Terrence Boyce

You are standing in Desmond Alcindor's kitchen in the dark, and the refrigerator light is the only thing on. Four minutes ago you were a man with silver hair and freckled forearms and a body that carried its weight low and easy, and you thought that would be enough — a change, a rest, somebody with a paid-off house and a wife asleep down the hall who is not your problem. But four minutes is long enough to notice the ache starting behind his knee, the taste of his dinner still in his mouth, a life so finished and so quiet it is like standing in a room where nothing is going to happen to you ever again. That is the thing you can't spend more than four minutes inside of. You want the part where something is still moving. You go back to the site with his hand — thick fingers, a wedding band worn thin — and you spin knowing already that whatever comes up, you will take it if it is awake at this hour, doing something with its hands.

The wheel gives you rope.

Cold, braided nylon, a brass clip warm where a palm just was. Your hand — his hand now — is already closed around it, mid-motion, unclipping it from the stanchion to let a couple through, and the motion stutters. You do it wrong. You do it again, slow, correct. The rope goes back on its hook. Somewhere behind these eyes a line of people you have never met is waiting in cold October air, breath showing, and you are the reason they are waiting.

The jacket is what gives him to you first — vinyl-faced, worn slick at the elbows, a smell of cold and old cigarette smoke that isn't his, that's the doorway's, absorbed into the lining over three winters. Under it a black polo, tucked, and under that the soft give of a stomach that used to be muscle and isn't anymore, not gone but settled, the particular tiredness of a man who trained hard at twenty-five and stopped noticing he'd stopped. Your knees — his knees — know how to stand still for six hours. Reflux sits low and hot behind your sternum from something eaten too fast before the shift, a habit so old it barely registers as pain anymore, just weather.

The earpiece coil against your jaw brings the rest of it in a rush: Marcus at the door inside, Deja on radio, the manager who shorts everybody's break by ten minutes and thinks nobody counts. Ten thousand nights like this one, give or take, starting when he was twenty-two and still going at forty-five because the money's steady and a man his size commands a doorway without having to prove it twice a shift.

The ring does the rest. You feel his thumb find it out of old habit, turning it once around the base of his finger — Denise, seventeen years, a wedding in her mother's backyard in Homewood with paper lanterns and his little brother crying through the vows. Two kids upstairs right now in a house on a street with public stairs cut into the hillside between yards, wet leaves slicking the concrete this time of year, a route he still takes two at a time coming home at 3 a.m. because it's faster than the road. Denise doesn't wait up anymore; she used to. There's an ex before her — Alicia — who he thinks about sometimes not with longing exactly but the way you think about a country you used to live in, harmless now, just there. He loves his wife. He is amazed, in the tired 1 a.m. way he is amazed most nights, that his life turned out to be this specific and this small and this much his.

His body is a good one to be in and you know it standing here — the scar through his eyebrow itching faintly the way old scars do in cold weather, some bar fight from his twenties he doesn't tell the story of anymore because the story got boring before the scar did. Skinny fat, he calls it to himself, not proud, not ashamed, just accurate. Strong enough. Steady on the ice.

You look down at the hand still holding the rope clip, and it is not the hand you had four minutes and one body ago, and it is not any hand that has ever been yours.

"Let's go," you say, to the couple at the front of the line, and your voice comes out low and easy in a way that surprises you, already his.

Somewhere down the line someone laughs at something. You don't know when you'll want to be someone else. Not tonight, maybe. You turn the ring once more before you let go of it.