Otis Beaumont

The apartment is doing the thing it does at eleven on a Saturday morning, which is nothing. You've read the threads for years — the ones where people swear it's real, the sites that turn out to be nothing, a mailing list, a Discord full of larpers. Vessel.cards loaded clean and quiet, no popups, just a wheel and a price, and you paid it the way you'd pay for anything else stupid at midnight, and you spun before you could talk yourself out of it.

The wheel is still spinning somewhere behind your eyes when it isn't anymore, and you are gripping a barbell that is two inches wider on the rack than it has any business being, and your arms are not your arms, they are thick through the forearm and corded at the shoulder and there is a weight settling into your knees that has been standing on concrete floors for forty years. You blow air through your teeth without meaning to, an old man's habit, a habit that isn't yours, and then you stop, because something in the chest under your hands has already decided this rep is going down slow, controlled, no different from the last nine.

You are Otis Beaumont, though you don't know that yet — the name comes later, off a locker tag, off a voice in a memory that hasn't surfaced. Right now you are only weight and grip and the bar biting into palms that have calluses in places your own hands never earned. You finish the rep. Your body — his body — racks the bar with the smooth economy of a man who has done this exact motion ten thousand times and doesn't need to think about where the hooks are.

Then you sit, because he was sitting, forearms coming down onto knees that ache faintly at the sides where cartilage remembers something the mind has filed away as fine now, fine, in remission, fine. The water bottle on the floor sweats against gray concrete. Your right hand finds it without looking — his hand, pale-patched across the back like a map of somewhere half-erased — and the plastic gives that flash under your fingers: a locker room three years ago, a nurse saying words that didn't attach to anything at first, and Otis — you have his name now, it arrived with the bottle's cold — sitting in a paper gown thinking about his son's wedding six months out and whether he'd be alive for it. He was. He is. The relief of that comes up through your palm like heat.

The shirt is next, gray and damp at the collar, and it gives you the morning he put it on — not this morning, some morning, all mornings, folded from a drawer his wife organized by color though he never asked her to, her voice from the next room asking if he wants eggs, and the answer that comes without thinking, *just coffee, Denise, I'll eat after* — and the name Denise sits down in you like she's always been there. Thirty-four years married. Two kids, grown, one in Cleveland and one two streets over who still calls him Pop and means it. The wedding band on the left hand you're sitting on gives you the day itself, a church on Herron Avenue, her dress the color of a good peach, his mother crying in a way that wasn't sad.

The bench under his thighs gives you the gym itself — not a chain, a converted storefront two blocks from the rail yard, the owner an old conductor too, comped memberships for guys off the extra board. You feel how the body knows this room, how it knows to keep the shoulders moving even at sixty because the shoulders are what carry a lantern and a coupling pin and forty years of stepping down off train cars onto platforms that don't always meet you halfway. Your knees know which stairs in the backyard at home have the loose concrete slab, wet leaves banked against it every October, because you've caught yourself on the railing there more times than you'd admit to Denise. Your hands know how to crack the knuckles one at a time, left first, when you're not paying attention — you feel them start to, sitting here, an old tell nobody in forty years of union meetings and closing-time card games has ever managed to break.

There is a church too, arriving the way a hymn arrives, half-remembered before you know why — Deacon somebody's voice, a Sunday feeling that lives in the sternum more than the mind, and under it, quieter, a pack of cigarettes he threw out eleven days ago and has not stopped thinking about since, the itch of not-having living in the same fingers that are cracking their own knuckles right now.

The vitiligo on the back of your hand catches the gym's flat window light, familiar and unhurried, patches he stopped hating around fifty and started thinking of as just the map of himself, no different from the wedding line or the ache in the left knee. You turn the hand over. You watch the fingers do it, slow, like you're checking they still work, which, in a way not this body's own, you are.

You look up. The rack in front of you, the water bottle, the door with morning coming through the wire-glass window in a flat Saturday wash.

"Whole set," you say, out loud, to nobody, in a voice deeper and older than any voice that has ever come out of you before — and then you just sit there, in him, cracking your knuckles without deciding to, not thinking yet about the wheel, or when, or whether tomorrow you're still sitting on this bench in this body in this gym two blocks from the rail yard, married to a woman named Denise you have never met and already miss.