Ruben Castellano

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Seven minutes is not long enough to want anything, and that's the whole problem with it.

You're standing in a gun locker room that smells like gun oil and bad coffee, bald head reflecting fluorescent light, and you're bored out of a skull that isn't yours. Russell Tamayo's hands are thick and competent and currently doing nothing except holding a phone with the vessel.cards page open on it, the wheel sitt`ing there mid-spin from last night, waiting. Seven minutes ago you were a man with a shaved head and a key ring and a shift that started in two hours, and in those seven minutes you have learned that Russell Tamayo's life is a corridor of other men's cells and a locker with a photo of a kid he doesn't call enough, and none of it moved you. You paid for a man and got a job. You didn't even get to finish feeling what he felt about the kid. You want the pull of the wheel again — not out of hatred for this body, which is strong and fine and will outlast you doing something more interesting than this — but because nothing yet has been worth the money, and the itch of that is worse than any single disappointment. You tap the screen. It spins without asking why.

The light arrives before anything else does — a hard yellow bar laid across a face, and you are the one turning into it, eyes opening on the glare, not blinking. You are lying on your side on a mattress that gives wrong, sunk low in the middle, and your arm is numb under your own head. There is foil crinkling faintly above you, pulling light into one bright seam, and a room around you that smells like a man who has slept here for years and a body that is shorter than the one you just left, softer through the middle, heavier in a different way — comfortable, worn, 62 years sitting in it like furniture. Your knees ache before you've moved them. That's new. That's his.

The shirt isn't on you yet — it's a t-shirt, gray, slept in, and that alone gives you nothing — but your bare feet are against the sheet and the sheet gives you his whole decade in this apartment at once, cheap cotton softened by washing, his girlfriend Nilda's voice somewhere behind it saying *these again, Ruben, I bought you new ones* and him laughing because new sheets feel like someone else's bed. The nightstand under your elbow — you didn't touch it but your elbow knows its height without checking, the drawer that sticks, the reading glasses he doesn't admit he needs folded in there next to a charger cord. Boots on the floor past the bed give you the heaviest flash: steel toe, eleven years old, resoled twice, the exact give in the left one where his foot has made its own shape in the leather over a thousand nights of loading a truck in the dark. You feel the whole shift come back through them though you aren't wearing them yet — four a.m. out on the dock, breath showing, the handheld scanner beeping against boxes, a route that doesn't end till noon some days, his back announcing itself around hour six the way it always does now, the particular tired that isn't sleepy so much as used up. He taped foil to this window himself, on a ladder made of a kitchen chair, because the sun comes straight into this room at the hour he most needs it gone, and the tape never quite held at the corner, and he complained about it every single morning and never fixed it right, and some stubborn ordinary part of him loved that it was his own failure to fix and nobody else's business.

There's a crucifix somewhere in this apartment you haven't touched yet but you feel the shape of Sunday anyway, folded into the muscle memory of a man who goes when he can, who prays plain and short and means it, who has one daughter grown and gone and calls her on Thursdays because that's when she has time, who married once badly and young and has been with Nilda eleven years now without the paper to make it official and doesn't see what the paper would add. The clothes draped over the laundry basket at the foot of the bed — his work pants, folded by habit rather than care — give you the morning he put them on last: standing in this same gray light, pulling the shirt over his head one arm at a time because the left shoulder doesn't lift above his ear anymore without a complaint, tucking it in out of a habit forty years old though the job doesn't require it, checking the badge on the pocket is straight though no one has looked at it in a decade. A man who dresses for a job like it's still worth dressing for.

He is sixty-two and his body carries it everywhere at once — thick through the waist, strong in the forearms from lifting what the job hands him, a tiredness in the knees that is going to be there when you stand up whether you want it or not, and under all of it something steady, something that has gotten up at four a.m. for this long without once deciding to stop. He does not drink to speak of. He has never smoked. Whatever wears a body down, it mostly isn't that, with him — it's just years, stacked like boxes in a truck, counted and signed for.

You open your eyes all the way into the light and don't look away from it this time.

You lift your hand off the mattress — his hand, calloused across the pads, a crescent of dirt under one thumbnail that a shower never quite gets, no ring on it, no mark at all — and you turn it over slowly in the foil-light like you're checking it's attached.

"Huh," you say, out loud, to the empty room, in a voice lower and rougher than the one you had seven minutes ago. "Okay."

You don't know yet how long you'll want this one. Nobody does.