish a whole shift before you find out.