Kenji Watabe

Three minutes is nothing. Three minutes is a man barely getting his shoes on.

You are Raymond Tsukamoto, sitting on the edge of a bed that is not yours, in a body that is short and gray-haired and sixty years old, and you have had it for exactly the length of time it takes to hate it. The knees ache without being asked to do anything. There's a whistle low in the chest on every breath, something old and mineral in there, coal dust settled into a life decades before you arrived to rent it. You spun and got a miner, and you thought, fine, novelty, and then you stood up in him and every joint reported for duty like a complaint. Ninety-seven men behind you and this is the one you can't wear a whole cup of coffee in. You are already reaching for the laptop.

The site loads the way it always loads, patient, the wheel sitting there mid-spin in its little loop of light like it never stopped since the last time. You don't think about Raymond. You've never once thought about any of them once the tab closes. You put the card down, you pay, you spin.

It lands, and there is no in-between.

Your hand is wet. Your hand is wet and there is a sponge in it, and the sponge is dragging soap down a car door in a long arc that just — stops, mid-stroke, because the wrist holding it has changed hands without changing hands, and for a moment there is a strange doubled sensation, like a chord resolving: the small circular motion the arm was making a second ago and the new stillness of it now, thumb tucked against the sponge, water running warm-cool over knuckles that are thicker than the ones you had a breath ago. A hose hisses somewhere near your feet. Late afternoon light, low and gray, the kind that comes off a low sky and never really commits to a color. A garage door, cream-colored, flanking you like a wall. You are heavier in the middle than you were a second ago and it sits on you comfortably, an old friend of a weight, not fought.

The shirt is what opens first — plain gray cotton, damp under the arms already, and putting it on this morning comes back sleeve-first: the left arm going in easy, the right catching for a second on the elbow the way it always does now, shoulder gotten stiffer this year than he'd like to admit to anyone, certainly not to Denise, who would just tell him to see somebody, go get it looked at, and he would say it's fine, it's just a shoulder, the way he says everything is fine right up until the doctor's office makes him say numbers out loud. A1C. He hates that his body has become a series of numbers he has to report like a shift log.

The ring is next — his left hand tightens slightly on the sponge and there it is, the band, fourteen years of it, and with it Denise on the porch of the brick house on a night in October with her arms crossed against the cold, laughing at something he doesn't remember the joke of anymore, just the shape of her laughing. Fourteen years and a kid now eleven who is inside right now probably still in pajama pants at three in the afternoon, and that's fine, Saturdays are for that. Denise is at her sister's. The car — his wife's car, this is her car, he's doing this because he told her he would and because doing something with your hands on a Saturday is its own kind of church for him, better than the actual kind, though he still lights something like a candle in himself most mornings without ever calling it prayer.

Under his boots — no, sneakers, worn white ones, laces going gray — is asphalt slightly tacky with old rain, and through the soles comes a whole decade of driveways: this one, the one before it in the apartment complex when they were newer, poorer, happier in a scrappier way. Aeration basins in his palms too, though his hands aren't on the railing now — a phantom hum of the plant on a Tuesday, the water going white and furious below the walkway, the smell of chlorine that never quite leaves the back of his throat even on a Saturday four miles from the plant. He likes the work. Nobody asks him about it at parties and that's fine too; some jobs are better left uninterrogated by people who don't want the real answer.

Somewhere further back, a woman who isn't Denise — younger, a laugh with an edge on it, an ending that didn't have a villain in it, just a slow bleeding-out of a thing that had already been mostly gone for a year, and he still thinks of her sometimes with the specific, useless fondness you keep for a country you'll never visit again. His hand, unbidden, drifts up to touch his own jaw — an old habit, checking himself, some anxious little tell he's had since he was a teenager — and that gesture alone unlocks a hundred mirrors, shaving, waiting rooms, his daughter's fever last winter when he stood in the doorway of her room with his hand on his own face like he could take her temperature through his own skin.

The soap is going tacky under your fingers. Somewhere behind this face a whole Saturday was laid out, small and complete and his, and none of it knew this was the last afternoon it would be only his.

You look down at the hand holding the sponge. Foam slides in a rope off the knuckle and drops.

You turn the hand over once, like checking it's real, and lift your eyes to find — nothing, just the garage, the gray light, no camera, no mirror, just the empty driveway watching you back.

"Almost done," you say, to no one, in his voice, and it comes out easier than you expected, like it was always going to be the next thing said.

You don't know if that's true. You don't know how long "almost" is going to mean, this time.