Marcus Boileau

You are Wesley Tanner for the length of a held breath more, and Wesley Tanner is tired of himself. The dorm room smells like instant noodles and the candle he never lights. Thirty-five years old, a body gone soft the way muscle goes soft when it stops being asked for anything, hazel eyes stinging a little from the laptop glow. Tuesday, early evening in Denver, the light doing that flat gold thing against the blinds. You have been him less than a minute, decided him less than an hour before that, and already the boredom is back in your teeth like a bad filling. This is the two hundred and seventy-fifth time. You know the shape of the feeling now: not hunger exactly, more like a hand finding a doorknob out of habit. Wesley's roommate is watching something with a laugh track through the wall. You open the site because the site is always open, somewhere in you, the way a phone is always in a pocket. You do not decide so much as arrive at having decided. You spin.

—

The room tips into evening. Fluorescent lamp gone to a warm bedside one, blinds gone to curtains, the smell of noodles gone to something older — laundry, a little Bengay, the particular hush of a house with no one else in it. You are on your knees at the edge of a bed, hands loosely folded, and the amen has just left your mouth too early, half a laugh riding under it, and you are already pushing up onto your feet when the floor seems to reach for you and you go back down. Forehead finds the bedspread. Somewhere behind that forehead, a mouth that isn't yet fully yours says something without sound.

—

The bedspread against your forehead is chenille, worn soft in a strip the width of a man's face, and that is the first thing that comes through — not a memory yet, just a decade of foreheads. Then the shirt. Cotton, thin at the shoulders from washing, and touching it your arms remember lifting it overhead this morning without looking, the way you do a thing four thousand times. A flash: this morning, sun through the same curtains, weaker, colder — pulling the shirt down over the tattoo like closing a door, the way you always do without meaning to, though nobody in this house has asked about the tattoo in eleven years. The gray hoodie is on a hook by the closet door, EASTSIDE WRESTLING across the chest gone soft-white at the letters, and just seeing it from the floor gives you the smell of the gym before the memory does — rubber matting, Right Guard, the specific squeak of new shoes on old wood. Twenty-two years of that gym. A hundred boys who came in with something to prove and left, most of them, having proved something else instead. You feel the whistle's cord-weight on the back of your neck even though it isn't there right now, that phantom drag, and under it a soreness in both knees that is simply Tuesday, simply fifty-eight, simply every practice where you got down on the mat to show a kid the angle instead of just telling him.

The wedding band isn't there. The finger remembers it before you do — a paler stripe of skin, and touching it against the bedspread gives you her, gives you Renee, quick and entire: her laugh in the kitchen of a house that isn't this one anymore, the specific stubborn way she'd fold her arms when she'd already decided to forgive you and hadn't told you yet. The last fight wasn't even the loud kind. It was quiet, at this same kind of hour, and she said the thing about feeling like assistant coach of her own marriage, and she wasn't wrong, and you have thought about that sentence more since the divorce than during it. Two kids who call on Sundays, mostly. A daughter's voice on the phone laughing at something you said, unguarded, the good kind of laugh, and you holding onto that feeling for days after like change in a coat pocket.

The reflux flares low and small, familiar as weather — too much coffee, not enough water, the body's small complaint about being fifty-eight and still going down on the mat for teenagers. Strong through the legs, still, surprisingly; that never left, even when other things did. A gap between your front teeth that your tongue finds without being asked, an old habit older than any wife, any tattoo, any gym. The tattoo itself, under the sleeve, a face rendered in gray ink you had done the year your father died, and touching your own arm through the shirt gives you one second of the old man laughing at something on a porch that's gone now too.

You had been praying badly, half a joke of a prayer, the kind you do out of habit more than belief, though the belief is there somewhere underneath, patient, the way it's been your whole life. Getting to amen early, laughing at your own hurry to be done with it, is the most honest thing about the last thirty seconds of a man's life you will ever get to keep.

—

You lift your forehead off the bedspread. Look at the hand on your knee — his hand, wide-knuckled, the pale stripe where the ring used to sit — and turn it over slowly, like checking it for a wound that isn't there.

"Didn't even finish," you say, out loud, to the empty room, and you don't know yet if that's a complaint or a confession or just a thing a man says when he doesn't know who he's talking to anymore.