Raymond Tsukamoto

You are four minutes into being Liam Foscarini when you decide he isn't worth finishing.

It's Saturday, it's Detroit, it's that flat gray afternoon light coming through a garage bay door somebody left half up, and you are standing over a torn-apart transmission with grease already working into the creases of hands that are shorter-fingered than you'd like, blond hairs on the knuckles catching the light. Liam's back has a twinge in it that isn't yours. There's a radio going, some classic rock station, and a coffee going cold on a rolling tool cart, and none of it is bad, exactly. He has dimples. He has a girl who texted him twice already asking if he's coming to her sister's thing tonight. He has $40 in his wallet and a lease and a torque wrench he loves the way some men love dogs.

It's fine. It's small. Ninety-six men behind you and this is the one that feels like a waiting room. You wipe your hands on a rag that smells like him — Liam, whoever he was under you — and you go to the laptop balanced on a stack of tire catalogs and you pull up the wheel again, because that itch never once has gone away, not through ninety-six of them, and today it's got a name in your mouth before you even see the spin: *bigger*. Something with weight to it. Something that isn't twenty-dollar bills and a sister's dinner party.

You spin.

The bar of light lays itself across a face that is not Liam's, and the face turns from it, and then turns back, stubborn even in sleep, and opens brown eyes into the glare and holds them there.

You are on your back on a mattress with a wool blanket half thrown, and the ceiling above you is somebody's water stain in the shape of nothing, and there is foil crackling faintly at the window where the tape has given up a corner, and the room smells like a garage that somebody sleeps in. Every part of this body is heavier than the one you left. Not fat-heavy — settled-heavy. A gut that has absorbed sixty years of decisions. Shoulders low and wide and permanently a little rounded, like something built to go through openings rather than stand up straight in them. Your feet, when you feel for them under the blanket, are bare and small, and the ankles ache in a specific dull way you don't have a name for yet.

Your hand is on the mattress. The mattress remembers him lying down on it — not from a fall, from being lowered onto it, careful, boots already off by the door, work trousers left on because taking them off was one motion too many. That was hours ago by his clock, though only seconds have passed by yours. Middle of the morning here. Middle of a night shift's morning, which is to say the deep bottom of his night.

You sit up an inch, and your palm finds the tank top strap at your shoulder, worn thin, and it gives you: a locker room, fluorescent and cold, a hard hat with a headlamp you've clipped and unclipped nine thousand times, the particular click it makes when it seats right. Coveralls, navy, stiff with rock dust no washing gets all the way out. You remember — he remembers, and it comes to you as his — pulling that suit on this morning before the sun was even a rumor, one leg and then the other, zipper dragging a little at the chest the way it always does, shrugging the shoulders into place with a motion so old it isn't a decision anymore. Boots last. Laced tight, double-knotted, because a loose lace in a cage going down is how a man loses a foot.

The cage. Your stomach — his stomach — knows the cage the way some men know a childhood staircase in the dark: the particular drop of it, the smell of diesel and wet stone, the light on your helmet the only light there is, going down into a dark that doesn't get less dark the longer you're in it, just less strange. Thirty-some years of that drop. Your knees know it. Your knees ache with knowing it, a low continuous static you understand, touching the mattress under your hand, has never once in decades fully gone away, and neither has the tightness behind your eyes that a doctor once told you was pressure, was blood, was something to watch.

The pillow under your head smells like her shampoo, and that opens wider than anything else has: a woman's voice down the hall of this same house, a kitchen you can picture though you're not in it, her hand flat on your chest last night before your shift, not saying be careful because after this many years she doesn't say it anymore, just resting there a second like a period at the end of a sentence. You live with her. You have for years. There was never a wedding, there doesn't need to be one, she brings you soup after doubles and you bring her nothing in particular and it has been enough for a long time. No children came, and there was a year that hurt about, quietly, that neither of you talks about now, and it settled the way all rooms eventually settle.

Your jaw works, and there — under your tongue, a small dense weight of habit — is the place where a pinch of dip usually sits, though it isn't there now, sleep having interrupted even that. Never a drinker. Never needed to be. There's something under the ribs, some old steady faith that doesn't go to any building, just goes with you into the cage every day like a second lamp.

Your fists close on the blanket. Thick fingers, blunt nails, old cuts gone to lines. Sixty years old and every one of them is somewhere in this grip.

You look at your hands, small and scarred and not yours, and you turn one over slow in the foil-light, and you lift your eyes up into the glare like it's a lens.

"There you are," you say, out loud, to no one in the room, meaning yourself, not him — and behind that, already, quiet, is the wheel, and no telling yet how long you'll let this one keep his own hands.