Rohan Deshmukh

The apartment is quiet the way it gets when the whole building has finally lost its argument with the day. You have had the tab open for three nights running, closing it, reopening it, the way you do with things you already know you're going to do. Vessel.cards. A wheel rendered too smoothly to be a joke, a price that is not a joke either. You have wanted this since before you had a word for it — every story where someone else wakes up wearing a stranger, every thread you read at hours like this one, alone, waiting for something to be real. Tonight there is nothing else happening. Tonight is as good as any night to stop almost doing it. You pay. You spin. The wheel does what wheels do, and then it stops, and there is no drumroll, no countdown, no chance to change your mind.

There is a sink. There is foam, half a jaw of it, and a mirror with water spots on it, and a razor already moving upward against a grain that is not yours because none of this, for one full second, is yours yet.

Then it is.

The razor doesn't pause where his hand always pauses — that little hitch at the corner of the mouth he's done a thousand mornings — it just keeps going, faster on this side than the first, and some deep muscle memory that isn't asking permission gets the job done. You feel the drag of the blade over new stubble, feel water cooling on a wrist braced against porcelain, feel a body that stands with weight distributed to the balls of the feet like it spends its life ready to move fast toward a shoreline.

The mirror's fogged at the edges. Through the window behind you, light — flat, grey-white, wrong for whatever hour you think it is, because where you are it is deep night and here, somehow, it is late morning, a Monday burning off fog the way San Francisco does. That crossed-wire feeling doesn't resolve. It just sits there while the rest of him floods in.

The shirt is what starts it — grey cotton, worn thin at the collar, and putting it on this morning comes back sleeve first, right arm, an old habit from a coach years back who said always dress the way you'd want to be found. Rohan laughed at that, alone, buttoning nothing because it's a t-shirt, no buttons, but the joke stayed and the habit stayed with it. The jeans next: a memory of standing in a room with a bay window somewhere above him and a garage door somewire below, a girlfriend's voice saying something about picking up her sister later, him saying uh-huh without hearing it, the two of them still loose and warm with sleep, twenty minutes before he had to be anywhere. Priya. Her name arrives soft, unforced, the way a name does when you've said it ten thousand times and stopped noticing the weight of it.

The sink under your palms gives you the cold apartment itself — the garage-under-house on the hill, the driveway too steep for the car he doesn't fully trust on it, the white light that comes off the bay glass upstairs and pours down through the one high window like it's being rationed. He likes this apartment less than he pretends to. It's what was affordable the year he stopped needing to pretend money was the problem — the accounts have long since stopped being the worry they once were — but leaving would mean admitting something about staying, and he has never liked admitting things about staying.

The whistle isn't around your neck right now, it's slung over a chair somewhere, but your hand already knows its exact weight, the exact half-second of breath it takes before the blast, the two hundred mornings on the stand with the ocean doing its slow gray work in front of you and a kid's arm going up in the third row of waves before anyone else clocks it. You have pulled people out of water that didn't want to give them back. It is the only thing you have ever been unambiguously good at, and it does not pay what your degree said it should, and you have never once regretted it.

There's a boy — five, maybe six, a school photo somewhere in a drawer you're not touching right now, but his face comes anyway, laughing with a tooth missing, calling you papa in that voice kids use when they're testing whether the word still works. That's the one memory that doesn't come through a thing in the room; it comes through nothing at all, just arrives, the way the biggest ones sometimes do without being asked.

And under that, quieter, a name you weren't reaching for — Diego, a summer three years back, the two of you on the roof of somebody's building in the Mission with the fog doing its evening crawl over the hills, and the particular ache of a thing that was good and ended anyway, on both your terms, cleanly, and still visits sometimes at hours like this one, uninvited, the way exes who did nothing wrong do.

Your jaw is bare and stinging faintly on the left side where the blade went fast. Your left hand grips the sink edge; you feel, distantly, a lifetime's habit in the ragged edges of your nails, bitten to the quick without him ever once deciding to. The body under the shirt is 5'10", carries itself lighter than its actual weight, shoulders set from ten years of paddling out past a break line. Nothing hurts. Everything is warm from the shower's steam still hanging in the tile.

You lift your eyes to the mirror. The foam is gone, wiped in one motion you don't remember choosing. His face — no, yours, for now, for as long as it takes the wheel to want someone else — looks back out of the glass, water beaded at the temple.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to no one, in his voice, testing the weight of it. "Okay."

You don't know how long you get to keep saying things in it.