In a place where iron clanged and grunts were exhaled from a handful of stumpy old men (some older than him, and he was sixty-one), the steamy pre-dawn smells were unchanged in forty years. There was comfort in that musty familiarity—machine oil, ZEP disinfectant, stubborn bacteria, stale cigarette smoke and bad mouth hygiene exhaled with the grunts. It was insomnia hour for most of these old dudes, but not for him; he had been rising early, seven days a week, since giving up booze.

The room itself was ringed with rimless, silver-plated, 48” mirrors, but he avoided them as much as possible because when he caught a glimpse of his own image, he did not see himself—he saw what other folks saw: a rock-solid, white-haired teppista with a hemispherical gut and a tattered Harley hat, pacing like a caged cat, scowling in a fugue of focus, seeping miasmas that said ‘avoid me.’

Between the mirrors were black and white photos torn from old ‘Muscle & Fitness’ magazines—Arnold in his cartoonish prime, Lou Ferrigno screaming in a voice he couldn’t hear, Franco Colombu flexing and flaring across the fading embroidery of years. On the wall behind a counter was an aerial photograph of the neighborhood in better days, when the commercial strip flickered with life, before the Bengali meat shops and amplified calls to prayer. In that picture, the storefront gym was Shishnevska Market where a tiny babcia once ran numbers, and in football season, parlay cards that listed the different teams with the spread—plus two, minus one or whatever; you picked your team and turned in the stub with your name on it. If you won, she’d either pay you in cash or subtract the sum from your grocery tab. The babcia spoke no English and if you bought a Vernor’s along with your parlay card she’d call it ‘ginjoo-ray.’ Orange Crush was ‘warinch’.

Above the mirrors was a blood-red stripe he’d painted there when he’d done a few renovations as a favor to Greg, the gym’s owner, who was a casual acquaintance. All his acquaintances were casual, but this work was the only loving touch the place had received in five years. Even then, he hadn’t done much—a coat of paint, bolting down bench presses and squat racks through 3/8" EVA foam mats.

And the stripe: It was the swinging pocket watch he used to self-induce hypnosis. Instead of facing his own fierce pout in the mirror, he fixated on the stripe and anchored himself to the one unwavering reality—that this second of this day, inside this overheated, rank-smelling gym, however isolated it was in space, was still contingent. It was one of an unbroken chain of instants that began at his conception and unfolded without interruption, without feeling, ever since, slogging steadily through an uneven, anger-filled childhood in the old place on Douglass where he still lived, a house where nothing was written and nothing resolved, instants that also entombed his wife Tambi, formerly loved and forever liable, and his long-gone sons.

The red stripe did not make him remember the boys or the stagnation of the subcurrents. By design, it did the opposite: It refracted his concentration into a single point and focused a mass of loud thoughts until the only the pertinence in his ragged universe was this single sliver of time, and then, the one that followed it.

He racked two forty-five-pound plates, did his reps, racked two twenty-five-pound plates, did ten more, then racked an additional pair of forty-fives—a total weight of two hundred seventy-five pounds against his own one ninety; thickset arms became twin pistons in a Shovelhead engine, compressing tension against his chest and pumping fury toward the red stripe; body mechanics, mental tumult, dead mass and tunnel vision. He felt himself within the private cavity, communicating directly with his muscle fibers, the sliding filaments, the bands of proteins transducing electricity like a blowtorch to his pectorals. His muscles were stone and the stone hit water with ripples that did not diffuse but grew more intense as slivers supplanted slivers upon slivers.

The curl rack was a problem he had yet to resolve. He had bolted it to the floor too close to the mirror and he could not see the stripe without wrenching his neck, so instead, he wedged his chin into his chest in order to avoid contact with his own face—like his father’s face, his own was nicely sculpted, and he saw his father’s eyes in the mirror and resented the reminder, so he found a random scuff on the mat to stare at. Chin hairs grated against chest hairs; he folded back piston arms, two twenty-five-pound plates; sixty-one pounds in total, a familiar sum, sixty-one years in total.

Behind a hedge of benches, ignoring the weights, two old regulars shrilled against the background music: One was a crusty hunchback with twig legs, jug ears and cut-off elastic waist pants; he sat on a bench talking about a mutual acquaintance: “That one? Cocksucker screwed me to death.”

The other one wore an oversized track suit and shoes street shoes that slithered across the mats, black socks rising midway up reddish calves; he answered, “I don’t mean this in an evil way, but he was always scheming. If you’ll forgive the term, he was a bullshitter.”

Their voices echoed through a fitful early morning. On the tape loop, Greg generally played iron to match the cold plates—Steppenwolf, Motörhead, ZZ Top—or bad nineties funk, but today, for some reason, he was playing softer, moody tunes from an easy-listening loop, songs for which the scowling man who had painted the stripe generally had no use.

But an issue bigger than the mirrors sidled from the speakers midway through his third set of curls—a song from his childhood that was linked to a particular memory of his mother, who had died of ovarian cancer when he was seven. He preserved the few solid memories he had of her in a silent reliquary, precious as the Virgin’s Sacra Cintola, intentionally untouched and imbued with unnatural light. In him, such reverence was foundational, and as a child grieving this unfathomable loss, he refused to listen when other people spoke fondly of her: He’d leave the room. These other people—aunts, grandparents, neighbors—had thought it was odd and even mean-spirited, but since he was an eight-year-old who’d just lost Mammi, they overlooked it.

In fact, it was neither odd nor mean-spirited; but it was bedrock: What was his was his, and whether beautiful or fraught with anxiety, he refused to co-opt their memories and have them accidentally become his own memories. He wanted to secure that brief spell of life when he felt safe and enshrouded inside a silver casket, pure as Paradise, like Mary’s holy scrap in Prato.

But then the song came up, and he thought of a day in the backyard of the house on Douglass when the world was filled with light and time. There was a blow-up Bakelite pool covered in images of dolphins and starfish and Mammi—who must by then have known that a malignant spirit was eating her from the inside out—sat in a lawn chair beside him wearing a delicately tinted sundress. A transistor radio was playing what is now nostalgia but was then quite new: ‘Killing Me Softly’, with Roberta Flack’s plaintive, fragile voice as cool as water from the hose, as enveloping as the sun-warmed pool, and suddenly, his mother had begun to cry. His own kid eyes were already wet from his break from the unrelenting summer heat; they followed her as she stood and faced the house, her shoulders heaving and her crying uncontrollable as he sat there, stilled to silence, watching her, touched and frightened, unable to move.

And now the song was playing again, fifty-odd years later and suddenly this man—Rocco Tomassino—was overcome by Roberta’s voice and the same agonizing words that had busted down Mammi’s pretense. He retreated quickly into a small alcove piled with broken equipment where his sobs—startling aggressive—made the morning awkward for the others, but wisely, nobody approached him.

By seven, a few fake thugs pumped with stackers would filter into Greg’s Gym, overusing the mirrors he’d just underused, but by then he’d be gone.

‘Dietrologia’ is an Italian word that translates literally to ‘behind-ology.’ It’s used to explain hidden motivations; the real reasons behind something. Cure and curse are a single letter apart, irrelevant to now yet unextractable from now. What is real is the force of decisions, even those as insignificant as doing another set, another rep.

It was the prime epiphany: The girding artery is overhead and for every exhaled grunt and every calorie expended in every thrust, there must one day be reckoning.

Pre-dawn, city pigments dulled and seeped between buildings, receding and muting the spray-painted gang affiliations in a neighborhood by now too deserted to be dangerous. On the corner of Cass and Ecoles, an old wrought iron gate careened toward a wind-blighted lot where a few vehicles huddled beneath a 200-watt bulb. Nick’s Corner was made of cinderblocks and a faux-brick façade. Late season bugs hovered in the lot, looking tentative and lost; there was no sign indicating that the bar was open; you either already knew it was open or didn’t care.

Rocco knew, and although he had not downed a drink in almost a decade, the smell of a bar to him was the smell of spring, even in the autumn. It was the pine-scent of Christmas spinning through infinity and the ozone of sparklers in July. A bar visit before the workday was a ritual and he’d been stopping at Cass and Ecoles every morning for nearly forty years. These days, the faces were different but the people were the mostly same: Instead of Niccolò—the old Calabrese who stocked moonshine grappa and served caffè corretto in a Gotham shot glass—there was now Danno, a young black dude in a slouchy beanie who listened to doom metal on earbuds while slogging through early morning motions.

Danno set a room-temperature San Pellegrino in front of Rocco from a case that Rocco himself had dropped off, as he did once a month. Social exchange was unnecessary and unwelcome, and the same mandate applied to silvery-skinned Wexler, an intense old ex-boxer who lived in the low-income assisted-living apartments on the far side of Cass and had been waiting outside for the door to be unlocked at seven o’clock.

Danno placed two longneck beers in front of him without asking; Wexler’s daily routine was as predictable as Rocco’s. Wexler guzzled the first beer and peeled off the label as he started in on the second, speaking in the high-pitched voice of someone with inner-ear damage. The voice jarred, disassociated from a man who looked like a junkyard dog raring for a fight he’d probably lose, brain stuck in a vinyl groove. He hit the same notes in the same order every day, talking to no one in particular. First, he wanted to know if there were any new Jackie Wilson songs on the jukebox. For some reason, Wexler fixated on Jackie Wilson. Like wristwatches in Hiroshima frozen inside the exact second the bomb went off, Wexler’s cognition seemed to have stopped at a random, if apparently significant memory of playing Jackie Wilson on a jukebox somewhere. Not this one, which hadn’t worked this century, and even when it had, played exclusively Sinatra, Dean Martin and La Ciapa Rusa. Likewise, the broken cigarette machine stood in permanent stasis—empty, unplugged, but still present on squat legs by the accordion-doored phone booth, crowned with mostly forgotten logos from Kent and Viceroy. Quickly tipsy, Wexler peeled off macrobrewery labels and launched into stories where he called all the characters by their first name as if you knew them. His slashing voice had a Jersey tilt; inexplicable for someone raised in the Brewster Projects.

A trucker came in and asked for coffee; he was quickly lost behind his flip phone. At seven twenty, the door opened again and this time it was Rudy, a grotesquely overweight guitarist in an amped-up tweaker-twisted metalcore band that had just finished an all-night rehearsal at a warehouse owned by Rudy’s dad. Rudy was Danno’s homie; Danno fed him draft beer in plastic cups and listened to the CD Rudy gave him, a sarcastic ode to Prince called ‘Lie Down and Die.’ Danno grinned; false chord growls and banshee cat wails murmured through his ear buds. After the tune ended and suitable praise was conferred, Danno and Rudy began talking about ‘Carlito’s Way.’ Rudy was Puerto Rican and said, “Love it the first time, but I watched it again yesterday and I’m sorry but Pacino sounds like a fucking idiot.”

“He's campy and over-emotes. Bad acting, dude. Fuck the guy and the fools who bought the bullshit. ‘Eyyy Frankie baby, jou a piece a' cheet!’”

The walls at Nick’s Corner had plaques from Stroh’s and Schaefer’s—beers they no longer carried. The stuffed head of a six-point buck had occupied the same corner for forty years and by now it looked like it had died of disease instead of factory ammo.

When you lose focus on what is real, life becomes unreal, and that’s when—within the private cavity—the genuine pangs of fear well up. Around him, voices droned. Rocco lifted the San Pellegrino bottle with rigid motions. His mouth was stiff with silence, but there was no lack noise. There was, as always, a crescendo inside him, just beyond earshot. He focused, and when the focus became too much, the walls closed in. The soundtrack of Nick’s Corner—the insolent, distorted, overdriven guitars, the stories Wexler told every morning, the chortling, disheveled bartender and Pacino’s mimicked dumbfuck accent—assured him that he was in the company of folks who had not yet had the epiphany.

For that, more than for their freedom to drink at seven in the morning, he envied them.

Il lavoro ti rende completo; arbeit macht komplett. It was the second epiphany—work makes you whole. Such insight had not occurred to the sons: Aldo, named for Tambi’s father, had capped a career of unrelenting hustle with a current stint at the Detroit Detention Center and had been behind bars for nearly three years; Salvatore, his younger son, had been swallowed whole and was dead—specific time and place unknown—somewhere in Northern California drug country.

The boys who had grown up afraid they’d become him had somehow, in their way, become worse than him.

At nine thirty that morning, Rocco pulled his Ranger to a pockmarked curb outside Mrs. Wiesnicki’s house on Nowak Street. The concrete near the driveway had been damaged long ago by a municipal snowplow; Rocco had offered to fix it with Fusion-Crete at no charge—the work of an hour—but Mrs. Wiesnicki had refused. She was the kind of curtain-peeker who reports neighbors for putting out garbage cans a day early and was of the unwavering mind that since the city had done the damage, the city should repair it. It had been seven years without repair and on the rare occasions she left the house, Mrs. Wiesnicki backed her Hyundai Sonata over rubble.

This morning, as he had done the previous week when he quoted the job, Rocco wedged the front passenger tire against scarred concrete, switched off the engine and listened to dieseling spit-ups. The truck had two hundred thousand miles on it but it was better on gas than a step-van and repairs were relative no-brainers, even the engine coughs; carbon build-up on the plugs. He’d get to it on the weekend provided it was warmer, and in the meantime, with fat wet raindrops dumping down, the truck was his army knife. The extended cab had folding jump seats for paint and power equipment, the bed was fitted with an aluminum crossover box and extendible ladder racks, and for larger jobs, he owned a 6’x12’ enclosed trailer, but it been a long time since he’d needed it. He was working on Mrs. Wiesnicki’s kitchen and claustrophobic downstairs bathroom. After Nick’s Corner, he’d gone back to the house on Douglass just long enough to change into splattered coveralls and check phone messages, of which there were none.

Mrs. Wiesnicki’s grass was bile yellow, variegated with shreds of dead weeds. He didn’t knock—she was peering through the curtains and opened the door while he was on the first porch step. She was a blunt stump of a woman in her seventies; her son, in his mid-thirties, was sprawled on the sofa wearing a Thor hoodie with the sleeves rolled up to reveal constellations of freckles.

“I’m going upstairs,” Mrs. Wiesnicki announced, peering at Rocco as she pumped the door shut behind him. “Walter is here so’s you don’t try anything.”

 Whether she meant burglary or sexual assault was unclear, and it was also irrelevant, because if either had been his intent, passively useless Walter was hardly up to stopping it. Rocco was repulsed that the slug of a boy—in fact, a middle-aged man—was not painting his own mother’s kitchen and instead was watching cartoons and eating jam cookies.

Rocco didn’t speak—even at $15 an hour, Walter’s fat-faced laziness was his own meal ticket. But his scorn must have translated because Walter said, “Yeah, sucks for me too, dude. This morning was when I was supposed to untangle all the cords behind my computer. I’m a day trader and you gotta keep up with that stuff.”

Aldo had once claimed to be a day trader when in fact he was scamming retirement money though peer-to-peer apps. Rocco didn’t peg Walter as someone with that level of gumption, but he recognized the bullshit immediately: Despite his reek of martyrdom, this scenario didn’t suck for Walter in the least. With off-stage mommy snoozing easier because her adult son was downstairs to keep the thickset, judgy handyman at bay, he was—in his way—hard at work.

In general, children need little more from their parents than a sense of being safe from harm and being wanted. Walter, in this moment, had both. And with his head relapsed into the cushions and a full refrigerator a few feet away, sealed within animated touchstones from his childhood, fully confident that Rocco Tomassino was no more sinister than Oliver Hardy in ‘The Painters’, he was soon asleep.

Rocco laid drop cloths in the kitchen, draped the counters and appliances, and approached his work with his customary mechanics—with minutia running through his brain and bloodstream. Mrs. Wiesnicki’s house was frumpy from the outside, but it had been solidly constructed in the 1920s, and he spent three hours painstakingly patching doorknob dents and plaster pinholes with putty and prying off the delicate, hand-carved molding that sopped up the space between the top of the cabinets and the ceiling.

He noticed that the carpenter had omitted a foot-long length of crown on the wall-facing side of the cabinet—one of those inexplicable quirks that you sometimes encounter in old houses. There may have been a reason at the time, but today, it was a repository for grease and dust and a haven for mice. Although the original molding was probably carved from old-growth basswood, Rocco believed he could duplicate the pattern in his basement workshop using sugar pine, and once painted, it would make no difference. He’d do it without charging Mrs. Wiesnicki or even telling her—she might refuse and in the end, she might not even notice. As she slept easier knowing Walter was downstairs, he’d sleep easier knowing that the century-old oversight had been reckoned with. He put an original piece of molding inside his rucksack and left Mrs. Wiesnicki a note saying he’d be back to sand when the plaster dried.

Walter was still snoring when he left. On the television, Plankton was frothing at the mouth and screaming, “I’m going to rule the world!”—to which SpongeBob replied, “Good luck with that.”