Kevin Auyeung

Roger Ashwell's kitchen smells like microwaved coffee and the particular staleness of a house with no wife in it anymore, and you are standing in it at ten to midnight with his soft gut against the counter edge, feeling every one of his sixty-three years in your lower back. You spun him last month and it has been a bad month to be him. The insomnia is his, not yours, but you inherited it anyway — three a.m. arrives and there is nothing in this body that wants to sleep, just a beauty mark you keep catching in the hallway mirror and a bald scalp that is cold even indoors. You have $40,000 of his money sitting untouched because retirees do not spend, they hoard, and hoarding a stranger's caution has started to feel like wearing somebody else's shoes two sizes small. You are not sad. You are not anything you'd confess to. You are just done, the way you get done, the way you have gotten done nine hundred and twenty-one times before — and you open the laptop and you go to the page with the wheel on it and you spin, because Roger Ashwell's arthritis is not going to improve and neither is the quiet.

The wheel lands somewhere it is already Friday.

The breath goes from ragged to even in a single pull, like a held note resolving, and the arm that was hanging into the dark off the mattress edge draws itself up on its own authority. The body rolls onto its back. Hands fold at the chest, fingers laced, a shape this man's muscles have never once made in sleep, and you are twenty-four years old and lean with it, weight distributed like nothing hurts, streetlight coming thin through a gap in the curtain and lying across a stranger's black long-sleeve shirt.

The shirt is the first thing that talks. It went on this body at four in the afternoon, over a shower that didn't fully wash the diesel smell out from under the fingernails — never fully does, not after a double — and there's a whole day folded into the sleeve: cab jacked up on the second lift, a fuel injector that fought him for forty minutes, Reyes from the next bay yelling something about the Eagles game that Kevin didn't answer because his hands were inside an engine and his hands, when they're inside an engine, are the only part of him that's actually thinking. Muscle memory: torque wrench, click, click, click, the small deep satisfaction of a bolt finally seating right. He loves it and has never said so to anyone, not even to Priya, two years gone now, who used to tease him about coming home smelling like a garage and meaning it fondly until one day she didn't mean anything about him fondly anymore. That ended fourteen months ago and he still, some nights, drafts a text he doesn't send.

The sweatpants against your legs bring the walk home — three blocks, marble steps worn into a soft hollow by a hundred years of other people's feet, his own stoop the fourth one from the corner, key sticking like it always sticks. The bare feet against the sheet bring nothing, just cool cotton and the specific ache of standing ten hours on concrete, knees that are twenty-four and will not always be. Under it all is a body that knows exactly what it's for: the forearms only look wiry, they've got a mechanic's grip in them, could shear a rusted bolt with a cheater bar and not think twice. The stubble along the jaw itches faintly, three days uncut, and threaded through everything else — quiet, procedural, not even a memory so much as a fact the body carries — is the knowledge that he worked graveyard tonight and slept the wrong side of noon into the wrong side of dark to do it, and that his mother back in the house he grew up in three neighborhoods over still doesn't fully believe diesel is a real trade, and that he is, on the whole, all right with his life, in the unexamined way of a man who has not yet been asked to examine it.

You surface out of all of it at once, the way you always do, a held breath let go.

You look at your hands — you know already, before you even lift them, that they will not be soft, will not be spotted, that there will be no beauty mark and no cold bald scalp above them — and you turn them over slow in the thin light, knuckles first, palms after, watching them not be Roger Ashwell's. Then your eyes come up off them, find the dark of the room, and hold there like there's a camera in it.

"Guess I'm not done sleeping," you say, to no one, and you almost laugh, because you have no idea if that's true.