Gregory Pashinian

The garage smells like cold concrete and the ghost of yesterday's coffee. A single bulb over the mirror, hung there years ago for exactly this — the last check before he leaves for work, shirt on, lanyard on, everything squared away. Gregory Pashinian stands in front of the glass in his slacks, shirt not yet buttoned, and lets a yawn take him the way yawns do at fifty-five, full-bodied, unstoppable, one hand rising to cover his mouth out of a habit his mother taught him sixty years ago.

He finishes it. He rubs one eye with the heel of his hand. He stops.

The hand hangs there a second too long.

When it comes down, you are looking at the mirror through his eyes for the first time, and it takes you a moment to understand what you're seeing, because what you're seeing is a stranger's face wearing your — his — expression, and it is not a face you know at all, and that is the entire point, that is what you came here to feel: nobody knows you, nobody knows this happened, there is no string leading back to anywhere.

You look at the reflection. Gray-silver curls, deep lines at the eyes that say he laughs more than he frowns. A lanyard around his neck with somebody's blank badge on it. A wedding ring, plain gold, worn thin on one side the way rings get when a man works with his hands even in an office job. You lift the hand — his hand — and turn it over, and the diabetic's faint tremor is there, small, almost nothing, a thing his body has been managing quietly for years without complaint.

There's a car key on the shelf under the mirror. A garage door that needs a code punched into a keypad by the frame. Upstairs, through the floor, you can hear someone moving — a wife, humming something off a morning radio show, plates finding a table.

You do not know her name yet. You will learn it by lunch, the way you'll learn the names of three children who are not children anymore, and an ex-wife who calls sometimes about the youngest, and a hotel two miles from here where a meeting is already on a calendar you didn't write. You will learn that this man doesn't drink, hasn't in years, that he prays before the meal you're about to sit down to, that his sales numbers are good enough that nobody asks him hard questions, that his knees ache a little on stairs and his blood sugar wants watching before noon.

None of that is yours. All of it is yours now.

You buckle in behind his hazel eyes like settling into a car that fits almost right — mirrors need adjusting, seat needs a notch back, but the engine turns over fine. You reach for the shirt hanging on the hook by the door and start on the buttons, his fingers, your intention, and somewhere above you a voice calls a name that isn't yours to answer to yet, and will be, starting now, for as long as there is a now to have.

You answer it anyway. The voice coming out is his. It always was.