Silas Kotch

The meeting is on slide fourteen when it happens to you, or rather when you decide to make it happen, because Marcus Reddick's hand is shaking around a water glass and you are so tired of that hand. Forty seconds ago you were explaining quarterly guidance to a room of people who are afraid of you, and it should feel like something, being feared, but you have been Marcus for less than a minute and already you know his tremor is permanent, that his doctor called yesterday and he hasn't told anyone, that this good body — six-foot chief-executive body, the one you spun for less than an hour ago — comes with a countdown in it you didn't order. You did not come this far, spin after spin, to sit inside a man's mortality and watch him do arithmetic. You excuse yourself. You go to the private office. You open the laptop, and there is the wheel, patient, colorful, waiting the way it always waits, and you spin it before you can think better of it, the way you always do.

It gives you cold. It gives you a strip light and a paper cup gone lukewarm and a number board clicking from 47 to 48. It gives you a knee that stops bouncing mid-bounce, a pair of hands folding themselves on a lap without being asked, and a name being called somewhere that you — that he — does not look up for. You are sitting. You are sitting in a plastic chair in a room that smells like drip coffee and hand sanitizer, and it is morning here, gray-blue morning through the window, though you left Marcus in the flat white glare of midday, and the wrongness of that — hour skipping over hour like a stone across water — is the first thing you notice, before you notice the gap in your teeth that your tongue finds on its own, an old habit that isn't yours yet.

The hoodie is green and worn soft at the cuffs, and it starts there — a flash of a laundromat on Fireweed, quarters lined up on the machine, a girl named Brianna laughing at him for folding towels into thirds, a whole year of her before she left for Fairbanks and didn't call. The denim at your knees remembers a job site, remembers kneeling on plywood subfloor with a headlamp on because the panel box was in a windowless mechanical room, remembers the particular satisfaction of a breaker clicking home clean. Your right forearm is heavier than it should be, ink-heavy, and touching it with your left hand brings the whole afternoon of getting it — nineteen years old, gritting through four hours of a rose going in over the vein, the artist's radio playing something with a lot of steel guitar, his mother's rosary looped once around his own wrist for no reason he could explain to anyone, some old promise to a God he wasn't sure was listening in a town nine hundred miles from the reservation his grandmother grew up outside of.

The shirt under your palms this morning — no, it's the hoodie now, the shirt came off hours ago in a memory that isn't yours yet either, dressing in a dark bedroom before six, buttoning a gray work shirt with SILAS stitched crooked over the pocket because he sewed the patch on himself and it shows, tucking it into jeans still cold from the line outside, the whole apartment quiet except the fridge humming and a bottle in the recycling that he doesn't remember finishing. That part comes back ugly and fast: the taste of it still coating the back of his throat this morning, the specific shame of checking his own phone for texts he doesn't remember sending, the promise made to no one, again, the same promise. Under all of it, twenty-one years old and strong in the shoulders in the particular way of a man who climbs ladders for a living, a body that doesn't hurt yet except behind the eyes, except low in the stomach where the drink sits like a stone that never quite dissolves.

The board clicks. Somewhere a receptionist says a name that used to mean something and will now mean nothing to anyone who hears it, forever, and you don't turn your head, because he already had that habit, not looking up, and you haven't decided yet whether to break it.

You look down. Your hands are broad, nicked at two knuckles, a white line of old scar across the left thumb from a wire stripper years before you arrived, tar and grime worked into the creases no soap ever fully lifts. You turn the right one over slow, watching the rose color move under the fluorescent light, watching it be real.

You lift your eyes off it, into the room, into whatever waits behind the eyes of whoever's about to call his name again, and you say, quiet, mostly to yourself: "Forty-eight. That's me."