Greg Palladino

The mine shift ends at noon and the taste in Greg's mouth — no, not Greg's, yours, the one wearing Greg for eleven months now — is rock dust and the metal tang of the water bottle he keeps refilling and never cleaning. Standing in the equipment room with the harness still half-buckled, you catch your reflection in a dead monitor: heavy through the shoulders, light brown hair flat under a hard hat's ghost, brown eyes that were never yours to begin with. Eleven months of double shifts and a supervisor who says your name — his name — like it's a small disappointment. It was fine. It is fine. That's the trouble with it. Nothing in this life is bad enough to leave and nothing in it is good enough to keep, and today, on your break, phone in a stiff glove, thumb finds the site the way it always does, not out of hunger exactly, more the way a tongue finds a chipped tooth. You didn't come here for Greg Palladino. You didn't come here for anyone. You just paid, and spun, and let it decide, the way you always do, because deciding is the part you never liked.

The wheel stops on a Monday morning in a city you are not in.

You are on a wet sidewalk that isn't wet where your feet are — no, it is, it's slick under a scuffed boot, and the boot catches the kerb crossing to a parked Corolla, palm slapping the cold hood to catch a body that is not the one you left a second and eleven months ago. Shorter. Lighter. A looseness in the knees that Greg never had, that ten years underground never let him have. The scuff that had been dragging every third step simply stops, because you're not drunk, you never were, some other man was, and your feet find pavement clean and quiet, forty even steps, and at the corner where home is to the right you go left, for no reason he would ever have given you, because you don't know his home, you only know the wheel put you down and told you to walk.

His jacket is open over a shirt gone stiff with old sweat, and the leather is cold under your knuckles, and it comes first through the collar: a secondhand shop on Fremont, eighteen dollars, the guy behind the counter saying it looked like a rock star's jacket and him laughing because he was tired and it was the first thing that day that had felt good. Then the shirt underneath, threadbare at one shoulder, and a whole morning arrives with it — not this morning, an ordinary one, indistinguishable from a hundred others: waking at ten past two in the afternoon in a one-bedroom above a check-cashing place, blinds doing nothing against the desert light, the ceiling fan he never turns off because the silence without it is worse. Pulling the shirt over his head one-armed, already reaching for the vape on the nightstand, three pulls before his feet even touch the floor. The taste of it, mint gone chemical at the back of the throat. His leg starts bouncing before he's even sitting up — it does that, has always done that, some motor in him that never got the message to shut off, running under him in card games, in trucks, in the break room at four a.m. with coffee that's been sitting since midnight.

The tool belt against your hip gives you work: a ceiling gutted open on Paradise Road, conduit strung like ribs, his hand finding a wire nut by feel before his eyes do, the particular ache across the shoulders that comes from twelve hours of reaching upward, and underneath the ache, something almost like pride, quiet and never spoken to anyone — he's good at this, better than the guys who went to trade school for it, and nobody's ever told him so and he's stopped waiting for it. A name patch stitched crooked reading GREG in someone else's shaky hand — no. Not Greg. That one's yours, left behind, still walking around a mine in Denver without you in it. This name comes through the boots instead, steel toes broken in soft, a thousand walks home the long way because the walk is the only part of the day that belongs to him, past the casino's employee door at four in the morning after a graveyard call-out, past the same three closed shops, a bar he doesn't go into anymore because a woman he was seeing for four months worked there and it ended the way things end for him, without a fight, just a slow going-quiet on both sides until neither one called.

The scar over his eyebrow doesn't announce itself in a memory so much as sit in the skin as a fact: a ladder, nineteen years old, a lesson learned once and never forgotten, and no story he tells about it anymore because nobody's asked in years.

His green eyes are the last thing to arrive, oddly, seeing the wet street through them rather than remembering through them — this scarf of a life laid over you complete but never once handed to you as his, only leaking up through denim, leather, rubber sole, the vape still faintly in his shirt pocket giving one last thing: the taste of mint again, and under it, cheap beer, and under that, nothing — no wife's name to surface, no kid's photograph in a wallet, no ex who left a mark deep enough to come up unbidden. A man scraping by. A man who is, this second, on a Monday morning that is his and not the one you left, thirty years old and none the wiser and never going to be.

You stop walking. You lift one hand in front of your face — his hand, broad-knuckled, a callus at the base of each finger exactly where a wire stripper sits a thousand times a week — and you turn it over slowly, the way you always do, the way you did as a miner and a boxer and a line cook and forty-eight other men whose hands you no longer remember the weight of.

You look up into the neon and the wet street and say, out loud, to no one, "Wrong way, huh," and you don't turn back toward home.