Terrence Kalama

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Ryan Petrocelli's apartment is quiet the way a grave is quiet — everyone in the building asleep, radiator ticking, some idiot's car alarm two streets over giving up. You've been him less than a minute and already you know the shape of this one: the muscle he doesn't use, the beard that itches at three a.m., a green eyes squint at a laptop he'll never open again because in four hours a bunch of eighth graders are going to be somebody else's problem. You didn't even sit down. You are standing in his dark kitchen in his socked feet, and it occurs to you, the way it always occurs to you, that you have never once, in nine hundred and eleven spins, wanted to keep the one you were holding. That's not boredom. That's just Tuesday. You go to the site because it is there and because the wanting comes back on its own clock, no warning, same as everything else about this. You open the laptop that isn't for job listings anymore. You spin.

—

The television throws blue light across a room that is not dark for the same reason — outside the window it is early evening, gold going orange, a long late light lying across a red dirt yard you have not seen yet. Your body is sunk low into a leather couch that has given up its shape years ago. A remote is loose and warm in your right hand. Something is funny on the screen — was funny, half a second ago, to somebody else — and your mouth does not finish the laugh. You sit up straight instead. You set the remote down on the arm of the couch, deliberately, the way you'd set down something you didn't trust yourself to hold anymore.

—

The couch knows this weight before you do. Fifty-four years of it, settling wrong into the cushions, a lower back that complains getting up and stops complaining once you're moving — that comes up through the leather like heat off asphalt. Then the shirt: plain cotton, soft from a hundred washes, and it gives you a whole morning at once, sleeve first — standing in front of a dresser that sticks in the humidity, wedding photo taped to the mirror corner going yellow, pulling this exact shirt over his head while Yolanda's voice comes down the hall telling him the interview's at ten, not eleven, don't be the fool who shows up late for a job cleaning pools. He wasn't the fool. He didn't get the job anyway. That was March. There have been four Marches like that one, maybe five, and every one of them left a little more air in the room where his confidence used to stand.

The wedding band is next — you feel its weight before you think to look for it, a thin gold thing worn smooth, and it opens a church with the doors propped for air, a woman in yellow he could not stop watching walk toward him, twenty-six years old and sure for once in his life that he had done something right. Twenty-eight years married now. Two kids grown and gone — a son in Schofield who calls on Sundays, a daughter in Portland who doesn't, not for reasons anyone says out loud. And under that, quieter, an ex-girlfriend's name arriving unbidden and hers alone, no picture, just a feeling like a door left open in a house you don't live in anymore — Denise, who he still thinks about on nights he can't sleep, not with longing exactly, more like checking a wound is closed.

The tin roof ticks somewhere above you, cooling now that the sun's going down, a sound this body has fallen asleep to ten thousand times. Bare feet on the carpet — carpet in a house on posts, red dirt tracked in at the door no matter how many mats Yolanda puts down. Your feet know the give of it, the one loose board by the kitchen doorway, the smell of plumeria coming through the screen mixed with something frying that isn't happening tonight because tonight nobody's cooked, because tonight he sat down at four in the afternoon with the laptop open to listings he already knows he isn't qualified for and gave up around six and put the TV on instead so he wouldn't have to think about the number in the savings account, which is smaller than it was last month, which is smaller than it was every month for a year and a half since the company let him go and called it a restructuring.

There's a callus on his right palm that doesn't match anything he does now — years old, pool-cleaning-and-before-that work, hands that know how to fix things and haven't been asked to in too long. Dad bod, soft where it used to be hard, and it isn't shame exactly, just a tiredness that lives in the gut along with everything else. The eyebrow scar — you find it without meaning to, a fingertip grazing it, and it gives you nothing, no story attached, just an old white boy's bicycle handlebar from a childhood forty years gone, healed over so long ago it isn't even his anymore, just a mark the face wears.

He smokes when he drinks and drinks maybe twice a month, and both of those come back as one memory: a Friday, a six-pack he shouldn't have bought, Yolanda laughing at something he said out on the lanai while the dark came down fast and complete the way it does here, no dusk to speak of, and for an hour, just that hour, the number in the account didn't matter and neither did the interviews he didn't get.

—

You look down. Brown hands, wedding band, a scar you can't see but can feel with your own fingertip when you touch the eyebrow. You turn the right hand over slow, palm up, like you're checking it's real, and the callus is right there where his last memory of work left it.

"Still here," you say, out loud, to the empty room, to no one — and you don't know yet if you mean him or you.