Roger Ashwell

The paint smell never fully leaves Gary Prentiss's hands, even scrubbed raw, even a minute in. You stand in his kitchen under a bad ceiling light, and the water is still running warm over his knuckles, and his knee aches the way it always aches after a ladder day, and you think: this is fine, this is a fine life, and that is exactly the problem. Fifty-eight years old, dimples, a beard he trims himself in a bathroom mirror with a fogged corner, a dad bod that carries paint cans easy enough. Nine hundred and twenty times you have stopped being someone. This body has been yours less than a minute and already the walls of it are visible — the mortgage, the two grown kids who call on Sundays, the wife asleep upstairs who is kind and who you did not choose and did not earn. There's nothing wrong with him. That's the thing nobody who hasn't spun believes: it is never wrong with them. It's just that the door is right there, glowing on a laptop on a paint-spattered counter, vessel.cards, a wheel that never stops turning if you don't let it, and Gary Prentiss's tired, ordinary, decent hand is the one that reaches out and clicks SPIN, because a fine life is somehow the hardest one to stay inside of.

The room you land in is dark and blue-lit and smells like carpet cleaner. Your back is against a couch cushion, upright now, spine straight in a way it wasn't a half-second before, and a remote is being set down on the couch arm by a hand that is not shaking yet but will be. The television throws its light across a face that is not yours — bald, smooth-jawed, a mole riding high on one cheek like a punctuation mark — and on the screen something is happening that used to be funny. It isn't now. You don't laugh. Somewhere behind that missing laugh is where you actually are.

The couch fabric under your bare feet — no, under his feet, flat on the carpet — brings the first flash: this exact carpet, vacuumed on a Sunday, his wife's voice from the kitchen asking why he's still up. Then more. The shirt is long gone, he's down to the black t-shirt and the jeans with the soft worn-in seam, but touch doesn't need the shirt to be on him now — his hands remember it, this morning, sleeve by sleeve, cotton gone thin at the elbow from years of the same three shirts rotated through a closet in a house at the end of a gravel road. Roger Ashwell. The name comes up out of the shirt's memory of itself, out of a laundered tag, and with it comes a whole morning: standing at a bathroom mirror at five-forty, glasses pushed up on his bare scalp because he'd shaved his head bald years ago rather than watch it go slow, the striped tie knotted twice because his hands wouldn't cooperate the first time — that tremor, faint but constant, the one he's stopped mentioning to the doctor because there's nothing to be done and mentioning it just makes his wife look at him a certain way over breakfast. Financial analyst. Six monitors, green and red columns all day, a job he is very good at and has stopped feeling anything about, the way you stop feeling a stair you've climbed ten thousand times. He is worth more than most men he grew up with ever will be and it changed nothing about how he takes his coffee.

The remote is still faintly warm in the hand — his hand — and it gives up an evening: lights off on purpose, wife long asleep, a show he half-watches because the house is too quiet without something talking in it. Two kids grown and gone, calling on schedules now instead of showing up. A marriage that settled decades ago into something comfortable and mostly silent, not unhappy, just worn smooth, like the porch step out front that he keeps meaning to replace. He quit drinking so long ago he forgets there was a before; never smoked; goes to no church, believes in no hereafter, has made his peace, or thought he had, with there simply being nothing after this — an irony that sits in your borrowed chest like a coin dropped down a well, no splash coming back up.

Outside, past a window you can't see but can feel is there, a water tower stands over a gravel road at an hour edging toward midnight, barbed wire fence catching the last of the porch light. A whole life at 6'0", skinny-fat, a body that never quite decided whether to be soft or spare, sixty-three years old and carrying that age mostly in the knees and in that tremor that starts up now, right on cue, as your hand lifts off the couch arm.

You look at it. Turn it over. Not your hand — his — pale, spotted faintly along the back, the wedding band loose enough to spin if you tried, fingers trembling in that same small persistent way that has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with sixty-three years of just being a body.

You lift your eyes to the dark television glass, where something like your new face is looking back at you, and you say, to no one, to the empty house, to the gravel road and the water tower and the wife asleep upstairs who will wake up next to a stranger and never know it:

"Well. Let's see what you've got, Roger."