Gregory Oschner

The scissors are still in your hand when you decide.

You've been Kimo Alapai for less than a minute — sixty-one years in a body that isn't yours, standing over a client's half-finished fade in a shop smelling of talc and clipper oil, and already the itch is back. It's Monday afternoon, light coming flat and hard through the shop window, and you feel every one of those sixty-one years in your lower back, in the ache behind your knees, in the way this man's shoulders round forward from decades bent over other men's heads. You did this an hour ago. You are already bored of him. That's the truth of it, plain and a little shameful: not hunger, not grief, just the flat gray taste of a body that clocks in and clocks out, that will die a barber, that has never once in sixty-one years had two million dollars or a wedding ring worth looking at twice. You set the scissors down on the counter, tell the client you need the bathroom, and instead you take out the phone and open the page with the wheel on it.

You pay. You spin.

The breath goes from ragged to even in a single pull of air, and you are lying face down in sheets that don't smell like the shop — no talc, no oil, just laundered cotton and, underneath it, the particular cold breath of air conditioning fighting a warm night. The arm that was hanging off the mattress draws itself up on its own, an obedience you didn't order, and you feel the whole heavy architecture of him rolling onto his back beneath you: soft gut, thick shoulders, the small definite ring of gold on the fourth finger settling against his chest as the hands fold there like a man laid out for a wake. Streetlight through a gap in the curtain lays one bright seam across the ceiling. It is evening here, wherever here is. It was afternoon where you were. You do the math without wanting to and let it go.

The sheets are the first thing that speaks to you — cheap hotel cotton, a thousand nights like this one — and it comes in through your own skin before you've even opened his eyes: airports. A rental Camry smelling of pine tree freshener. A binder of laminated spec sheets he stopped believing in around year eleven and kept selling anyway, because the commission checks paid for the balcony. You get a flash of a conference room in Tampa, fluorescent and merciless, his voice going smooth and warm on command — *Gregory, everybody calls me Greg* — and under the smoothness, tired all the way to the bone.

The wedding band gives you more. It's warm from his own body heat, unremarkable, worn thin at the inside curve from thirty years of the same three fingers turning it when he's nervous. A woman's hand comes with it — not a picture exactly, more the weight of an arm across a couch, the smell of her shampoo on a pillow that isn't this one. Miami. A condo with a pastel balcony and ocean haze silvering the rail in the mornings. A daughter, grown now, a phone call last week that ran long and good, the two of them laughing about nothing. He is, you understand suddenly and completely, a happy man in the parts that count, and it sits strange in your borrowed chest, a warmth you didn't order any more than the folded hands.

The lanyard is still around his neck even here, half-tangled in the sheet — he fell asleep without taking it off, too wrecked from the day to bother — and touching the laminate wakes the whole morning: standing in front of a hotel mirror at six, buttoning this exact pale blue shirt one-handed while the other hand held the phone to his ear with the wife's voice tinny and far off, tucking it into slacks gone a little snug at the waist the way slacks do now, threading the belt on the notch that used to be one over. Knuckles cracking without him noticing, out of habit, the same three-second ritual before every meeting for twenty years. His body: fifty-eight, soft where it used to be solid, a low simmering pressure behind his eyes that he takes a pill for every morning without thinking much about it, dimples that dent his cheeks even now, asleep, as if his face defaults to gentleness whether he's using it or not. Hands that know a handshake, a business card, the particular two-finger tap on a table that means *let's close this.*

Then, underneath the shirt-memory, something smaller and only his: a cigarette he hasn't had in eleven years, and still — this exact hour, this exact tiredness — the ghost-want for one, unacted on, private, never mentioned to the wife who thinks he beat it clean.

You lie there another second in all of it, in the folded hands and the ring and the ache behind the eyes, and something in you that has worn three hundred and ninety-one other men recognizes this one as good — not exciting, not dangerous, just good, solid, paid-for — and you understand with a small cold clarity why you left the barber an hour into being him.

You lift your hands off your chest and look at them in the seam of streetlight — thick fingers, the band catching what light there is, a callus on the trigger finger from a hundred thousand pens.

"Okay," you say to the dark hotel room, in a voice with a Miami evening still caught in the back of it, dimples pulling even though nobody's there to see them. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."