Idris Oyelaran

The Detroit evening is going orange in the glass wall of the office, and you are standing in it, fifty-four years old, green-eyed, shaved bald, small and soft around the middle, holding a phone with the site open. The man has been yours for less than a minute. His board will want him at seven. His shoes pinch. You have already learned that he is the kind who says "circle back" and means "no," and that it is exhausting to be believed so easily. Nobody in the building will tell him what he sounds like. That is not why you are leaving, but it is close. The truth is the one before him, the mechanic in San Francisco, the twenty-three-year-old with grease in the cracks of his knuckles. Eight minutes ago you were him. You stood in his brother's number on his phone and did not call it. Then you were here, with a corner office and no one to forgive you. You press the wheel. It turns.

Heat leaves, and cold bright light arrives.

You are standing at a bench with your hands in blue gloves, and your thumb is on the lid of a centrifuge. Something has gone wrong with the motion: the tube you were seating went in crooked, and you pull it and seat it again, slowly, correctly. The next ten you check one by one. Your breath is heavy and even, with weight behind it. Under the light the rack is cold-edged and the rotor smells of plastic and alcohol.

The glove cuffs bring the first of him. A drawer of nitrile boxes, his own voice teaching a new girl to load balanced, opposite, always opposite. Pride, small and private. The coat is heavy on your shoulders, cotton rubbed soft, and when you press your arm to your side the pen in the pocket clicks against a rib, and there is the morning: his wife's hand fixing the collar he had folded under, the sleeve of the white coat held open for his arm like a child's, the ring catching on the cuff. A daughter or son somewhere below the counter of that memory, shoeless, shouting for juice. He did not hurry. He never hurries.

The knuckles want to crack, and you let them. Left, then right. The sound runs up the wrists, and with it a night behind a bar in the alley outside, a cigarette he quit and still reaches for, the ex who still matters, a text he did not answer, and a savings number he checks like a pulse. His rosary is in the car, and the guilt about it is oddly warm. The studs in his ears are cool. Through the window the neon bleeds red across the brick, and the beard under your fingertip is clipped to a precise edge. His belly presses the bench edge, his feet ache in good, ugly shoes, and the mole on his cheek is something he has stopped feeling. You find the brother's name in him, Terrence, and it is a warm place with a bruise in it. You know the bruise. You made some of it.

You turn your hands over under the light. The ring is plain and a little tight. They are steady. They are not yours, and they are not anyone's now.

You look up, and say quietly, "Opposite. Always opposite." Then the thing under it, how long, and what tomorrow is. The rotor waits, and you do not know yet whether you are still him when it stops.