Kevin Struzik

The projection booth smells like hot dust and popcorn oil three floors down, and you are standing in it at the wrong hour, in Travis Boehner's body, in a bathrobe he does not remember putting on. Atlanta is dark outside the little square window. He should be asleep. You made him get up.

It has been less than a minute. You have his weight, his breath, the ache already starting in his lower back from a chair he sits in too long, and none of it is interesting anymore. That's the thing nobody tells you before your first spin: the wanting doesn't come from the man, it comes from the gap where the next one hasn't happened yet. You spun the wheel a night ago and got a projectionist who loves a job that's basically obsolete, and for about four hours that was enough. Then it wasn't. His hand is on the doorknob of his own booth and it feels like somebody else's hand, which, at this point, is simply how hands feel to you.

You open the site on his phone, the way you always do, thumb moving before you've decided anything. You pay. You spin.

And Travis Boehner's Sunday goes on somewhere without you in it, forever, and you don't think about that part, because that part is never the part you think about.

---

The van's back doors are open on a wet street and the box in your hands is halfway to the shelf when the motion goes wrong — your hand turns it the wrong way, corners it against the rack at a bad angle, and you have to stop, back it out, do it again, slow, correct. Then the next one. Then the one after that. Ten boxes, checked like a man doing this for the first time, on a route his hands have run ten thousand times without him.

You are heavier here. Not fat exactly — thick through the middle in a way that sits low, a gut that pushes the polo shirt out over the belt, shoulders still wide underneath it. Late thirties in the knees already. A scanner holstered against your hip bumps your leg when you shift your weight, and your left leg is bouncing, has been bouncing this whole time, a tic that started before you arrived and didn't stop for the possession, like the body kept its own rhythm going underneath whoever's driving.

The polo shirt is the first thing that talks to you. Cotton gone soft at the collar from a hundred washes, a little tight now across the belly in a way it wasn't three years ago, and there — a whole morning comes up out of the fabric: him standing in front of a mirror in a bedroom in Bay Ridge, pulling this same brown collar down flat, sucking in for half a second out of old habit before he lets it go because sucking in doesn't do anything anymore and he stopped pretending it did around the time his second kid was born. His wife's voice from the kitchen, something about the school trip form, and him calling back that he signed it already, it's on the counter, and her saying no it isn't, and him going to look and finding it exactly where he said. A small, married argument that isn't really an argument. He kissed her on the way out. That part comes through soft, almost embarrassed, like a man who still means it after eleven years and doesn't examine it too closely because examining it feels like asking for trouble.

The tattoo on your forearm burns up a different year entirely — twenty-four years old, a shop in Sunset Park, a version of himself that drank more and slept less and thought the tribal design meant something specific instead of just meaning twenty-four. An ex-girlfriend's name almost got inked under it that same week and didn't, and some nights, not many anymore, he wonders what that would have looked like now, healed and stretched over the weight he's carried since. He doesn't wonder hard. It's not a wound. It's a door he doesn't open, just checks sometimes that it's still shut.

The wedding band is warm from his own skin already, a plain gold thing that used to spin loose on the finger and doesn't anymore. That one gives you almost nothing — no story, just a fact so constant it doesn't announce itself, the way you don't feel your own name.

Under your feet: the corrugated ridges of the van's floor, familiar as a staircase in the dark, four years of the same lurch and stop, lurch and stop. Your back against a shelf edge for a second — a whole decade of a bad lower back comes through it, ibuprofen in the glovebox, a chiropractor he keeps meaning to go back to. In your shirt pocket, empty, a memory of the cigar he'll have parked outside his own house tonight before he goes in smelling like it anyway, a habit his wife tolerates because it replaced the drinking and she'll take the cigar every time.

The mole on your cheek you can't see but you feel it anyway, the way he does, a small thing his kids like to touch when they're being sweet and his wife calls his beauty mark when she's teasing him, and somewhere in there is a feeling with no story attached, just warmth, just his whole ordinary decent life sitting in a body that is thick and tired and forty minutes into a route that doesn't get easier no matter how long he's run it.

The sodium light through the open van door hits the wet stoop across the street, and for a second the borrowed rhythm of the job wants to just continue, wants to reach for the next box, because that's what these hands know to do without being told.

You stop. You look down at your own hand instead, thick fingers, the ring, the small dark hairs on the back of it, and turn it over once like it might mean something upside down.

"Not mine," you say, out loud, to no one, to the wet street, to the stoop light. "Not yet, anyway."

Then you look up into the dark at the top of the doorway, past the boxes, past the rain starting again, and you hold there, because somewhere behind Kevin Struzik's brown eyes the wheel is still spinning, and neither of you knows for how long.