Robert Kanaly

The screen has been open for forty minutes. Not because there's a decision left to make — the card is already saved, the little wheel already loaded, spinning in place waiting for a finger — but because you keep almost closing the tab and don't. This has been a thing with you since you were a kid: every body-swap movie, every thread where strangers argue about whether it would be like dying, every three a.m. spiral into fiction that promised a life not your own for an afternoon. You never thought anyone would sell it. Somebody did. You put the card number in like you're buying anything else.

You tap the wheel.

There is no fall, no tunnel, no sense of going anywhere. There is a couch cushion giving under a weight that was not yours a half-second ago, and then it is, entirely, and the room snaps into being already lit the way it's going to stay lit — a blue TV wash on a dark apartment, a floor lamp off in the corner, a rerun laugh track hitting a punchline that isn't funny this time, because you are not the one who heard the joke the first time either. A remote sits loose against fingers that already know its weight better than you do. Your — his — spine straightens without your telling it to, some reflex of a body startled by nothing it can name. You feel your own heartbeat, except it isn't yours, it's a sixty-four-year-old heart kicking a little harder than it should, a blood pressure number you'll never see wearing off some pill taken this morning.

The shirt is what opens him first. Navy cotton, worn thin at the elbows, a name patch stitched crooked over the pocket because his girlfriend sewed it back on last spring after the original stitching gave out. *Bob.* The memory comes in on the shirt's collar like static resolving into a channel: a locker room that smells like conduit grease and coffee, a supervisor barking a start time, thirty-one years of apprentices and journeymen and code inspectors who all called him by that patch instead of his name until the patch was more true than the name. Under it, muscle memory in the forearms — the specific fatigue of holding a fish tape overhead for six hours, the callus map of a man who has stripped ten thousand wires with the same three fingers. The shoulders ache in a way that isn't today's ache, it's decades of it, filed down into a permanent low hum his body stopped mentioning to him years ago.

The sweatpants are older than the shirt, older than most memories that come with them, but they give you evening — every evening — the specific unlacing of boots by the door, the exact tired that isn't tiredness so much as a day finally being allowed to end. A woman's voice from another room, half a laugh, half-affectionate: Denise, telling him to move his feet before she vacuums, an argument they've had four hundred times and neither wants to win. You feel, distantly and not yours but his, the shape of what he still doesn't say to her — that some nights he thinks of a different woman, one from thirty years back, one he let get on a plane because he was twenty-six and certain there'd be time later, and there wasn't, and he has never told Denise that this is who he thinks of sometimes when the light goes a certain blue on the ceiling. It isn't guilt exactly. It's just still there, the way a splinter you never dug out is still there.

The remote in his hand carries the smallest memory of all — clicking it on forty minutes ago, sinking into the cushion with a beer he didn't pour because he doesn't anymore, hasn't in six years, not since the doctor's number scared him enough to quit both the drink and, eventually, the cigarettes that went with it. His thumb still drifts toward where a pack would sit on the arm of the couch. Nothing's there. His hand goes to his face instead, unthinking, two fingers along the eyebrow with the pale scar cut through it — a ladder, 1987, a job he still tells like it's funny at parties, and it is, a little.

You are sitting in all of it now: the ache, the money that never needs counting because there's enough of it, the church he goes to twice a month more out of habit and Denise's asking than conviction, the bald head that stopped bothering him around fifty, the dad-bod weight riding low and familiar over the waistband. Sixty-four years, worn in like a boot.

You lift the hand off the face and hold it up in the TV light, turning it, watching the calluses catch the blue glow like they belong to someone you've just met, because they do.

"There you are," you say, out loud, to no one, and you don't know yet if you mean him or you.