Rene Casillas

Nathan Ruskovich's freckled hand is on a coffee mug that says WORLD'S OKAYEST AGENT, and it is not funny the 782nd time either. The station break room smells like burnt drip coffee and the inside of a gun locker. Outside the window, Ohio is the color of a filing cabinet. You have been him less than a minute — a shift change, a nod from a guy named Pruitt-something who clocked out, a radio clipped to a belt that isn't yours — and already you know you don't want the rest of the day. Not the truck stop lot at mile 40, not the paperwork, not the specific tiredness in this body's knees that isn't even the good kind of ache, the kind that means you did something. You didn't do anything. You inherited a Tuesday. Bald head, freckles, forty-six years in a body that jogs to feel like it's earning its cholesterol numbers — and somewhere under all that, a boredom so total it has its own gravity. You set the mug down. You don't finish the coffee. You are already reaching for the phone in your pocket, for vessel.cards, before you've admitted to yourself that's what you're doing.

The wheel spins the way it always spins, no drama in it at all, a cursor circling on a phone screen in a Small-town Ohio break room — and then you are standing in fluorescent light with a pen in your hand, mid-signature, and the pen has stopped moving.

You look down at the page. A delivery log, a column of names not your own, a line half-signed in a hand that loops its R a certain practiced way. You finish the loop. Wrong — too slow, too careful, a child tracing letters. You do it again, correctly this time, and the correctness costs something, a kind of concentration this hand has not needed in years. Ten more signatures come after it, and you check every single one, your eyes actually on the page now instead of somewhere past it, out through the glass at the pastel building across the street going soft in the ocean haze.

The headset is still looped over your ear. There's a phone against your hip that hasn't rung. And the weight — that's the first thing that isn't the pen, isn't the paper — the weight sitting differently on this frame than it did on the last one, low and broad through the belly, planted, five-seven and heavy with it, nothing like the runner's lean you just stepped out of. It doesn't feel bad. It feels like furniture that's always been in this room.

The shirt is what opens first. Light blue, the collar a little tight, sleeves already rolled to mid-forearm because that's how he wears them by ten a.m. every day of his life, and the memory comes in through the fabric like heat off asphalt: this morning, an hour that was actually two in the morning here, black outside the apartment window, him buttoning this exact shirt in a bathroom with a bulb that flickers on the fourth blink. He works the graveyard desk at a hotel that used to be a motel, the kind with a lobby that's mostly glass so the neon sign across the street bleeds pink onto the tile all night. He remembers — no, you remember, wearing him now, the memory arriving the way his did, unbidden — tucking the shirt in over a stomach he has stopped fighting with, the belt buckle a familiar small struggle, tie already knotted from the night before because retying it at that hour felt like more effort than a man should owe anybody. He does this every night. He has done this so many nights that his hands tie the tie without him, the same way his leg starts bouncing under the desk the second his mind wanders, which is often, which is now, except right now the leg is dead still, because you are new in it and haven't found that yet.

The pen. Bic, chewed slightly at the cap though the beard would suggest he doesn't chew things — an old habit from before the beard, maybe, and it comes with a flicker of a woman's laugh, a name — Yesenia — gone as fast as it arrived, three years dissolved into someone else's apartment somewhere north of here, an ex he still thinks about on nights slow enough to think at all, which is most of them. The log book itself, leather gone soft and gray at the corners under a thousand elbows, gives you the shape of the whole job in one motion: guests who don't look at him, guests who do, a manager who calls him "our guy" like it's a title, seven years of this desk under these fluorescent tubes that hum on the same frequency as the mini-fridge behind him.

The tattoo on his arm — you can't see it right now, sleeve rolled over it, but the skin remembers being under a needle at twenty-two, a friend's shop in Hialeah, an anchor and a rose because it was the first one and he wanted something that meant nothing complicated. Bold lines gone a little soft now, like most things about him.

His body: thirty-three years old and heavier than it wants to admit, feet already faintly aching in shoes that were new once, chest a little short of breath from standing this long, hands thick and sure around a pen despite everything, a body that has quit drinking without ceremony sometime in its late twenties because it just stopped feeling worth it, that never smoked because nobody around him did either. Comfortable, not rich — a savings account that makes his mother proud on the phone. Spiritual on nights like this one, when the ocean's close enough to hear if the traffic ever quieted down, though it never does.

You look at your hands. His hands. Thick fingers, a pen still gripped in the right one, the log open under it with your correct, careful signatures marching down the last third of the page like a man learning to write.

You look up, into the glass wall, at the neon sign across the street burning backward through the window, and you say, out loud, to no one behind the desk:

"Who signs this many times a night."

The leg starts bouncing. You let it.