Suresh Nair

The wheel is just a page, and the page is almost stupid in how plain it is — white background, a circle with a pointer, a button that says SPIN. It has taken you three years to find someone who built the thing you always wanted and had the nerve to actually sell it. You have read every thread about it there is to read, argued the ethics of it with people who didn't believe it was real, watched the trailers for movies that only gestured at it. Tonight is nothing — a Wednesday bleeding into Thursday, everyone in the house or the building or wherever you are asleep, the phone throwing its cold light on your face because you couldn't stop scrolling. You tell yourself you're only going to look at the page again. You have looked at the page a hundred times. Your thumb finds the button before you've decided anything, the way it does with everything else at this hour, and the wheel spins, and there isn't even a good long wait — it just stops.

And you are standing in rain.

It comes into you sideways, mid-step: a body heavier than the idea of a body, water already down the back of a collar, one boot lifting out of a puddle that isn't a puddle yet, more like the rain finding a low place in the sidewalk. His face is tipped up. Water is running into an open mouth that was, a half-second ago mid-sentence to no one, and warm, unhurried air is going in and out of a chest that is not panicking, though you are. Hood shoved back. Gray hair gone flat and dark with wet at the temples. Everything smells like wet asphalt and the specific mineral smell of rain on stucco, and underneath that, faintly, the plastic-and-dust smell of a jacket that has hung in a hallway closet for years without being cleaned.

There is a strap over one shoulder, canvas, damp, cutting a line across the chest. Your hand — his hand — twitches at his side, and that is the first thing that comes through: not a memory exactly, just a habit standing at attention with nothing to do, fingers curling around an absent pen. Click, it wants to say. Click click.

Then the jacket gives you something.

Not a flood — a knuckle-tap, and then the door opens all the way. This morning: pulling this same jacket off the hook by the door of an apartment that still has the fan going in the bathroom, his wife's, though she left for her shift before he was fully awake. The zipper sticks a third of the way up the way it always does and he has to walk it down and start again, the way he has for four years since Deepa bought it for him at the Ross on Vermont because his old one finally gave out at the seams. Your — his — shoulders remember hunching into it. Cold morning, or what passes for cold here, sixty-one degrees and everyone in this city acting like it's a blizzard.

The shirt under it, the blue one, soaked through now and cold against the skin, brings the shift itself: seven-forty a.m., the crew van, Ionel driving too fast down Fountain like always, the radio on a station none of them chose and nobody turns off because turning it off would mean somebody has to be the one who cares. A third-floor walk-up in Los Feliz, a sectional too wide for the stairwell, the argument about whether to take the legs off, forty-five minutes lost to that argument, his knees already complaining on the second flight before ten in the morning. Fifty-seven years in a body that has carried a lot of other people's furniture and not enough of its own weight training, and it tells you plainly, without complaint, the way an old employee files a report nobody reads: lower back, tight; right knee, a click on the stairs; blood pressure medication in the truck's glovebox, taken at seven with the coffee, a habit as unremarkable to him as breathing.

The strap gives you the truck itself, and Marcus who has run the crew eleven years and calls everyone brother without irony, and a name tag that peeled at one corner two jobs ago and has stayed peeled since. Small thing. He noticed it every day and never fixed it.

The wedding band is the one that opens all the way, no partial flash, just there, whole: Deepa at twenty-six in her sister's kitchen in Artesia, both of them terrified of both families, and then not terrified, thirty-one years of it, both of them gray now, her at the hospital on nights, him hauling other people's beds and sofas and mothers' dining tables into other people's new lives. Two kids grown and mostly gone — Priya in the Bay Area with a job he still doesn't fully understand, Arjun still in the city, calls on Sundays, mostly. A house that was never bought, a two-bedroom rented since 2003 with a landlord who has raised it twice in twenty years and calls that generous. A temple on Sundays some months and not others. A cigarette habit put down twelve years ago after a doctor's look that scared him more than the diagnosis did. A beer at a nephew's wedding, a rum at Diwali, otherwise nothing, because he has never liked the feeling of not being the one steering.

None of it comes as facts. It comes as weather — the particular tiredness of loving people you don't see enough, the animal comfort of a wet face turned up into rain on a body that runs hot most days from work, the small itch of a blood pressure pill wearing off early. He was not thinking about anything when the bus board said three minutes. He was only standing there, glad, in a stupid uncomplicated way, to feel water on his face after a morning of drywall dust and someone else's couch cushions.

You feel all fifty-seven years of him settle into the shoulders like a weight finally set down right.

You lift the hand with the ring on it. Turn it over. Rain keeps landing in the lines of the palm, and for a second you just watch it collect there, delighted in a way that has nothing to do with him and everything to do with three years of wanting exactly this and not one bit more.

You bring your eyes — his eyes — down out of the rain and into whatever is watching, and you say, out loud, in his own unhurried voice:

"Okay. Okay — I'm somebody."

Behind that, already, quietly, not yet a decision: how long. Nobody answers. Nobody ever will.