Victor Suminski

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The site loads slow on purpose, like it wants you to feel the weight before you spend it. A wheel, hand-drawn looking, the kind of thing that should be a joke. Vessel.cards. You've read every thread about it there is to read, the screenshots, the arguments about whether it's real, whether it's legal, whether it's anything at all. Tuesday, late morning, nothing on, the kind of nothing that has been building for years without a name. You have wanted this since before you knew it could be wanted — every film where someone wakes up behind a different face, every story you told yourself at two in the morning instead of sleeping. You tell yourself it's probably fake. You put the card number in anyway. You spin.

There is no falling. There is no feeling of going anywhere. There is a thumb, not yours, moving across a screen faster than it was moving a second ago, and the screen is close, six inches, blue-white, and the room around it is dark in the particular way a bedroom is dark when the only light left awake in it is a phone. You are lying on your side. The mattress holds a weight that is not the weight you expected to have, though you expected nothing, because you have never had a weight before. Somewhere behind the face you are now wearing, a thought that was his stops, mid-sentence, like a man cut off on a call.

The thumb keeps moving. You let it, because for a second that's the only thing your body knows how to do.

Then the shirt. You feel it before you understand it — not cloth exactly, more the memory of cloth, the way a sleeve was rolled this morning with a thumbnail catching the hem, rolled twice, always twice, because once looks sloppy and three times cuts off the blood in the forearm on a hot roof. The tattoo under that sleeve goes warm, not literally, but a flash comes with it anyway: nineteen years old, a shop on Lincoln that doesn't exist anymore, a dare from a friend who is dead now, ink that was supposed to mean something fierce and ended up just meaning young. The arm remembers the needle more than the design.

The ring. Left hand, plain band, and touching it — not touching it, it is simply on the hand and the hand is yours now, so it's in you the way a splinter is in you — brings her. Not all at once. A kitchen with bad light. An argument about money that was never really about money. Her hand on his sternum at four in the morning the time the cough wouldn't stop, worried in a way she didn't have words for, and him pretending it was nothing because the roof doesn't care if you slept. Twenty-six years of her. Two kids who are grown now and call on Sundays, mostly. A wedding in a backyard in Van Nuys with a priest who talked too long and nobody minded.

The sheets under you, the particular give of this mattress, bring the ordinary weight of the marriage — not dramatic, just married, just long, a thing worn smooth. And under that, further down, an ex-girlfriend's name arriving unbidden and unwanted the way old names do, a woman from before the wife, a version of himself at twenty-eight he doesn't visit on purpose but that visits him anyway, some nights, uninvited, the way she is arriving in you now, a door he thought he'd shut that opens a crack whenever his guard's down enough to scroll instead of sleep.

The body itself: sixty-three years in it and every year of it sitting somewhere specific. A back that knows the shape of a pitched roof better than it knows a bed. Knees that announce themselves on stairs. The dad-bod softness over what used to be harder muscle, muscle that still remembers how to swing a hammer true even half-asleep, because some things the hands keep long after the rest of you stops training them. The crooked nose — broken on a jobsite decades back, a beam swinging wrong, set by a doctor in a hurry — sits at the center of the face like punctuation, and somehow you already know, from nowhere and everywhere at once, that it's the first thing anyone ever says about him.

And the hands. You notice it now because you're finally still enough to: a tremor, fine, constant, worse when he's not thinking about it, worse now because you are the one not thinking about it right, a passenger fumbling controls that have run themselves for sixty-three years without asking permission. Nicotine wants something. The body wants a vape that's on the nightstand, a habit so old it isn't even a craving anymore, just weather. Catholic guilt sits somewhere low and familiar, unprompted, about nothing in particular — a Sunday missed, a drink two nights ago that turned into four.

This morning — his morning, hours gone already in his time, a whole day folded under you — comes last and clearest, because the shirt is still faintly him: pulling on the gray work shirt in a gray light, rolling the sleeves twice, the belt with the pouches worn soft at the buckle, boots that know this particular tightness of lace. A roof above a street he's worked a hundred streets like. The job he complains about and has never once seriously thought of leaving, because he's good at it, because it's his, because being up there with the whole dumb sprawl of the city laid out underneath him is the closest thing to prayer he's got left.

The thumb finally stops.

You look down. The hand in front of your face is wide, spotted, the ring catching no particular light because the room has none, and it is shaking, just slightly, just always, and it is not a hand you have ever owned.

You turn it over once, slow, like checking it for damage that isn't there.

Then you lift your eyes to where a camera would be if there were one, and you hear his voice come out of you, rough with disuse and surprise both.

"Who's driving this thing now."