Gregory Podolski

Marcus Villanueva's office chair is too small for the feeling in your chest, though it fits his body fine — 5'8", thirty years old, that beauty mark near his mouth you keep catching in the monitor's reflection. You have been him for one hundred and twenty seconds. Long enough to feel the particular flatness of his throat, the dryness of a Kansas courthouse afternoon still sitting in him from whatever he was doing when the wheel found him. Long enough to know you don't want it. There's no story here yet, nothing you want to open like a hand of cards. You paid for the spin already priced into the boredom itself — you didn't come back for Marcus, you came back because Marcus was thin, a placeholder, a coat you tried on in a doorway. The card in your head, the deck of two hundred forty-seven men, hums under the itch of him. You open vessel.cards on his laptop with his own fingers, the nail beds still a stranger's nail beds to you, and you spin.

The bathroom arrives around you mid-stroke, fluorescent light too white over a chipped porcelain sink, and you are leaning into a mirror with foam going dry on one cheek and clean skin shining wet on the other. The razor is already moving. It goes up the jaw against the grain with no hesitation where a man usually flinches, at the corner of the mouth, and the second half of the face gets done faster than the first, like something impatient took over partway through a task someone else started. Steam curls off the running tap. A tank undershirt sticks to your back with old sweat. Your knees are locked at an angle that feels practiced, the give in the left one familiar as a hinge.

The razor's handle is warm from his grip already, and touching it brings the first flash: a hardware store off Aramingo, buying the good blades because his father-in-law once told him disposable ones tear up your skin, and some fondness folded into that even though the father-in-law is a pain in the ass at Easter. You feel Gregory's hands know this motion without watching — thirty-four years of shaving, cheap and unremarkable, an evening ritual before a night shift, not a morning one, because his board changes and today it's a four p.m. start out of 30th Street. The tank top against your shoulder blades gives you more: the shirt underneath waiting on the doorknob, navy wool coat on a hanger with its brass buttons dulled at the edges from thumbs, the conductor's cap with PENN TERMINAL stitched faded on the brim, hanging where it always hangs. Touching the coat, later, will give you the platform — the step box scraping concrete, the particular ache of standing on marble station floors for nine hours, the small pride of a schedule kept.

The wedding band is cool and then warm against the sink's edge where his left hand rests to steady himself, and it opens wider than the rest: a woman named Colleen, her laugh loud enough to embarrass him at his cousin's wedding, seven years married, no kids and a long quiet grief about that neither of them says out loud anymore, just a Sunday mass they still go to together at Visitation, candles lit for nothing in particular. Under that, thinner, an old ex — Danielle, nineteen and reckless with him on South Street, a version of himself he sometimes still misses without knowing why, gone eleven years and resurfacing only in songs on the oldies station. The toothbrush in its cup by the mirror belongs to Colleen; hers is pink, his is blue, and some Tuesday two years ago he stood right here chewing a toothpick after dinner instead of having the beer he used to have, because the pills the doctor gave him made drinking feel stupid, and he never missed it, not really, not the way people warn you.

The floor under your bare feet is cold tile, and it gives you nothing grand, just the ordinary ache of an average body at thirty-four — a little stiff in the lower back from bending to set the step box down a thousand times, forearms wiry from pulling the emergency cord test every shift, average in every way the file said and truer than the file could say: he is not remarkable, he never asked to be, and there is a strange peace sitting in that, foam drying unevenly on a face that has never once been the first thing anyone noticed about him.

You set the razor down. You look at your hands — his hands, thick-knuckled, a plain gold band catching the bathroom light — and you turn them over slow, like you're checking they're real, though you already know.

"There you are," you say to the mirror, to no one, to him, and you don't know yet if you mean it as hello or goodbye.