Gavin Oleshansky

The air in the garage is cold the way all Tokyo basements are cold at this hour — concrete-cold, borrowed-cold. You are eighteen in a body that is not yours, student muscle still thrumming from the stairs you climbed to get down here, phone light the only light. Kenta's body breathes easy, young, patient. You have been him less than a minute and already you know you are only passing through him, the way you pass through everyone now, because ten minutes ago you were somebody else — fifty-seven, silver-stubbled, a missing front tooth you kept running your tongue over out of habit that wasn't yours — and that man had a rival he never got to finish being angry at. You left him mid-argument, basically. Mid-grudge. You felt it the whole short walk back to the wheel: an itch under a dead man's skin that wasn't dead, just vacated, left standing there not understanding why his anger had gone quiet all at once. That unfinished feeling is the whole reason your thumb is already on the site before Kenta's legs have stopped trembling from the stairs. You know exactly whose evening you want next. You spin knowing his name without being told it, the way you always do when it's personal.

The wheel doesn't care that it's the small hours in Tokyo. It finds him where he is, which is a living room three thousand miles and about sixteen hours sideways from here, late Sunday morning, sun actually in the windows for once.

And then you are sitting down.

Weight comes first — more of it than Kenta had, settled low and comfortable around a gut that has had forty-three years to get there, a dad-bod ease in the couch cushions like the couch has learned his shape and he's learned it back. A beer can sweats coolly to your right, close enough you can smell the aluminum tang of it. Your fingertips are resting on a planchette, varnished smooth, worn pale at the thumb-grip from God knows how many jokes like this one. The board under it reads YES in gothic type and the pointer is sitting right on it, which is funny, which is the joke, except your hand — his hand — is already moving before you have decided anything, sliding the planchette toward GOODBYE the way you'd slide a door shut on a conversation gone on too long.

It doesn't stop at GOODBYE.

It keeps going, slow, deliberate, like someone writing in wet sand, and three letters come up under knuckles that are not asking you for permission because they were never asking him either.

The shirt is what gives you the first real piece of him — plaid, buttoned with the sleeves rolled to just below the elbow, cotton gone soft from years of washing, and the memory comes in through your forearms like heat off a stove: this morning, this exact shirt, him standing in a closet that smelled like cedar blocks and his wife's shampoo, picking it because it was Sunday and Sunday means nothing is required of him, no glass-walled office, no door propped open so the regional director can see he's "approachable." He'd buttoned it watching his own hands in the mirror and thought, not for the first time, that he looked like his father now, silver through the hair, soft through the middle, and had decided — the way he decides most things, by simply not fighting them — that this was fine.

The ring is next. Left hand, plain band, warm from his own skin before you ever got here. It opens wide: a wedding fourteen years back, a wife whose laugh you can almost hear if you hold still, two kids whose height marks are penciled on a doorframe somewhere upstairs in increments that make his chest hurt in a way he's never told anyone about. And underneath that, quieter, an ex-girlfriend's name surfacing uninvited, the particular guilt of a man who loves his wife completely and still keeps one window in himself permanently cracked for someone from twenty years ago. He doesn't examine it. He just leaves it open. You feel why.

The couch cushion against the backs of his thighs gives you the office — glass walls, door he insists on leaving open because closed doors make people nervous and he has spent a career trying very hard not to be the kind of manager people are nervous of, mid-level and happy enough to stay there, comfortable, direct deposit comfortable, two kids'-college comfortable, not the kind of money anyone writes stories about.

And the planchette under your fingertips, still moving, gives you the joke itself — his son dared him to do this, laughing, phone out to film it, and he'd rolled his eyes and sat down because it's Sunday and he loves being the dad who says yes to stupid things. He had absolutely no plan to feel his own hand travel somewhere he didn't send it.

The body under all of it is easy in a way Kenta's youth never was and never will be — a looseness in the shoulders, a softness at the belt that has stopped being a source of shame sometime around year two of marriage, hands that know a keyboard and a steering wheel and a child's bicycle seat and absolutely nothing about construction, about concrete, about the particular ache of a man who worked with his back for thirty years. That man is who sent you here. That man is the one whose decade of quiet contempt you are currently sitting inside of, uninvited, in his rival's own skin, on his rival's own Sunday.

You look down. The ring catches the window light.

You turn the hand over once, slow, like you're checking it's real, and the mole high on the cheek pulls faintly as the mouth under it almost smiles.

"Guess who," you say, to no one in the room, to the open-mouthed teenager somewhere upstairs still holding up a phone, to a dead argument nobody else even remembers starting.