Warren Petracek

Rigo's gym smells like liniment and old rope, and you have been him for four minutes, standing in the doorway of it on a Sunday evening with nobody around, and already you know this isn't the one. The knees ache going up stairs. The dad-bod softness under the T-shirt, the silver in the mirror, the green eyes that aren't yours and never will be — you spun for this two hours ago wanting something slower, a man who taught boys how to hold their fists up, and instead you got a body that reminds you, every time it bends, that it is not built for standing still. You gave him four minutes because four minutes is long enough to know. You want the other thing again — the clean coldness of a man in a good suit, a man with a case file and a mole on his cheek and money buried somewhere he'll never dig himself out of. You had him once, thirty spins back, for an afternoon, and you never forgot the particular satisfaction of wearing someone who already believes he is finished, and does not yet know it. So you open the site again, on Rigo's phone, in Rigo's kitchen, and Rigo's thick finger — yours, for now — taps the wheel, and you let it spin.

The chalk is still wet-looking in the lamp light, though chalk doesn't get wet, and there is a bead of blood sitting on a thumb that isn't rolling, isn't falling, just holding there like a held breath, and you are behind that thumb, behind that whole kneeling body, before you understand you've arrived. Corduroy pressed into bare shin. Floorboards cool and bowed under a bare heel. A laugh is coming out of a mouth that is no longer entirely his, and it keeps rolling a half-second past where his face has already gone still, an engine running after the key's been pulled. Then the knees unbend and the body stands up out of the circle without the hands ever touching the floor, smooth as a marionette remembering how to walk on its own.

The shirt gives it to you first — flannel, soft at the elbows from years of the same three shirts rotated through a closet, and with it comes a whole morning: him buttoning it slow because his shoulder's been catching lately, humming something with no tune, thinking about a deposition due Tuesday he has already half-written in his head, thinking, not for the first time, that Yvonne would've laughed at the circle, would've called it an early midlife thing and been right. Yvonne. The name arrives whole, the way names do when they still mean something — an ex from fourteen years back, a woman who left when the money did, who he still, God help him, thinks of on quiet Sundays, who he pictures sometimes in the front row of a courtroom that never has her in it. The corduroy against your knees brings the rest — a friend from three law firms ago talked him into this, said it's a scientific thing now, energy readings, said bring chalk and something that bleeds and see what comes through, and Warren went along not because he believed it but because Sunday nights are long and quiet in a house built for two people that only ever holds one.

The floor under your bare feet is the floor he's slept twenty feet from for eleven years, in a rented Nashville walk-up with a neon sign bleeding pink through the blinds from the honky-tonk in the alley below, a sign that's been humming outside every deposition he's prepped and every case he's lost sleep over. His body: sixty-four, skinny in the way men get when the muscle just quietly leaves and doesn't say why, a heart that skips when he climbs stairs too fast and he tells no one, a pack a day that he swears, every January, he's cutting down. Bald head that his hand goes to without him noticing — it goes there now, your hand, rising and dragging once across smooth scalp, an old tic older than the baldness itself, from a mother's hand doing it to him as a boy, though he wouldn't remember that if you asked him, and he can't be asked anything ever again. His hands know courtroom things without thinking — the particular way to snap a briefcase latch, the exact pressure to lay flat on a table when you want a jury to believe you're calm. He goes to church some Sundays and skipped this one for the circle instead, and somewhere under the humor of it there was a real held breath, waiting, the way lonely people sometimes want the impossible thing to be a little bit true.

You look down. Thumb first — small bead of blood gone matte, drying now that it's finally allowed to. Then the whole hand, spotted, ropy-veined, a stranger's hand doing a stranger's old habit as it drifts up and passes once more over the bald scalp before you catch it and stop it, on purpose, just to feel yourself decide something in him.

You laugh again, on your own terms this time, and say to the empty room, "Well. Nobody home."