Wendell Tuakana

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Rigoberto's hands ache in the dark before the alarm goes, the way they always do now, and that ache is the whole reason. Thirty-two men and every one of them borrowed to escape some small, specific rot in the one before — a knee, a debt, a wife who'd stopped looking at him a certain way — and this time it's simpler than that. This time it's just the fingers. Cold-stiff, arthritic, curled at the first knuckle no matter how long he runs them under hot water, because Rigoberto Alvear has been picking fruit and turning wrenches on irrigation pipe for fifty-six years and his body has sent him the bill. You lie there a minute more, feeling that ache like it's yours, because for eleven hours it has been, and you think: not this one, not today. You get up before the alarm. You find the phone, the screen too bright, and you go to the page with the wheel on it, and you pay, and the farm outside the window is still dark, still waiting on a man who will wake up in it and never know he went anywhere at all.

You spin.

And you are gripping a barbell.

It is cold-knurled and it is two inches wider on the bar than muscle memory expects, and your hands — his hands — correct without asking you, walking themselves out along the metal like they've done this exact adjustment before, some other week, some other program. Your knees are bent under a rack, your shirt is stuck to your back with a sweat that is not the dry valley heat you left, and the air going into your lungs is colder and thinner and smells like rubber matting and clean floor polish instead of dust and diesel. There is a fluorescent hum somewhere close. Your breath is halfway out through your teeth, mid-exhale, and you finish the rep because the rep is already moving and there is nothing yet in you that knows how to stop it.

The bar goes down onto the rack with a sound that rings in your teeth. You are sitting. You are someone else's weight now, someone else's stiffness — not thighs burning with a set finishing but something older, duller, a low grind in both knees and along the base of the spine that has clearly been there for years and simply is, the way weather is. Your left hand finds your right knee, forearms dropping to rest there, and the wedding band on your finger is warm already from your own skin heat, and that's the first thing that comes through: not a memory yet, just a fact arriving sideways — *married* — carried on cold metal and a groove worn so deep into the finger that the finger doesn't feel whole without it.

Then the shirt. Damp cotton across your shoulder blades, and it gives you a morning: gray light through a bedroom window with foil taped over half of it to keep the day out, because he sleeps in daylight and works in dark, and a woman's voice from the kitchen already going before he's dressed, asking has he eaten, telling him Nadia called, their daughter, something about a flight. He pulled this exact shirt off a hook on the back of the closet door without looking, one arm and then the other, the fabric soft in a specific worn place at the left elbow where he always leans on the fly rail's counterweight arbor for hours at a stretch. Under the running lights, blue and dim, waiting through a show he's watched two hundred times, hauling on hemp and steel while actors up front get the light. Thirty-one years of it. A back that goes electric down one leg if he stands wrong for too long. He does the stretches the physical therapist gave him in the wings, where nobody can see, embarrassed by his own body's slow betrayal in a building full of people whose job is spectacle.

The bottle of water sweating on the floor — you don't touch it yet, but you know it's there, and knowing it gives you the gym itself: a converted Quonset off the highway, snow banked against the cinderblock, a snowmobile at home under a blue tarp he hasn't ridden since his knees went, plywood siding on the shed his son helped him build the summer before the boy moved to Tacoma and stopped calling as much as either of them would like. Two kids. A daughter who still calls. A wife nineteen years now, a woman he still, on the good days, can't quite believe agreed to any of it — that comes through warm and total, no complication in it, the rarest kind of thing to find this far into a stranger.

His leg is already bouncing, heel drumming the rubber floor mat in a rhythm his mind isn't running. It never asked permission to do that, not once in fifty-nine years, and it isn't asking now.

You turn your hand over in front of your face, the ring catching gym light, and hold it there a second too long for a man just resting between sets.

"There you are," you say, to no one, to the hand, to the room, and your voice comes out lower than the one you left sleeping in a farmhouse bed six time zones south, and you let the leg keep bouncing, and you do not yet know how long you'll let it.