Steve Wozniewski

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The vitiligo bothers you more than it should. You are standing in Neil Pomerantz's kitchen — his kitchen, less than a minute now — looking at the pale continents spreading across the backs of his hands under the bad fluorescent light, and you already know you are not going to keep them. Thirty-four is young. Green eyes, decent enough. But you have been him for forty-some seconds and that is long enough to feel the specific itch of wanting to be someone else, which is the only feeling that has ever been reliably yours across three hundred and sixteen men. It is Sunday, mid-morning, sun already flat and white through the window over the sink. You set down the key blank you were about to file — his job, not yours, never yours — and you go to the laptop on the counter because some decisions don't want to wait for a body to warm up.

Then you are not standing. You are walking, and it is night, and it is wet.

The street tilts. A parked car meets your palm before you decide to reach for it, and the reaching is not yours — it is already finished by the time you feel it, muscle memory older than you are in this. Your foot — his foot — was scuffing, catching itself every third step, and now it doesn't. Forty steps go down flat and even, heel-toe, heel-toe, a rhythm laid into this body long before tonight. At the corner the legs turn left. Left is wrong. You don't know that yet, not with knowing, but something under the knowing does, and it aches faintly like a held note.

The jacket is open over a gray henley gone dark at the collar with a day's sweat, and the smell of it — cut wire, drywall dust, the particular sourness of a body that drinks four times a year and isn't built for it — comes up off the collar and opens the first door. A ceiling. Half-finished, conduit run in a fan across furring strips, a headlamp beam swinging while a man swears softly at a junction box that won't seat. Steve. That's the name that surfaces with the smell, unasked, the way his own name always arrives before anything else does — Steve Wozniewski, and under it the whole shape of forty years doing exactly this, wrists that know the twist of a wire nut without the eyes needing to check.

The Carhartt jacket is next, its weight settling onto shoulders that are used to it, and it gives you a morning — not this morning, an old one, hundreds of them folded into one — a hand pulling the jacket off a hook by a door, keys already in the other hand, a woman's voice from somewhere in a house saying something too worn down to be an argument anymore, just weather now. Diane. The ring finger has no ring but the skin remembers one, a paler band that the salt air off a shore vacation once tanned around, years back, and there is a whole failed marriage folded into that strip of untanned skin — not bitter, just finished, the kind of over that has scar tissue instead of a wound. One kid. A daughter, grown, a phone that doesn't ring as much as he'd like. He minds that more than he lets himself say.

The belt with its dead weight of tool pouch pulls at the hips and that's a whole trade arriving at once — thirty-some years of licensed work, panels opened in a thousand row-house basements, the particular satisfaction of a breaker that finally holds, the boredom of it too, the Tuesday-ness of a trade you're good at and no longer feel anything about. Feet in boots that have been resoled twice know the exact give of wet pavement before the eyes confirm it. A leg starts bouncing on nothing, no chair to bounce it against, just a tremor at the knee going nowhere, an old habit with no off switch.

There's a church memory too, distant, Sunday mass attended out of habit more than belief anymore, a rosary somebody's mother gave him decades ago sitting in a drawer he doesn't open. And underneath everything, low and mechanical, the apnea — the memory of waking at 3 a.m. gasping in an empty bed with no one to elbow him quiet, the machine on the nightstand he keeps meaning to actually use.

He was drunk tonight in a way that isn't about celebration. Just Sunday. Just the long way home because the short way has too many lit windows with families in them.

You feel the whole weight of him settle — dad bod, tired knees, hairline gone all the way back at the crown where the streetlight would be finding it bare right now if anyone were behind him to see — and you feel, distinctly, how much lighter this is than being thirty-four with a laptop and a decision to make. No decision here. There was never a decision here. That was the point of coming.

You stop walking. Lift both hands up in front of your face in the orange wash of the streetlamp, turn them over like you're checking them for something specific, though you already know what's not there and never was — no discoloration, no map of pale islands, just plain skin, a little spotted, a little cracked at the knuckle from cold work.

"There you go," you say, out loud, to nobody, to the shuttered street, and it comes out in a voice you didn't choose and already like better.

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