Vincent Paladino

You are Samir Haddad for the fourth minute of your life, standing in a Dallas duplex on a Sunday evening with the lazy eye drifting and the good eye fixed on the laptop screen. The body is strong — you can feel that, the thick wrists, the discipline packed into the shoulders like coiled rope — and it should be enough. It isn't. Four minutes in and already the wanting has turned over again, restless, ungrateful, indifferent to the gift of him. That's the thing nobody tells you about the wheel: the body is never the itch. The itch is yours, and it doesn't care what you're wearing. You flex Samir's hand once, watch the tendons move under skin that isn't scarred anywhere it should be for a man who says he's a soldier, and you think: not this. Not yet. Something plainer. Something with less to prove. You open the site again.

The wheel spins and lands and the world does not travel to meet you — it simply becomes the world you are in. You are gripping a barbell, arms two inches wider than they've been all year, and your chest is a fire that has been burning for twenty-nine reps and does not stop for the thirtieth. The rack overhead throws its shadow down your forearms. A water bottle sweats somewhere near your feet, out of sight now, remembered rather than seen. Fluorescent light, the particular thud of plates elsewhere in the room, the smell of rubber matting and old sweat. Lungs that pull air in short, practiced sips, like they've had to learn how. You do not gasp. You grind the rep out slow, and your face — his face — does none of what a last rep does. No grimace. No relief. Just the flat concentration of a man used to hiding what things cost him.

The bar goes back on the rack with a sound like a door closing, and that sound is the key. It comes back to you in his feeling: how many thousand times this exact clang has meant *done*, meant *good*, meant the small private victory of a body that isn't young anymore but still listens. Your hands — his hands, gray-haired at the knuckle, a mole riding high on one cheek you can't see but feel like a fact of the room — go to your scalp without being told to, the old habit, checking the thinning place at the crown the way a man checks a wound that stopped hurting years ago and just became true.

The sweatshirt against your back gives you a Tuesday — no, not this Tuesday, a hundred Tuesdays folded into one — pulling it over his head in the bathroom light of the rowhouse, Denise already awake down the hall, coffee going, her voice asking if he wants eggs. The jeans give you the knee that clicks going down stairs, the worn hollow of the marble steps outside, forty years of Philadelphia weather in the stone before he ever lived there and thirty more since. The shoes — polished, always polished, a habit from the tables — give you the felt. Not this felt, the other one: the casino floor at two in the morning, the cards snapping off the shoe, the chips clicking under his fingers in stacks he could count blind. He is good at his job in a way that has nothing to do with loving it. He deals, he watches the table, he runs a hand over his scalp between hands and doesn't know he's doing it, and somewhere in eight hours he'll go home to a woman who still finds him funny after eleven years, no ring on either of them, no papers, just the two names on one lease and neither of them minding.

The inhaler. Somewhere in a locker, a nightstand, a jacket pocket — the memory of reaching for it comes without an object in your hand, just the phantom shape of it, the two sharp breaths after a flight of stairs, after a bad set, after nothing at all some mornings for no reason he's ever pinned down. He does not think of himself as fragile. He thinks of himself as a man who plans half a beat ahead of everyone else, because he has to.

No ex worth the name. No kids to wonder about. A mole on his cheek that Denise touches sometimes without seeming to notice she's doing it. A church he doesn't go to anymore but a God he hasn't quite let go of either, some quiet arrangement made alone, late, that nobody else is invited to. Money that comes and goes and never piles up — enough, most months. Enough.

The bar is racked. The gym noise resumes around you — someone's plates, someone's music leaking thin from earbuds two racks over. Your chest still pulls a little too hard at the air, the old asthma announcing itself the way it always does after the last rep and never before.

You look down at your hands — his hands, spotted faintly, a callus riding the base of each finger from thirty years of cards — and turn them over like they've been swapped out for someone else's while you weren't looking, which they have.

You look up, into the fluorescent light, into nobody, and say, "Forty-seven."