Terrence Okafor-Boyd

Marco's dorm room smells like instant noodles and unwashed sheets, and you have been him for exactly three minutes, and it is already not enough. His roommate's laptop is open on a philosophy paper due at midnight, his phone buzzes with a girl named Priya who wants to know if he's coming tonight, and none of it belongs to you in any way that matters. Twenty-one years old, freckles, green eyes, a face that hasn't decided what it's going to be yet — a starter body, a rental you didn't even mean to keep this long. You paid for the spin because eighty-two men wasn't enough and never will be, because the wanting doesn't wait for you to finish digesting the last one. You pull up the site on his phone with his own thumbprint, which should feel like something and doesn't. You spin.

The catwalk is hot with afternoon light that hasn't happened yet where you're headed, but here, now, it is late morning, and your hand — his hand — is on a control panel, two fingers walking through a sequence they have done ten thousand times: pressure check, reset, advance. The motion breaks. You feel it break before you understand why — a half-second where the hand does not know what it is doing, presses the wrong toggle, and something in the line below hitches with a sound like a held breath. Then the hand corrects, slow, deliberate, checking. It does this ten more times, every motion audited that has not needed auditing in years. Below, the conveyor clatters on, oblivious. Above, on the catwalk rail, your palm — his palm — is dry and thick-knuckled, a plain gold ring warm from body heat, a watch loose enough to turn on the wrist.

The shirt is what opens first — the collar against your throat, damp already with morning heat trapped under a hard hat, and it comes back to you in his own hands: buttoning it four hours ago in a bathroom with bad light, his girlfriend Dawn still asleep, the graveyard shift ending late and the day shift walk-through starting early because the new sup can't be trusted alone with the extruder yet. Two showers a day, this life. He'd stood in front of the mirror and touched his own jaw before he shaved it, an old habit, checking the goatee was still even, still gray the same shade all the way across, which it wasn't, not anymore, but he'd stopped minding that around fifty. The nose in the mirror crooked a little left — 1988, a fight outside a club in Inglewood that he started and lost and would not, if you asked him honestly, take back.

The tattoo at his collarbone is warm under the shirt's top button and it comes with a name, a unit, a year, a friend named Curtis who did not come home and whose name Terrence has said out loud exactly once a year since, on a date in November, to nobody, in the truck, with the radio off.

The boots on his feet know this catwalk grating better than his eyes do — twenty-six years at this plant, elevated to plant manager six of them ago, and his knees know the walk from the office to the floor is eleven seconds too long now, a thing he complains about to no one. His hands know the safety glasses need pushing up the bridge of his nose every few minutes, an old crooked-nose problem, and they do it now, unbidden, a gesture that isn't yours.

The rest comes in pieces, out of order, the way memory works when it isn't being asked politely: Dawn's laugh through a cracked bathroom door. His ex, Renata, twenty years gone from the daily shape of his life and still somehow present in it, a Christmas card every year that he keeps in a drawer and doesn't examine too closely why. Three kids, a fourth technically his stepdaughter and he doesn't make the distinction out loud, a table too small for all of them at Sunday dinner and nobody minding. Communion at eight years old in a church that isn't there anymore. A drink, maybe two, on a Friday every few weeks with Danny from maintenance, nothing more, nothing that would worry Dawn, though she'd tease him about the smell anyway. Cigarettes he quit fourteen years ago and still, some tense mornings, reaches for a phantom pack in a shirt pocket that has only ever held a pen.

The pen. Blue, cheap, clipped in the pocket over the tattoo, and his hand goes to it now the way it goes to his own jaw when his mind wanders — touching his face, three times in the last minute, an old tell nobody in his life has ever pointed out to him because it's so much a part of how he stands still.

You look at the hand on the rail. It is not young. The knuckles are heavier than any hand you have worn in eighty-two tries, and the ring on it means something that Marco Bautista's bare finger never had to. Below, the line keeps running, indifferent, forgiving nothing and noticing less. The heat coming off the machinery is a smell you didn't choose and already recognize as familiar, welded into muscles that have stood on this exact grating at this exact hour for years without you.

You turn the hand over once, study the scar tissue at two knuckles, the pale ashy dryness at the heel of the palm that a fifty-two-year-old man stops noticing about himself.

You lift your eyes to the floor below, to the line, to nothing in particular, and you say, out loud, to no one:

"Alright. Let's see what today's got."