Walter Pelkey

The screen does not look like anything. That is the first disappointment and also, somehow, the proof — a plain white page, a wheel rendered in flat gray, a button that says SPIN like it's selling car insurance. You have read every thread about this, every forum post from people who swore it was fake, every story that was definitely written by someone who'd never left their apartment. Years of it. The quiet, specific hunger of wanting to be let out of yourself for even a minute, filed next to things you don't say out loud. Tonight there's nothing on, there's never anything on, and the page is finally real, and you pay, and you spin, because what else was any of it for.

The wheel spins through names you'll never know you missed.

It stops.

There is no falling, no tunnel, no sense of distance crossed, because none was crossed — one second you are nowhere and the next you are a weight you didn't have, a chest drawing a breath that isn't a decision, a can gone warm and light in a hand that is not closing around it on purpose. Afternoon light through a window to your right, low and cold and gold at once. A television. A crowd roaring thin through a small speaker. Your head is already coming up off the back of a couch cushion, your eyes already open, as if you'd only blinked, as if sleep were something that happened to somebody else a half-second ago. On the screen, a ball arcs into a glove a second time — the replay — and a thumb you did not send finds the volume wheel with a steadiness that feels like muscle memory older than you.

The shirt is what gets you first. Flannel, soft from a hundred washes, a little heavy at the elbows where it's gone thin and been patched from the inside with iron-on tape, and touching the collar of it — just the collar, just your own neck brushing it — gives you a kitchen, early, a woman's back at the stove, the particular silence of two people who've had thirty years to run out of things that need saying and found that comfortable instead of sad. *Fifty cents a day on the lot and still can't make myself buy a new shirt,* and it's not even bitterness, it's just Walter, cheap in the specific loving way of a man who grew up with less and never quite believed the money would stay.

The can in your palm — his palm, five-eighths warm aluminum, going sticky — opens a different door. Not a drink. He hasn't had a drink in eleven years, and the memory that comes isn't thirst, it's the morning after the last one, nothing dramatic, no rock bottom, just him looking at himself in the bathroom mirror of a Rockland motel and deciding, flatly, the way he decides most things, that he was done. He drinks the near-beer now because baseball without something in your hand doesn't feel like baseball. The tremor is already there in the fingers around the can, has been there for years, worse by evening, and he has a whole private choreography built around it — how he holds a pen so customers don't see it jump, how he waits a half-second before reaching for anything on the lot so his hand can catch up to him.

The couch under you is older than the marriage, nearly — his wife picked the fabric, some pattern of leaves she liked in 1994 and he never saw the point of changing, and his back against it remembers thirty years of Sunday games, two kids who used to climb over the arm of it before they were grown and gone, one to Portland, one further, calls on holidays, a quiet house most of the year now that isn't unhappy, just smaller than it used to be.

And the wedding band, when your attention — his attention, you're not sure anymore where the seam is — catches on it: a whole marriage arrives at once, unhurried, nothing you did, nothing you earned, just handed to you through gold on a finger. A woman he still finds handsome. Thirty-four years of it. He is, mostly, a happy man, in the unremarkable way that doesn't make a story. He sells cars because he's good at it and has been since he was twenty-six, knows the particular silence that means someone's about to say yes, knows how to let it sit. Balloons on mirrors. Coffee from the gas station. None of it is much. All of it is his.

The clock on the wall doesn't match the hour this should be — he fell asleep too early for a man who should be at work on a Sunday, and some other part of you understands, distantly, grounded in his schedule rather than yours, that the dealership's closed today, that this is just a man off his feet on his one slow afternoon, the game humming, the beer gone warm, the whole small good dullness of being sixty-one and tired on a couch he's had for decades.

The hand comes up without you quite choosing it. Yours now. His, forever, until it isn't. You turn it palm-up in the gold light, watch the tremor move through it on its own schedule, nothing to do with excitement, nothing to do with you — just Walter, just always, now also you.

You lift your eyes to the window like it's the only lens in the room and say, out loud, to no one who could possibly be listening:

"Huh. Didn't even see the first one."

Somewhere behind that, already, faint and patient as a held breath, is the shape of the next wheel, and no clock telling you when you'll reach for it again.