Gregory Alsept

Malcolm Averitt's office is quiet at eleven on a Monday, which is the whole problem. Two minutes in this skin and already you can feel the shape of what's coming: the market open red on three screens, a client call at one you don't want to take, the particular tightness in this jaw that isn't yours and isn't going away by lunch. You spun for him thirty-one times ago wanting somebody clean, and he is clean — goatee trimmed, beauty mark, good watch — but clean isn't the same as good, and today the numbers on his monitor are numbers you'll have to answer for by Friday if you stay. So you don't stay. You get up, because Malcolm Averitt would never leave his desk mid-morning for no reason, and that wrongness is the last thing that is only his. You go to the little site with the wheel on the plain white page, the way you've gone thirty-one times before, and you pay, and you spin, already gone before it lands.

The lecture hall exhales chalk dust and old radiator heat. Your hand is up at the whiteboard, eraser flat against a word that isn't finished disappearing, and for half a second the arm doesn't know whose it is — it drags wrong, a stutter-stroke, then stops and starts again slow and correct, like a man rereading a sentence he's already read. The next ten strokes come out careful. Checked. A job the hand has done ten thousand times, done now like the first.

The moustache is the first thing you feel, absurdly — a weight above the lip that your last mouth didn't have — and then the bag strap cutting into your shoulder, canvas gone soft with years, and through it, fast, unbidden: a July at a leather counter in the Mission, him turning the bag over in his hands, thinking *this one, this is the one I'll carry until*, and the thought never finishing because it didn't need to. The moustache itself comes with mornings — a razor stopping short of the lip out of habit so old it isn't a decision anymore, his wife's hand once, early, brushing it and saying *don't ever*, and him not ever.

The classroom is empty behind you, chairs rising in their rows toward the fogged window, and San Francisco is doing its grey late-morning thing outside, the Victorians across the street sitting in mist like they're embarrassed by their own color. Your feet remember the two steps up to this whiteboard better than they remember most rooms in his house. Twenty-some years of Mondays. The chalk tray under your fingers is dry and gritty and it brings back, whole, a lecture from a decade ago, a student in the front row asking a question so good he'd had to sit down on the desk edge to answer it properly, the pure clean joy of that, better than most Sundays, better almost than the sermon he half-believes now out of habit more than fire.

The clothes bring the rest. The tweed jacket, elbow patches worn slick — he remembers buying it used, remembers his wife saying it made him look like exactly what he was, and laughing, not unkindly. The green sweater under it, hand-me-down soft, put on this morning in the cold garage-light of their bedroom below the bay window, sleeve by sleeve, half-asleep, coffee not yet in him, the day not yet needing him to be anyone. The wedding band is warm from his hand and it opens a marriage at once — decades of it, comfortable and thinned by time the way rope thins, not broken, just less than it was, both of them turned a little private and a little kind about it. Ordinary. He'd have said *good*, if you'd asked him. He never smoked in front of her anymore, stepped out for it, told himself each one was the last one, meant it each time.

His body under all of it: fifty and holding, average padding him at the waist, a lower back that complains on the stairs down to the garage, a bald head that stopped bothering him around forty-five, hands that know the exact pressure an eraser needs and don't need his eyes to find it. Nicotine wants something now, low and constant, a small animal scratching. Nothing hurts badly. Nothing announces itself. He is a body that runs fine and has run fine for a long time, which is its own kind of unremarkable mercy after Malcolm's tight red mornings.

You lower the eraser. You look at this hand — thicker than the one you had an hour ago in New York, a plain gold band catching the flat classroom light, chalk dust worked into the creases you didn't earn — and you turn it over once, like you're checking it's real.

"Huh," you say, to the empty rows, to nobody, "wrong hand."

You don't know yet how long you'll want this one. Nobody does.