Idris Farhan

The page loads slow on old wifi, the way everything loads at this hour. Nothing on. Nothing worth staying awake for except the wanting, which has outlasted every show you have ever half-watched at this exact dead hour, waiting for something to be real. A wheel on a plain white background. A button that should not work. You have read about this kind of thing since you were a teenager, under different names, in worse fonts, and never once believed the checkout page would actually take your card. It takes your card.

The wheel spins for longer than it needs to. It stops on a man you have never seen.

There is a highway, and it is not yours, and it is night in a way that does not match the hour you know in your bones it is. Both hands are on a wheel at ten and two, and they are not your hands, they are wider through the knuckle, older, a plain gold band catching the dash light on the left one. The car drifts a foot toward the line — not your doing, some last motion already committed to before you arrived — and comes back in one smooth correction that isn't yours either, muscle doing what muscle has done ten thousand times. Then the hands come off the wheel on their own, low, resettle wider, and a turn signal ticks on for an exit that means nothing to you and everything to some other part of this body that hasn't caught up yet to the fact that it isn't going home.

The shirt is what gives him up first. Cotton, soft from washing, buttons under your — his — fingers, and there's a memory in the fabric of standing in front of a mirror at five in the evening, rolling the sleeves twice each, checking the collar because Aaliyah always says he looks like he slept in it if he doesn't. The bar smell is already in the weave: well liquor, lime rind, the bleach they mop with after last call. Under that, older washing, older mirrors — a hundred versions of this same fifteen seconds, buttoning up for a shift, a lifetime of it, going back to a much younger face doing the exact same thing in an apartment above a taqueria that doesn't exist anymore.

The wedding band. You feel his thumb want to turn it before you even decide to let it, an old habit with nothing behind it but itself, and it opens onto Aaliyah at a kitchen table twenty-some years ago, both of them younger, her hand flat on his while he talked himself into asking her father properly. There were nerves, real ones, a whole life not yet decided balanced on that afternoon, and it went fine, it went better than fine, and now there are three kids grown or nearly grown and a house that is quiet more often than it used to be and he still, still, turns this ring without noticing, at red lights, doing inventory, listening to someone else's problems across a bar top.

The bar top itself comes up through the memory of his forearms resting on wood before opening — the good hour, the only hour that's his, stocking the well in a strip mall that has seen four different tenants in the space next door and one of them was a mosque for eighteen months before the rent went up and they moved. He's never once poured himself a drink in fifteen years behind that rail, hasn't wanted to since before that, since a pack a day and a cough that finally scared him into quitting for the kids' sake, and there is something in him that likes it, the not-drinking, likes being the only sober one in a room built entirely for the opposite, likes closing up in the quiet and driving home with the radio low.

His body holds all of it plainly: fifty-three years sitting easy in an average frame, five-five, nothing to complain about except the knees on long shifts and the CPAP machine waiting on the nightstand that Aaliyah bought him after months of elbowing him awake. The hairline pulled back into that shape he stopped fighting a decade ago. Hands that know how to crack a case of limes without looking, that know a pour by weight not measure, that have never once poured for himself.

Three miles from a house he built a life inside of, on a Monday evening he will never finish arriving at.

You look down. The hands are broad, spotted faintly, the ring loose enough to turn without trying. You lift them off the wheel that isn't turning anymore and hold them up to the dash light like they might tell you something they haven't already.

"Okay," you say, in his voice, to no one. "Okay."

The signal keeps ticking for the wrong exit, patient, and somewhere behind your eyes is a wheel that will spin again whenever it spins again, and not before.