Sunil Bhagat

You are standing in a temple that smells of camphor and someone else's devotion, and it is three minutes old on you and already wrong. This body — twenty-three, blond, built like a swimmer, hazel eyes that aren't yours to use — has been folding its hands at an altar for donors who think a priest this young and this beautiful is a sign of something. It is not a sign. It is 733 other men behind you, and this one, and none of them fit for more than a minute before the fit starts to itch. You gave him three minutes. That's the tell now — you know inside sixty seconds whether a body is going to hold your attention or just hold you, and this one is a costume on a mannequin, gorgeous and empty, and somewhere behind your borrowed hazel eyes something old and tired that has nothing to do with any of your bodies says *not this one, not tonight,* and your thumb is already on the site before the incense clears your head.

The wheel spins doesn't feel like anything. It never does. It's just a page, and then it isn't a page.

You are sitting on a bench under a squat rack with your forearms on your knees, and the air smells like rubber mats and chlorine from a pool two rooms over, and there's a bottle of water sweating on the tile by your foot, and your chest is doing the thing chests do near the end of a set — except it isn't ending. You'd been about to blow out through your teeth, the last exhale before racking it, and instead your hands find the bar two inches wider than they've set it all year, and you grind because that's what the body already decided before you got here, and the face in this body does not do what a last-rep face does. It is calm. Slack around the eyes. A stranger's calm wearing an old man's skin.

The bar is cold and knurled and it bites your palms — his palms — and that bite is the first door. It swings open on a whole gym life: fifteen years of the same three mornings a week, a trainer named Deshawn he doesn't listen to half the time, the particular satisfaction of a body that other people write off at sixty-four still able to put up weight that surprises the twenty-two-year-olds spotting nearby. Sunil doesn't come here to look good. He comes here because his knees complained for a decade before he started, and stopped, and because sitting under a desk all day re-seating Cat6 cables into a punch-down block does something to a lower back that only a barbell undoes.

The shirt is not on him here — he's in gym clothes, not the polo — but the memory of the polo comes anyway, riding on the sweat-damp cotton against his back right now, because his hands dressed in it only hours ago in the dark of a Brooklyn bedroom, quiet so as not to wake Priya, one sleeve then the other, the lanyard with his badge photo already looped and waiting on the doorknob where it always hangs, his ID picture from four years ago when the beard had more black in it. The badge photo is a joke between him and his work friend Marcus — *you look like you're being extradited* — and it makes you, wearing him, want to laugh in a way that isn't your laugh at all, it's his, sitting right there in the muscle of his face waiting to happen.

His hands know this bar the way they know a network switch, the way they know the particular click of a patch cable seating home, the way they know, without looking, which drawer in the office kitchen has the good spoons. Sixty-four years old, skinny-fat, a gut that the shirts he buys are cut to hide and don't, and underneath it forearms ropy from two decades of exactly this bench, exactly this rack. His knees are fine now. His right shoulder aches on cold mornings, an old rotator thing from moving servers before that became someone younger's job. He is strong in the specific, unglamorous way of a man who decided to be, on a schedule, because a doctor once said a word he didn't like.

The wedding band is on the hand gripping the bar, and it is warm from his skin, and it opens on Priya — twenty-nine years of her, the two of them repainting a hallway the color she wanted and he didn't and now can't imagine any other, her voice at 6 a.m. saying he's going to be late again if he doesn't stop drumming his fingers on the nightstand and get up. Two kids raised and mostly launched. A wedding a decade before that to someone else who isn't in the ring on his finger but is still, somehow, in the ring on his finger — Marisol, who he thinks of exactly once a year, on a date he never tells anyone, and who he does not think of now, because there isn't room, because the memories are coming in bursts and this one hasn't surfaced yet.

He quit smoking the year his father died of what smoking does. He quit drinking without a story attached, just a decision, the kind he makes and doesn't revisit. He is, on paper nobody at the gym would guess, worth more than most men who'd sneer at his khakis — a stock option exercised at exactly the right decade, sat on, never spent on anything that would show. He drums his fingers on the bar rack now between sets, an unconscious tattoo, his hands doing it because his hands always do it, whether he's thinking or not, whether you are the one behind them or not.

You rack the bar. Your arms — his arms — are shaking a little, pleasantly, at the edge of what they can do.

You look at your hands. Freckled, brown, spotted with age, a plain gold band catching the gym's fluorescent light, calluses in a bar-shaped line across both palms.

"Whose hands," you say, out loud, to no one, in a voice with thirty more years on it than the one you had three minutes and one wheel ago — and you don't know yet if that's a question you're asking him or the next spin.