Gary Vantrease

Devon's dorm room is quiet the way rooms are quiet at six in the morning when nobody else is awake to hear it, and you sit on the edge of his bed in his body, twenty-three years old, six feet of him, and you already know you're not staying. It isn't boredom exactly. It's that last night, at a party you don't remember choosing to go to, some girl said his name like she'd known him for years, and you had to ask her where you two had met, and she'd laughed like you were joking, and you weren't. That's the thing about a body like this — it comes with debts you can't see the shape of until somebody hands you the bill. You like him fine. You just don't want to be him for the rest of whatever this is. So before the sun is up you open the laptop, the site loads the way it always loads, plain white page, the wheel sitting there patient as a slot machine, and you spin it at ten after six with Devon's own finger, on Devon's own trackpad, and somewhere a great distance and no distance at all away, a television changes the color of a room.

The show cuts to a bright frame and your spine straightens before you've decided to straighten it, weight dropping down through hips and shoulders that are not the ones you had a half-second ago — heavier, shorter, older, a low ache already sitting in the lower back like it's been there so long it stopped being news. The remote is in your hand and you set it down on the couch arm because his hand already knew to do that, before you caught up to it. Hazel eyes. A dark room. A television throwing light at a face that isn't laughing anymore, though something in the jaw remembers a laugh was supposed to happen here.

The shirt is what starts it — gray cotton, soft from a hundred washes, and touching it the way your arms are folded against your own chest brings a flash: this morning, or some morning, pulling it over his head in a bedroom with the blinds already broken at one slat, sunlight coming in like a blade across the floor, and the small necessary ritual of rolling each sleeve to the elbow before he even leaves the bedroom, because by ten a.m. he'll be elbow-deep in someone's transmission and he doesn't like fighting fabric while he works. The gum is in his mouth right now, has been for hours, gone flavorless and forgotten, and his jaw works it out of habit and you feel that habit arrive whole, unasked — thousands of pieces of gum, thousands of mornings, a man who quit cigarettes decades back and never found a place to put his hands or his mouth that didn't ask for smoke, so he chews instead, under cars, at stoplights, alone.

The couch under you carries something too — years of it, evenings exactly like this one, a can of something on the table gone warm before he finishes it, a woman's laugh from a long time ago that used to fill this same room and doesn't anymore, no name attached to the memory, just the size of the space where somebody used to sit. He built this life alone and doesn't examine it much; there's a garage with his name over the door, GARY'S AUTO VENTURES, hand-painted, a little crooked, and it makes him prouder than almost anything else has, prouder than he'd say out loud to anybody, because he's the kind of man who talks in grunts and shows you what he means with a wrench instead. Two bays. A regular flow of Nashville trucks and touring vans with electrical gremlins nobody else wants to chase down. He believes in something, some shape behind things, though he hasn't been to a church since a funeral he doesn't want to think about right now and the memory slides past too fast to catch, just a coffin-shaped absence and organ music.

The freckles are under your fingers when you touch your own face without deciding to, scattered across a nose that's been sunburned a hundred times leaning into engine bays with the garage door up in July. The lower back throbs low and constant, an old complaint, a mechanic's tax, and the hands — when you finally look at them — are wide, scarred faintly along the knuckles in ways too old and too many to call scars anymore, just texture, just weather. Calluses in exact places: the base of each finger, the heel of the palm. Hands that know a torque wrench by feel in the dark.

You turn the right one over in the blue wash of the television, watching the fingers open and close like you're testing whether they'll answer you, and they do, easy, obedient, fifty-one years of practice in them that isn't yours yet and already is.

"Well," you say, to the empty room, to no one, "guess I'm up."