Kyle Beringer

You are Mark Heffernan for less than a minute, standing in a condo that isn't yours, in a life that isn't yours, and the gap between the teeth you keep running your tongue over is already boring you. Forty, average, fine — a sales rep body with a good watch on the nightstand and a decent view of the Bay Bridge, and you spun for it eight hundred and ninety-three men ago and felt something. Now you feel the couch cushion and the true crime rerun and the specific tiredness of a stranger's mortgage, and you think: not this. Not tonight. Mark never gets a say. You barely let him finish standing up before your hand — his hand — is already reaching for the laptop.

The wheel spins and you are gone from him mid-blink, and San Francisco's evening folds up and Philadelphia's almost-midnight opens instead, and you are sitting on a bench under a squat rack with your forearms on your knees and a water bottle sweating against black rubber matting and a light overhead doing that fluorescent hum specific to gyms nobody else is in this late.

You are small in this one — 5'5", skinny, a build made of tendon and stubbornness rather than mass — and the first thing that arrives isn't a memory, it's the ache: shoulders lit up, forearms trembling faintly even at rest, the good kind of wrecked. Your hands find the toothpick tucked at the corner of your mouth without being told to, chewing it slow, and that alone cracks something open — not a picture yet, just a feeling, church pews, a woman's voice saying quit gnawing on that thing at the table.

Then the shirt. The gray tee is damp at the collar and it gives you the morning whole: standing in the bedroom before six, Danielle still asleep with one arm flung across your side of the bed, and you pulling this exact shirt over your head one sleeve at a time, quiet about it, the way you're quiet about everything in that apartment because she sleeps light and you love that about her more than you'd ever say out loud. The shorts next — black, worn thin at the seam — and they bring back the drive in, empty streets, a marble stoop two doors down worn into a shallow bowl by a hundred years of other people's feet, the kind of thing you notice because you spend your days telling people how weight and repetition change a body, and stone is no different.

The bench under you gives you the gym itself — the parallel bars against the far wall, the treatment table you stretched an old man's hip on eleven hours ago, telling him about his grandson's little league team while you worked the joint slow. Rehab is the thing you're actually good at, better than anyone tells you, and you know it in your palms: the specific give of scar tissue, how to find a compensating pattern by watching someone walk twenty feet, patience you didn't know you had until you needed it professionally. Church on Sundays, when you can. A drink maybe four times a year and even then just the one. The eye — you feel it before you'd ever see it, the faint outward drift, the way people's eyes flick to it and then away, embarrassed, and you stopped minding that around age nineteen.

The bar overhead — cold, knurled, two inches wider grip than you've used all year, some late experiment your body doesn't remember agreeing to — gives you the last of it: the tenth rep, the one where your face should have crumpled and didn't, where you blew through your teeth with a minute of set left on the clock and then just stopped blowing, and ground four more out with no fight in your jaw at all, like something else finished the set for you.

Your hands come off the memory and into the present, into the actual weight of them, and you turn them over in the dead fluorescent light — small hands, calloused at the base of the fingers from bar work, a toothpick worn soft at one end between them.

You look up into the dark glass of the mirror across the empty gym floor and say, "Long night," to no one, and your mouth does something with the words that isn't quite Kyle's smile yet, and isn't quite not.