Russell Gaither

You are at the screen, and it is nearly midnight, and nothing is on. You have scrolled until the scrolling went flat. You have read the threads again, the two-in-the-morning ones, the films you could recite, the stories where someone wakes up in a different man and looks at his hands. You have wanted this for as long as you can remember. Tonight there is a page with a wheel on it, and you pay, and you spin, and you do not believe it.

Then you are standing.

A phone is pressed to your ear, warm against the cheek. A voice is talking in it, small and tinny, and you are not listening. Your left arm is clamped over something flat and leathery against your ribs. Your right hand is out over a desk, fingers reaching for a pen on a stack of paper, and the hand has already done this ten thousand times and was doing it a half second ago without you. You pick the pen up wrong. Set it down. Pick it up again, slowly, correctly. Through the glass, neon in daylight: a red outline of a guitar, an oval sign, the brick of an alley. It is morning here. Midnight there. You are in the middle of someone's Tuesday.

The sweater is first. It is wool-soft and a little tight under the arms, and it gives you a morning: his hands working the cuffs of the collared shirt beneath, left then right, thumb pushing the button through the stiff hole, while a girlfriend's voice calls something from another room about the coffee. He tugged the sweater down over the belly and did not look at it in the mirror. That was his habit. He looked at the knot of the day instead.

The khakis, rough across the thighs, hand you the creased knees of a man who kneels at a church pew on Sundays. The leather book under your arm is a planner, and when your thumb finds its edge you get years of other people's schedules: a corner office, a door that stays shut, a man behind it who says "grab me" and never says thank you. Forty-eight, and he has made someone else's day run on time for most of it. It does not hurt him. That is the worst part of it. He is proud of the folders.

Your jaw is moving. There is gum in your mouth, worked to nothing, mint gone, and your teeth keep chewing because they always do. Under that, the want of a cigarette sits in the chest like a held door. A pack a day. Your lungs know the number. His back aches low from the chair. The belly sits over the belt, solid and warm. Six feet of him, and the ceiling is closer than you expected.

Money flickers: a card declined once, a calculator on a kitchen table, the girlfriend's hand covering his. A drink he quit, the bottle poured out in a sink, the sound of it. The ring on your finger is not a wedding ring, and it is his, and you do not know its meaning yet.

You put the phone down. The voice in it goes on. You lift your right hand and turn it over. Square nails, the pen groove on the middle finger, a pulse in the wrist. You raise your eyes to the glass, where a mole sits dark and high on a cheek, and one eye is blue and the other brown.

"Hello," you say, in his voice, low and a little rough. "It worked."

Somewhere a wheel is waiting to turn again. You do not know when the wanting returns. You do not know if you are still him tomorrow. The gum keeps moving.