Sione Faleolo

You are standing at attention in a body that isn't tired of you yet, but you're tired of it — Colt Rasmussen, nineteen, a scar splitting his eyebrow like punctuation on a sentence somebody else wrote for him. Barracks light through cheap blinds. Someone down the hall is laughing at something on a phone. Your hand — his hand, blond hair on the knuckles, a callus from the rifle you don't even think about anymore — is on the laptop, and the page is already loaded, the wheel already spinning lazy circles on the screen like it's got nowhere to be. Twenty-six times now. You know the shape of the itch by heart: it isn't boredom exactly, not this time — it's that Colt is young and healthy and has decades ahead of him doing calisthenics and getting yelled at, and that suddenly feels like a life sentence instead of a life. You don't decide so much as notice your thumb has already clicked.

The wheel stops.

You are leaning over a sink with foam going tacky on half a face that isn't Colt's — heavier, older, brown-skinned, glasses fogged faintly at the hinge where they've slid partway down a wide nose. A single bare bulb overhead. The razor is already moving before you have any say in it, drawn up the jaw against the grain, no hesitation where a man might hesitate at the corner of his own mouth, and that missing hesitation is the only clue anyone would ever have that something in the room changed. Steam curls off a sink with a rust stain shaped like a comma. Your — his — knees ache faintly with standing. The mirror shows a stranger's face finishing a stranger's shave, unbothered, unaware, already reaching for the towel.

The towel is terrycloth gone thin in the middle, and taking it off the bar gives you the first flash: this towel, a hundred mornings, the particular smell of the drugstore bar soap that sits in a dish shaped like a shell his wife bought in Waikiki before they were married. You wipe your face — his face — and get his name the way you always get names, sideways, from an object: the razor handle, worn smooth where a thumb sits, and it comes back Sione, said the way his mother said it, two syllables like a small stone dropped in water.

The tank top against your back is warm from his own heat and it gives you a Tuesday — not this one, some other one — sitting at two monitors under office fluorescents that hummed at a pitch he'd stopped hearing years ago, a spreadsheet of somebody else's numbers open in front of him, his tie loosened, the particular ache behind his sternum that he never mentioned to the doctor because the doctor already knew, because the pills for it are in the cabinet six inches from where your hand rests on the sink edge. High blood pressure, unspoken, managed, a small quiet fact he lives around the way you live around a piece of furniture in the dark.

The wedding band is the deepest one. Cold gold, a little loose from a body he used to have less of. It gives you a whole wedding — his, hot, outdoors, a folding chair digging into the back of his good pants — and past that, further back and softer, a temple in Laie, sealed to her, both of them believing it the way some people believe the sun will come up, no drama in it, just weight. Her name comes with the ring too: Leimomi. She's at the store right now, this exact Saturday afternoon, buying something for dinner, not thinking about him shaving, not thinking anything is wrong, because nothing that shows is wrong.

His hands know things without asking permission — a keyboard's muscle memory, the specific two-finger flick that closes a spreadsheet without saving by accident, twice, years ago, the panic of it still living somewhere in the tendons. He used to smoke; the want for it is gone but the ghost of the want isn't, a small itch at the back of the throat when stress climbs, which is often, given the numbers, given the pressure, given that he is worth more than most of the men he grew up with combined and has never once told anyone at the ward what the number actually is. Sober because he chose it, once, deliberately, the way he chose most things — carefully, a man who reads the fine print of his own life. His jaw is already tight, has been tight since before you arrived, a habit older than the marriage, older than the money, and you feel it now as your own, an ache along the hinge you didn't put there and can't quite unclench.

The shorts, the tank top, the socked feet on cold tile — dressing comes to you backward, from the skin out: this morning (his morning, hours behind wherever you're standing on the clock that no longer applies to you) he'd pulled the tank top over his head already thinking about a client call, already rehearsing a sentence about depreciation schedules, the mundane machinery of a rich, careful, God-fearing man's Saturday. None of that call is happening. It was always going to be a normal afternoon. It still might be, for everyone in it but him.

You look down. His hand — thick-fingered, ring loose, a little foam still caught in the crease of the thumb — doesn't feel like yours yet, but neither did Colt's, once, and neither did the twenty-four before him. You turn it over slowly in the bulb light, watching the tremor that isn't fear, just a blood pressure that runs high, just a body that has been quietly working against itself for years without telling anyone.

You lift your eyes to the mirror instead of the lens, because there is no lens, only glass, and you say it to the glass like it might answer:

"Okay. Let's see how long."