Kevin Chao

The retired man's knees ache getting up from the recliner, and that's the whole problem in one motion. Sixty-four years old, sitting in an Atlanta living room at two in the afternoon on a Monday, with the television off and nothing on the calendar and nothing on the calendar tomorrow either. This body — his sixty-third — is soft in the middle, freckled along the forearms, a good face, a decent life somebody else lived into this shape. It has been generous to him for less than a minute of felt time, and already the quiet in it is unbearable. He was a person people called at holidays. He does not want to be spoken to at holidays. He wants the second before the wheel stops, every time, more than he has ever wanted anything that lasted. He opens the laptop on the TV tray. vessel.cards loads the way it always loads, patient, ordinary, a wheel and a price and a button. He pays. He spins.

The highway is dark and then it isn't a highway anymore, it's a body, upright, alive, hands at ten and two going slack and finding a new position lower on the wheel, wider, more casual than the boy who owned them ever drove. The dash light is green-blue on knuckles that are not the hands you had a second ago. The turn signal clicks on, ticking for an exit that belongs to nobody's home. Outside the window the sky over the highway is going the color of a bruise healing — not night, not day, that empty hour before a Tuesday actually starts. Three miles from a house you will never turn into now.

The backpack strap is still faint on his shoulder from hours ago, a phantom weight, and touching the wheel gives you his hands first — small for a man, quick, a callus at the base of the right thumb from gripping a pen too hard through high school exams. The tattoo on the inner wrist, a compass rose, comes with the memory of a tattooist in Newtown laughing at how still nineteen-year-old Kevin Chao held his arm, like he was steering something even then. You feel where his eyebrow barbell sits, a small cool weight above the socket, and with it comes the day he got it done against his mother's wishes and wore a beanie for two weeks so she wouldn't see, and how proud he was of himself for the lie, briefly, before he told her anyway because he always tells her anyway.

The hoodie memory doesn't come — he's not wearing it now, he's in the t-shirt from last night, the one with a faded band across the chest, and pulling it on this morning-that-was-yesterday comes back sleeve by sleeve: him tugging it over his head in a share house bedroom with a poster half peeling off the wall, his girlfriend texting him a photo of her cat because she knows he checks his phone right after he checks the mirror. He does that — checks the mirror, touches his own face without noticing, thumb finding the notch of his chin like it's a rosary. The cleft chin is the first thing anyone says about him and the first thing he forgets he has, until his hand finds it again.

The jeans give up a whole semester: an economics tutorial he skipped to fall asleep on the campus lawn, laptop open to a blank document, the harbor light so hard and white off the water near the wharf that he had to angle the screen away from the glare. He loves that lawn. He loves the ferry horn at a certain hour, low and stupid and comforting, more than he has ever told anyone, because it isn't a cool thing to love. He does not drink at the parties he goes to, orders a lemon lime bitters and nobody teases him for it anymore, not since second year. He has never smoked anything in his life, tried a vape once at sixteen and coughed so hard his girlfriend — not this one, an earlier one, nothing that matters now — had to hold his hair back from his face, and he never touched one again out of pure wounded pride.

His girlfriend now is named in a group chat still open on a phone in the cupholder, though your hands haven't found the phone yet, only the wheel, only the seatbelt cutting faint across a chest that runs the numbers on a body of its own accord: 5'3", compact, strong through the legs from years of futsal on weekends, a body that has never once had to think about how to be strong, it simply is. Nothing hurts. That is new, this deep in your history of borrowed skin — sixty-four years of somebody else's knees, and now nothing hurts at all, and it is almost obscene how good that feels, sitting behind a wheel that isn't moving toward anything anymore.

The steering wheel itself gives the last of it, the longest thread: three miles from a rented house with a leaking tap he keeps meaning to fix, a mainline Protestant upbringing he's drifted from without deciding to, church on Christmas Eve because his mother still asks, a compass tattoo that means nothing profound, he just liked the shape of it at nineteen. Nothing he'd bring up if you asked him what he carries. That's the truth of him — a clean life, a small life, worth less than the fear of losing it would suggest, and none of that mattering now, because he isn't the one making decisions inside it anymore.

You look down. The hands on the lower part of the wheel are small, brown, sure of themselves in a way that isn't yours yet and already is. The indicator ticks on, dumb and patient, aimed at an exit nobody who lived here would take.

"Wrong turn," you say, out loud, to no one, and you don't switch it off yet.