Wayne Prokop

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You have been waiting in the place where waiting has no length to it, and then there is a room.

A rented room off the Trail with the ceiling stained the color of weak tea, a lamp doing what it can, a can of ginger ale sweating on the desk beside a remote. Four bottles on the dresser. Three of them have labels and the fourth does not, and the fourth is the one in his hand. He's been given eight weeks of it by a clinic in Kendall — a trial, a study, phase something, a form he signed with the pen they gave him and did not read past the part about compensation. Nerve pain in the left leg. That is what he thinks he is treating.

You know the leg. You've watched it. That's the thing about being what you are: you get to watch, and you can't touch, and you keep the wanting. His right knee going up and down all through the shift briefing like a sewing machine. Up and down at the doctor's, at his daughter's kitchen table, at the deposition, at church — the pew shivering next to him until his ex-wife laid two fingers on his thigh without looking over and he stopped for maybe eleven seconds. That was fourteen years ago. She doesn't lay fingers on him now. She still calls, though. Twice a month. That is what makes her the one who matters and not just the one who left.

He is a stranger to you. Understand that this is not a diminishment. You did not choose him for love, or grievance, or any of the reasons the small ones tell each other. You chose him because he opened the door — because a man who has spent thirty-one years standing in doorways he wasn't invited into finally left one of his own unlatched, and put a pill on his tongue, and did not know that the compound they were testing does one thing very well and one thing they have not written down.

So: he tips his chin. His tongue is out, the pill white and round on it, and he's holding the amber bottle up like he's showing it to somebody, though there is nobody in the room, and this is the part you find almost tender. He looks at his own reflection in the dark screen of the television and pulls a face at it. Sixty-two years old. Hair dyed a flat dark brown, the gray coming up at the temples and the roots, clipped down to nothing at the back and sides with that hard straight line a barber cut into him in 1983 and has been recutting ever since. Skinny arms. The old cross and the praying hands at his collar, gone soft and blue at the edges, done in a shop on Miami Beach the week after he made probation, back when he still smoked and still believed the two facts about himself were the badge and the Lord.

He swallows. Drinks the ginger ale. Sets the bottle down.

Then he waits, the way he waits at lights.

And the leg starts up. Up and down, up and down, and you go in on the rhythm of it, the way you always find you can, on the part of a man that is already moving without him.

*

You expect a fight and there isn't one. There is a door, and then there is a hallway of a man: a wall of index cards, thirty-one years of stops and calls and one Christmas Eve in Liberty City he has never told the second wife about because there was no second wife; a woman named Denise laughing on a seawall in 1986 with her shoes in her hand; three children and then a fourth, the youngest a boy he does not know how to talk to; the taste of a Winston he has not had since 2004 and misses every single day; the smell of Sunday. And a small, tight, patient ache in the left leg that has never once in six years let him forget it is there.

Then you are behind his eyes, and the eyes are open, and the pupils go wide all at once — the whole room floods in, the tea stain, the lamp, the dust in the air, all of it too bright and too much — and then they narrow. Focus.

He is walking. You are walking. You take four steps to the bathroom door because you want a mirror and not a television screen, and the walk is wrong, is not yours, is a lean and a roll off the left hip that you are wearing before you understand it, and the ache in that leg arrives like a bill coming due. This is the price. Nobody told you either. You get the body. You get the leg.

The mirror is spotted. The light above it buzzes.

You look at the hand first. Big knuckles, a working man's hand on a skinny arm, and there on the ring finger a band of skin paler than the rest, a stripe that has not caught the sun since he took the ring off and has not gone away, and you turn the hand over, and the palm is somebody's, and it is yours, and it is not going back.

Then you look up.

Blue eyes. Not startled. That is the thing — the face has been arranged by thirty-one years into an expression that does not startle, and it holds, and behind it you are new, and you are appalled, and you are so glad you could weep with a mouth that has not wept since 1998.

For good. No term on it. Nobody is coming to the door.

The phone buzzes on the desk behind you. It says DENISE. It will keep buzzing. You will learn the shift schedule, the combination on the locker, the name of the boy you cannot talk to, the hymn he hums shaving. You will learn to answer to Wayne. You will learn what the tattoo was a promise about and you will keep failing it in his voice.

And the leg — you notice, standing there in the buzzing light, that the leg has stopped. It's still. First time in forty years, and there's nobody left in this body to know it.