Ruben Castellano

You are two minutes into being Sanjay Malhotra when the itch starts, right there behind his freckled eyes, and it is not even about him — Sanjay is fine, Sanjay is a good coat, tall and clean-cut and smart-mouthed in depositions — it is about what he isn't. You spent thirty-one years as somebody else before the first spin and you still remember what it was to move like you meant it, and this body settles disputes with billable hours, not with hands. You stand in his condo in the last light of a Tuesday, phone still warm from a call you don't remember taking, and you think: one more. Just to feel a body that has ever actually hurt someone on purpose and liked it. You open the site on his phone with his thumb, feel his mild lawyer's guilt about it, and spin anyway.

The wheel stops and the room changes before you do.

You are face-down. That's the first thing — gravity pulling wrong, weight low and dense across the hips, one arm gone dead and hanging off a mattress edge into cool air. Breath rattles out of a chest that is not the chest you had a second ago, ragged, open-mouthed, and then — because you are here now, because it is yours to run — it evens. One long inhale, held, released clean. The dead arm draws up on its own, not asked, and the whole body rolls onto its back like it has done this every night of its life, hands folding at the sternum, fingers already finding each other. Somewhere outside, a strip mall sign hums pink through a gap in the curtain.

The sheet against your back is the first key, and it turns.

It's laundry-day sheets, softener smell, and underneath that flash is a woman's laugh from a kitchen that isn't here anymore — Diane, three years gone, the one who left not because of anything he did but because of everything he didn't say, and even now some nerve in this chest still reaches for her before it remembers not to. Then it's gone, replaced by the shape of his own hand finding the other hand's fingers, and a ring is there, warm from skin, and that's the second key: the ring turns itself between two fingers without being told, an old habit older than the marriage that made it necessary, and you feel — not your feeling, his — the small ritual comfort of it, a rosary with only one bead.

The shirt is next. Cotton, soft with age, and it gives you this morning — no, yesterday morning, whichever morning this was — pulling it over his head in a bathroom with the fan running too loud, tattooed forearms swimming up through the sleeves, cross and praying hands dark against skin that tans easy and never quite loses the gym-floor smell no matter how many showers. He'd looked at the unibrow in the mirror the way he always did, flat, unbothered, a face he stopped negotiating with twenty years ago. He is 5'5" and has made peace with rooms full of taller boys who listen to him anyway because he can still put any one of them on the mat in four seconds if they get lippy. That's not vanity coming through the cloth. That's just what the shoulders know.

The mattress under the whole body brings the gym floor up through it sideways — the smell of the wrestling room, bleach and boy-sweat, Tuesday practice, a kid named Eli who can't keep his hips square no matter how many times you drill it, and the good ache of a whistle cord against the back of the neck for six hours a day. Coaching didn't pay what the degree he never got would have, but nothing else ever made his chest feel like that, arms up, some skinny fifteen-year-old finally landing the throw right and looking over for the nod. He has a daughter who does that same look when she lands something right. He loves her uncomplicatedly, which is more than he can say about most things.

And under that, quieter, always there, is the noise the meds are supposed to quiet and mostly do: something that sits behind the sternum some nights and makes the whiskey necessary, makes three fingers of it into four, into knowing better and doing it anyway, into a girlfriend two towns over who is patient with him in a way he suspects he doesn't earn. Catholic guilt runs the whole thing on rails — a cross on one forearm, praying hands on the other, church some Sundays, not enough, never enough by his own accounting. You feel forty-three years of a good tired man arguing with himself in a dark bedroom, alone, an hour later than everyone else's evening, because somewhere in this life the shifts got turned around and night became the only quiet he gets.

Your eyes open. Streetlight bar across the ceiling. You lift the hand with the ring on it, turn it once in front of your face the way it wants to turn on its own, feel the cross and the praying hands settle on the forearm like they've always been there, because for this body they have.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to the empty room, in a voice thicker and rounder than the one you had two minutes and one man ago. "Okay. Let's see what you've got."

You don't know how long. You never do.