Paul Iacovone

The tab has been open for two hours. You know because the coffee went cold and you never noticed drinking it. A wheel, rendered in something a little too shiny, sitting under a headline that promises exactly what every forum post and every midnight thought experiment has promised for as long as you can remember wanting it: to be someone else, completely, from the inside. You have never believed anything sold to you at this hour of a dull morning. But your card is already in the field. You click before you can talk yourself down again, and the wheel spins, and it does not feel like anything, and then it feels like everything.

It lands mid-breath. Not your breath — you don't have one to compare it to, not really, not anymore — his. Ragged, then even, in the space of one inhale. You are face-down in sheets that smell like fabric softener and something underneath it, warmer, a body's smell. An arm hangs off the mattress. You feel it as your own before you understand you should call it that, and it draws itself up on its own, elbow bending, and the whole weight of a body you didn't ask for rolls onto its back. Hands fold at the chest like a man laid out for a wake. Streetlight cuts a blade through a gap in heavy curtains and lies across a ceiling you have never seen.

You lie still inside the stillness. Somewhere outside this room a Friday hasn't started yet, wherever you came from. Here it is still Thursday, and the light says evening, not morning, and the body under you is loose in a way that says it has just gotten off its feet, not just gotten out of bed — a man who sleeps when the sun is still deciding whether to go down. Second shift. Third shift. Something that runs against the grain of the ordinary day, and you feel that oddness sit there without an answer yet.

The sheet is under your palm first. Cheap cotton, softened by a hundred washes, and it gives you nothing but a hum, a bed slept in a thousand times. Then your hand finds the hem of the t-shirt riding up over the belly, and that's when it starts arriving in pieces, sleeve by sleeve, the way a coat gives you a coat and nothing more until you put your arm all the way in.

Paul. You get the name the way you'd get a smell — Paul Iacovone, and the shirt against your back is suddenly this morning, hours and hours ago now to you but only a doorway away in his time — the whites, stiff with starch, the chest pocket that always sits a little crooked no matter how the shirt is hung, the smell of the walk-in already on the collar before he's even left the house because it's soaked into everything he owns. You feel the cold come up off a counter of trays through hands that know a boning knife's balance without checking, a bicep that has forty pounds of primal cut memorized before the scale confirms it. The saw goes quiet at the end of the day and there is a particular kind of relief in that quiet, in the apron coming off, in the walk home with his eye — his left eye, drifting soft and outward, always slightly looking at something beside you rather than at you — catching streetlights at an angle nobody else sees them at.

The wedding band gives you a whole marriage in one cold ring of metal. A wife's voice saying his name like it has three syllables when she's annoyed and one when she isn't. A kitchen table. A silence at that table that isn't unhappy, just worn smooth, like a stair tread. Somewhere behind that, further back, an ex-girlfriend's laugh that this hand once thought it would hold onto forever and didn't — not tragic, just a life, just a fact the body carries the way it carries the ring, without making a show of it. A kid. One. A photograph he keeps meaning to reframe and never does.

The jaw clenches without you telling it to — his tell, not yours, an old habit worn into muscle from things he never says out loud. Under your ribs there's the flat, familiar ache of a body that used to drink and doesn't anymore, that still reaches, sometimes, for a vape that isn't in this hand right now but is close, always close, in a jacket pocket downstairs. Fifty-five, no — forty-five, but built like a man who has stopped fighting his own gut and made peace with the dad-bod truce of it, strong through the forearms in the specific, deceptive way of men who move heavy things all day and look soft doing it.

None of it is dramatic. That's what surprises you — how ordinary a whole life feels from inside its own hands, how little ceremony there is to a marriage, a job, a body that aches in the shoulders and is fine with that.

You look at your hands. His hands. The band catches what little light there is.

You say it out loud, to the empty room, in his voice, testing it like a coat you're not sure is yours to wear yet: "Okay. Okay — who are you."

Nobody answers. Nobody ever will. The wheel is still sitting on a screen somewhere, waiting, and you don't know yet if you'll spin it again in an hour or in a year, and neither does he, and neither does anyone.