Tyler Wysocki

You are Nicolás Reyna, sitting on the edge of somebody else's couch in Pittsburgh, and the trouble with him is that there's nothing wrong with him. Off-duty, off-shift, the gun locked up, the nose that got broken twice already healed crooked in a way you didn't do to him. He is fine. He is exactly what the wheel said he'd be. And six minutes ago that felt like enough — a cop, a badge, a little weight to carry around — and now it feels like sitting in a waiting room. You can feel his patience in your own borrowed jaw, an ache from clenching a habit that isn't yours yet either. You did not spin again because Reyna did anything to you. You spin again because six minutes was long enough to learn the shape of a life and want out of it before it closes over your head, and because the page is still open on the phone in his hand, the wheel still slowly spinning its colors, and the itch under it is just: not this, not yet, one more.

You tap it before you can think better of it.

—

The foam is cold at your jaw before you know you have a jaw. The razor is already moving — up, against the grain, no pause where a man usually pauses, at the corner where the mouth pulls the skin tight — and it goes through that corner like it isn't there, like whoever is steering already knows this face doesn't flinch. Water runs. A cracked mirror throws back a bathroom that smells like old pipes and Barbasol. Half a face wears foam, half of it is clean and pink, and both halves belong, this second, to you.

The sink is cold enamel under your left palm, chipped at the rim, and that's the first door: a whole winter comes through it, hosing plaster dust off calloused hands at the end of a day, this same tap running rust before it runs clear. The razor in your right hand is the second door, and it swings wide — mornings, dozens of them, shaving in a hurry before a foreman who docks you for lateness, the blade always a week past when it should be replaced because replacing it means remembering to buy one.

His name arrives with the water: Tyler. Tyler Wysocki, twenty years old, and the body under your hands is not soft anywhere — shoulders built off two years of framing houses, forearms that ache pleasantly the way muscle aches when it's been worked honestly, a low dull throb in the lower back that he's decided, at twenty, not to think about yet. The jaw you're dragging steel across is the thing his hands do without him: clenches when the foreman rides him, clenches when the check's short, clenches, quietly, most of the time, at nothing anybody could name. You feel it now, a tightness that has nowhere to go and no reason today, a Sunday, a day off, foam and water and nothing wrong.

The jeans against your hips remember themselves going on this morning — sitting on the edge of a mattress that's really just a boxspring, threading a belt he never wears to work because the tool belt does that job. The shirt isn't on him yet, hangs off the towel rod, but the tattoos on your left forearm are talking anyway: the realism portrait, a woman's face rendered in black and gray, done two summers ago in a shop on Gratiot from a photo he gave the artist and never explained to anyone since, not to the guys on site, not to anyone — a grandmother he barely knew, gone before he could ask her the things he wanted to ask, and getting her face put into his skin was the only way he found to keep a conversation open that had already ended. Nobody at work has asked. He likes it that way.

Under your bare feet, cracked tile, cold, familiar as breathing — this house older than he is, rented, two bedrooms, one his, a street of brick two-flats under a sky the color of a nail. Sawdust ghosts in the creases of his knuckles no amount of washing gets all the way out. Tomorrow there's a job — framing, second floor, a header that didn't sit right Friday and is going to be his problem again — and some small patient part of him is already there, already tired of it, in the honest way you get tired of a thing you're good at and not from.

The razor finishes the last pass. Foam and water swirl down the drain. Your face — his face, the mole riding high on the cheek like a period at the end of a sentence — comes clean out of the foam whole, unhurried, twenty years old and not particularly impressed with itself.

You look down at your hands on the rim of the sink, and they are not the hands you had ten minutes ago, not Reyna's, not anybody's you've worn before — wide-knuckled, nicked along one thumb, a fleck of dried joint compound under one nail that three showers haven't found. You turn the right one over slowly, like it might tell you something it hasn't already.

"Six minutes," you say to the cracked mirror, and laugh once, short, at no one. "Let's see what you're good for."