The sound came on the third rep, from inside the knee. It wasn't loud. It was just present, the way a floorboard announces itself in a house you thought you knew, and he held the sled at the halfway point with his palms flat against the grips and his breath doing arithmetic. The kid two stations over had earbuds in, but his eyes moved in the mirror. He lowered the sled the rest of the way, slow, racked the plates one at a time, and walked to the locker room without stretching, which was its own kind of announcement.
Reva's office had a plastic knee on the desk with a crack along the tibia, one of the ligaments wrapped in electrical tape, the red kind. She pressed two fingers into the soft hollow below his kneecap and watched his jaw while he straightened the leg, and his jaw did the thing jaws do. She wrote something on the yellow pad without looking down at it, the way waitresses write, the way people write who have written the same thing many times.
The sheet she gave him was still warm from the printer, and the top line said zero pounds in a font bigger than the rest. She set it face-up on the table and tapped the stick figure doing the heel slide, a little oval body, legs like a clock showing ten to two, and said, start here. He looked at it the way a man looks at a parking ticket he knows is his. She clicked her pen closed and slid it into her coat pocket, done, and he understood that the appointment was over and the argument he'd been preparing had no one to hear it.
The stretching corner had a fluorescent tube that buzzed at one pitch and then another, like it couldn't decide. He lay flat on the thin mat, the kind with the pebbled surface that leaves marks on your elbows, and moved one heel slowly toward his hip and back, toward his hip and back, lips doing the count in the dark of his own mouth. Across the room the 35s sat in the rack where they always sat, third slot from the left, and he did not look at them once, which took more out of him than the heel slides did.
He folded the sheet along the stick figure's waist and tucked it into the belt's inner pocket, where the velcro had gone the color of old wool and didn't catch anymore. The zipper snagged on the second tooth and he worked it back and tried again. On the highway the defroster pushed warm air against the bottom of the windshield and he drove with both thumbs resting easy on the wheel, the way his father had driven, all the way home.
Monday he reached for the 35, the way he always reached for the 35, and his hand stopped about two inches short and hung there in the cold air of the rack. The 20 was on the bottom shelf. He had to bend his knees to get down to it, which he did the way the sheet said to, hips back, and he heard Reva's voice saying it even though she wasn't there. He stood back up with one in each hand, and his reflection in the mirror across the room was the same height it had always been. He watched the reflection a moment, a man holding two small weights like a man holding two bags of groceries, and then he got to work.
He came back on a Tuesday, which wasn't his day, and took the mat from the same corner without being told. The buzzing tube had been replaced, and the silence where the buzz used to be was strange, a missing tooth his tongue kept finding. He moved through the heel slides and then the others on the sheet, the ones past the first stick figure, and when he got to the last one he held it for the count of eight and then held it four more, lips moving, eyes on the water-stained ceiling tile with the brown ring shaped like a boot. Nobody watched him do it. That had bothered him once, in some other part of his life, the doing of hard things unobserved. It didn't anymore.
Wednesday he set the 20s back and took the 25, just the right one, and curled it eight times while his left hand held the upright. The kid with the earbuds was doing something with a resistance band looped around the squat cage, stepping sideways like a crab, and he watched for a moment, without judgment, which was new, before looking back at his own hand on the bar.
At the front desk on the way out, the woman asked if he wanted to renew the personal training package and he said no, and then stood there another second, tapping his card on the counter, and said, actually, what days does Reva work.
The yellow sheet turned out to have a second page he hadn't noticed, folded behind the first, and he found it in the belt pocket on Thursday morning with a crease across the middle where it had doubled over on itself. The stick figures on this one were standing, both feet on the ground, arms out like they were asking a question. He did them in the kitchen in his socks, one hand on the counter where the toaster usually sat, the toaster having been moved without ceremony to the floor. Coffee going in the machine. Cars going by outside. A man in his kitchen, standing on one leg, arms out, asking the question.
In the spring he reached for the 35 and his hand closed around it, the knurling familiar as a phone number, and he stood there feeling the full price of it in his wrist and forearm and, faintly, in the knee, which reported in and then went quiet. He held it long enough to know he could. Then he set it back on the shelf himself, in its slot, third from the left, and picked up the 30, because the sheet had a line for week twelve and the line said 30, and he had come to trust the sheet more than the mirror.
