Osiel Maldonado

Gregory Fassbinder's hands smell like the hand sanitizer that never fully leaves them, and you have been standing in a supply closet for six minutes not restocking anything, just standing, because the shift hasn't officially started and already a call light is on down the hall for a man who does this every morning at this hour out of habit and not need. Fourteen minutes ago you spun a wheel and it gave you this: green eyes, a bad knee already announcing itself, a name that isn't yours attached to a job that isn't either. You liked the idea of being useful. You did not like the fluorescent hum, or the taste of the coffee in the break room, or the particular fatigue of a body that has been standing on linoleum for twenty-two years before you ever arrived in it. Six minutes was long enough to know. You take the phone out of Gregory's scrub pocket — muscle memory you didn't ask for, already fading — and you go back to the page with the wheel on it, and you spin, because the wanting came back faster than you expected it to, faster than it ever has, and that itself is worth noticing and not examining.

The foil peels at the corner and the light lands on you like a hand and you turn from it, and something in the turning already belongs to somebody else — a body's certainty about which way morning comes from. You turn back into the glare and open your eyes and hold them there. Squat weight settles into you all at once: a gut, a slight looseness behind the sternum, tar of sleep still gumming the hinge of your jaw. Your skull is bare against the pillow. The room smells of foil-warmed plastic and stale sheets, and there is a boot-shaped emptiness at the edge of your vision where two boots stand side by side on the concrete floor, laces still tucked in.

The t-shirt is the first thing that gives you anything: cotton gone thin at the collar, a year of washing in the same machine at the same laundromat on 8th, and under it, faint, the press of his own ink against his sternum, geometric lines he chose at twenty-six after a divorce he doesn't call a divorce because Amina left before the paperwork and he still says "when Amina and I were together" like a man setting down something heavy in a doorway rather than a room. She used to trace that tattoo with one finger while he was almost asleep, not asking about it, just following the lines like they meant something she wasn't going to ask him to explain. He never got another one. He thinks about her on Fridays for no reason he's identified, maybe because Friday used to be the day she came by the bar near close and drank a soda water and waited for him.

The waistband of his work trousers is still buttoned — he fell into bed like this, didn't undress, just kicked the boots off and lay down sideways into eleven in the morning like it was midnight, because for him it is midnight, four hours after last call, after mopping the well, after cutting off a regular named Petrov who cries at the same song every single time. His body knows the bar the way it knows nothing else: the particular give of the rail under his forearms, the three-inch reach to the well without looking, the exact pressure to seat a cork back in a bottle that's already been opened twice. His hands, empty now on the mattress, twitch faintly toward his own face — an old tic, checking for something, a shave that isn't there, a worry that lives at the jaw and has for years. Blood pressure medication in the cabinet in the kitchen, taken most days, forgotten some, a small guilt he carries the way he carries the rent.

He prayed less this year than last year and he knows it and doesn't like the knowing. Friday means something to him underneath the shift schedule, a want he hasn't acted on, and it sits alongside twenty-five thousand dollars he doesn't spend and doesn't mention, sitting quiet in an account he checks like checking a pulse. No wife. No kids. An apartment with a balcony that looks at haze over water, and neon that gets into the wet tile at night in colors he never picked out but has come to like.

You lie in his skin, in his stalled Friday, in the taped light lying across a face that isn't going anywhere, and you feel how tired this particular tired is — not your fatigue, his, twenty years of it, load-bearing.

You lift your hand off the mattress and look at it: thick fingers, a scar you didn't put there, a callus along the side of the palm from a thousand nights of pulling the same tap. You turn it over slowly, like checking whether it still works.

"Not you again," you say to the ceiling, meaning the light, meaning Fridays, meaning nothing he'd understand — and you hold your eyes there, open, unblinking, waiting to see if the wanting comes back before he even wakes all the way up.