Gary Wetzel

The clinic smells like antiseptic and dog fear, and you are standing over a steel table with your gloved hands still inside a Labrador's abdomen, and you hate it, suddenly and completely, the way you have hated the last nine days of being Sami Rusnak. Twenty-two years old, six-foot-one, a scar through the eyebrow that isn't yours, a career you did not choose and cannot walk away from without consequences that would follow the body, not you. The dog is fine. The dog was always going to be fine. That is the problem — nothing here is a decision, everything is a protocol, and you are so tired of being careful inside someone else's competence that your hand is already moving toward your phone on the counter, bloody glove and all, pulling up the site with your knuckle before you've even closed the incision. You don't wait for the tech to notice. You spin.

The road comes first — not sight, weight. A seatbelt across a chest that is not the chest you had a second ago, narrower through the shoulders, older, softer at the middle where it used to be flat. Both hands leave a leather wheel at ten and two and settle lower, wider, like they've done this ten thousand times and know something you don't. Dash light glazes a wedding band. Outside, dark trees strobe by at fifty-five, and somewhere behind your sternum a car that isn't turning is putting its blinker on for an exit that means nothing to you yet, ticking in the dark like a metronome nobody asked for.

The wheel is warm from his hands, worn smooth at two and ten, and touching it gives you a merge onto 71 eleven years ago, a Braves game on the radio, his oldest kid car-sick in the back seat. You let go of that one fast, it isn't yours to keep, but another comes right behind it — his left hand, the ring, the day he put it on in a Presbyterian church he hasn't been back to since, not out of anger, just drift, the way a lot of things drift once you've got two kids and a HOA and a business to run. He believes in something. He couldn't tell you what. He'd call it that, spiritual, not religious, and mean it exactly that much and no more.

The shirt is the loudest thing in the car. Black cotton, RETRO GAME COLLECTIVE across the chest in orange lettering gone soft from washing, and it brings back this morning whole: pulling it over his head in the bedroom mirror, arms up, the small twinge in the left shoulder that's been there two years and isn't going anywhere, tucking nothing in because at sixty you've earned the right not to tuck things in. He'd laughed at himself a little, seeing the shirt again, a gift from a subscriber, a running joke about a man his age doing let's-plays of Contra for eleven hundred people who call him Wetz in the chat. He is good at it. Genuinely good — twenty-six years fixing small engines before that, and somewhere in there the hands that used to strip a carburetor learned to hit a hotkey mid-sentence without looking, and it turned out people liked watching a sixty-year-old man be competent and a little dry about Castlevania at ten at night. The headset around his neck now, resting cold against his collar, gives him back mid-sentence, the RGB strip behind his monitor cycling blue to violet, his daughter texting can you get pull-ups on the way home, his wife's laugh through the wall while he signed off early tonight because his blood pressure had him a little foggy after the second cup of coffee he wasn't supposed to have.

The gray cargo pants know his knees, the specific ache of kneeling to change a car battery for a neighbor last Saturday. The sneakers, broken in soft at the heel, know the walk to the mailbox and back, twice a day, since the quitting started — eleven days off the cigarettes now, and the craving lives low in his chest like a held breath, worse at night, worse right now, except right now there is no craving, only your hands on his wheel, foreign and unclaimed for one more second, and the smell of him — coffee, faint woodsmoke from a fire pit, the ghost of tobacco in the seat fabric he can't wash out — filling a body that used to be twenty-two and isn't anymore, that is soft where it was hard and strong in ways the other one never had to be, sixty years of ordinary use humming quiet in the muscle.

You bring both hands up off the wheel — his instinct fighting you for half a second, a flare of *not now, not here, three miles out* — and you look at them in the dash light. Blunt fingers. Thin gold band. A thumbnail bruised faintly purple from a dropped controller. Not your hands. Not anymore either of the two you've worn tonight.

You say it out loud, to no one, to the windshield, to whatever's three miles ahead with the porch light on: "Okay. Okay — who are you."