Marcus Duvall

Danilo Restrepo's hands are shaking before you even reach the site, and they're not your hands, not really, but they're what you've got — a tailor's hands, forty years old, calloused at the fingertips from pins and not from work that matters. You made him marry a woman you don't love an hour ago, in his kitchen, over a phone call to her mother that you don't even remember dialing, because it seemed like something Danilo would do and you wanted, for one night, to feel what wanting something small felt like. It didn't take. It sat in you like a coat two sizes wrong. Small-town Ohio at midnight on a Monday is a dead channel — porch light, a dog three yards over, a woman upstairs who thinks she just got engaged to a man who has been someone else, off and on, for less than a minute at a time, more times than she'll ever know. You go to the laptop still open on the counter. Spin 431. You don't decide it so much as your thumb decides it for you, the way it always does now.

The bar is under your hands before you know you have hands. Cold knurled steel, sweat-slick where a stranger's palms have already been going ten minutes, and your body — his body — is dropping into the bottom of a rep that started before you got here, hips loading, air locked in a chest that is not the chest you had a second ago. Two inches wider than his grip has been all year and you don't know that yet, you only feel it: wrong leverage, unfamiliar, and the weight comes up anyway on legs that know something your mind hasn't caught up to. Fluorescent light. Rubber floor smell. A water bottle sweating somewhere below and to the left, remembered before it's seen.

The rack against your shoulders when you rerack the bar gives you the first flash — his hands on this same steel eleven years ago, a different gym, a drill sergeant's voice folded into the memory like a stain that never washed. Then the tank top, damp cotton dragging over the tribal ink on your right arm, and that's a door too: a shop in Waikiki, twenty-six years old, a artist named Sefa who wouted three sessions and charged him in beer for the fourth. The lines going in slow, meaning nothing and everything at once, chosen because his grandmother's people were from an island he'd never been to and he wanted something on him that said so before he forgot.

The dog tags are gone — day off, gym clothes only — but the ghost-weight of them against his sternum still answers when you breathe, and it brings the barracks: 0500, cold concrete, men he'd bleed for standing in a line that gets shorter every few years as somebody doesn't re-up, or doesn't come back, or comes back different. Twenty-four years in. A staff sergeant's patience worn into him like the crease in a uniform ironed too many times. The old injury surfaces without asking — right knee, a jump gone wrong in a year he doesn't like to talk about, the joint that clicks on cold mornings and has never once, not once, stopped him from doing anything he decided to do out of pure meanness toward his own body.

The bench under him a second ago gives you the water bottle, and the water bottle gives you the woman — not a wife, never that, a girlfriend eight months gone now, who used to sit on this same bench and hand it to him between sets and laugh at how he blew through his teeth like a bull. She left a note, not a scene. He still has the dip can she hated in his gym bag, tucked in the mesh pocket, and some nights the tin's shape in his palm is the whole reason he doesn't call her.

You feel how strong this body is before you feel anything else about it — fifty years old and still built like something load-bearing, shoulders that know the bar without checking, a leg that has already started, under the rack, its old restless bounce, tapping against nothing, the body doing what it does whether he's watching it or not. And under the strength, threaded through it so fine you'd miss it if you weren't wearing it: the low steady hum of a thirst that isn't for water, that starts most days around four and gets managed, mostly, by discipline and dip and the gym and not always.

You finish the rep. The face does none of what a last rep does — no grimace, no grin, nothing — because you are not the one who was counting.

You look at your hands on the bar. Wide, dark, a callus map you didn't earn. You let go and turn them over, palms up, like they might have something written on them.

"Who's counting," you say, out loud, to no one, in a voice with twenty-four years of command in it that you didn't put there.

Somewhere behind your borrowed ribs, faint as a pilot light, the wanting is already back — not for water, not for her, not even for him. Just the wheel, waiting, and no clock on it at all.