Kenji Okafuji

---

Warren Pettibone's office has the good chair, the one with the lumbar bladder you pump by hand, and Warren Pettibone's knee will not stop going under the desk, up-down, up-down, like there's a metronome buried in the bone. It is the middle of the morning. There is a quarterly deck open on the monitor that somebody else built and that you, wearing him, are supposed to read before eleven. You have been him less than a minute and already you know the shape of the boredom coming — the calls, the flattery, the gray-haired weight of being deferred to by people who want something from Warren and would want nothing from you. You spun him seventy-some men ago as somebody else entirely, and every one since has been a stop on the way here, and here is not where you want to stay. That's the whole reason, if you're honest, and you are, to yourself, for exactly as long as it takes to reach for the mouse and pull up the site instead. Comfortable and static is worse than uncomfortable and new. You have learned that about yourself over seven hundred and seventy-four other names. The wheel loads. You do not hesitate over it, because hesitating is for people who are still deciding, and you decided a long time ago, at spin nine or ten, that you were never going to stop.

You click.

There is no chair under you now, no monitor, no knee bouncing under a desk. There is a trash bag, half-lifted, and a weight in your right hand that wants to go somewhere your wrist hasn't finished deciding, and for half a second the bag hangs wrong — twists a quarter turn too far, corner slipping — before the hand that is now yours corrects it, slow, deliberate, the way you'd walk out a cramp. You tie it again. You watch yourself tie it again, from behind eyes that are not the eyes you had nine seconds ago, in light that is aggressively, physically morning — low sun coming flat down a corridor with a wall of glass at the end of it, two saguaros standing outside like they're waiting for a bus, and everything the color of a held breath.

You are short. That arrives first, before any memory does, just as fact: the cart beside you is at your hip, not your thigh, and the world sits closer to the ground than Warren's world did. Fifty-two years in this frame and it carries like a tool that's been sharpened down to fit one hand. The shirt is what starts talking first — gray twill, buttoned to the collar, and the moment your shoulders settle into it you get him getting into it, hours ago by his clock, in a bedroom with the blinds still down and his wife's breathing steady on the other side of the bed. He dresses without the light on. He knows this shirt by feel — the second button that's a half-shade off from the others because he lost the real one and his wife sewed a spare on without asking, the collar gone soft in a way that isn't shabby, just his. He does the belt one notch tighter than he needs to, out of habit from twenty pounds ago he never quite lost the memory of. The keys go on the belt loop before the shoes go on, always, because once, years back, he left without them and had to drive home from the district lot at five a.m.

The keys are warm already from his hip, and that's a whole year by themselves — the ring of them, the school's master and the storage room and the one for the old gate nobody uses, and under that, further down, the smell of pencil shavings and floor wax that this building has had since before he started here, sixteen years now, nights at first, then this, the early shift, four a.m. to noon, because he asked for it after his second was born and never asked to go back. Two kids. A boy who plays trumpet badly and beautifully in the garage, a girl at community college who calls on Sundays. His wife lights a candle most evenings, not for any god exactly, more a practice than a belief, and he doesn't share it but he doesn't mind it, stands in the doorway sometimes just watching the flame do what flames do. There was a woman before her — Denise, a name that surfaces on its own, unbidden, off a stray thread of feeling that comes up through nothing you're touching, just there, the way an old ache is there — someone from a different decade of him, a road not taken that he still, once in a while, on a bad night, wonders about without regret exactly. Just wonders.

The bag crinkles in your grip and gives you the job itself: the particular ache low in the back from bending into bins built for someone taller, the callus along the second knuckle where the mop handle rides, how his knees announce themselves on the concrete in a way they didn't used to, how none of it is unbearable, how he has made a kind of peace with a body that does one thing very well without being asked and asks for very little back. Nicotine never got him — tried it once at nineteen, didn't take. A drink now and then at his brother-in-law's on a holiday, never more than that. Comfortable, he'd say, if you asked him, not rich, not struggling, comfortable, and grateful for the word.

The corridor smells like a school before the school wakes up — floor sealant, the ghost of yesterday's cafeteria, cool air conditioning fighting a sun that's already climbing outside that window like it means something personal by it. The cart's yellow buckets catch the light. Somewhere past the doors, the desert is doing what it does at this hour, turning gold before it turns merciless.

You look down at the hand holding the bag. Not Warren's hand — softer, older in a different way, a plain wedding band worn thin at the band's edge from sixteen years of forgetting to take it off. You turn it over once, like you're checking it's real, and under your skin the leg starts up on its own, the knee going, small and fast, an idle he never notices and you already can't stop.

"Okay," you say, to the empty hallway, to the cactus outside, to nobody. "Let's see what today is."