There’s a man at the YMCA named Gary. Gary’s enormous. He has curly grey hair and blue eyes that look vaguely crazed, like the eyes of a caged wolf. I always meet him in the locker room and he is always naked throughout the entirety of our interaction, usually with a towel close to hand that he could use to cover himself but which he never uses to cover himself.

Gary has one of those big round bellies that is fat without losing a certain kind of structural integrity: like there’s some kind of scaffold inside him that holds the bulge out. He looks like he was once insanely strong. He has big shoulders and thick arms, and his calves look like footballs under the skin. When I look at his feet, they always seem painful and red and sort of flattened as if they’re holding up even more weight than his enormous size suggests.

I have a theory that Gary is incredibly dense, like a dying star. Sometimes I place coins next to my feet as I change to see if they will get caught in his gravitational field, skitter across the floor, and stick to his leg. I started with toonies and have progressively worked my way down to nickels. Nothing so far.

Gary likes to talk to me. Our first talk was like this:

Gary (standing maybe ten feet behind me as I open my locker after my workout, him naked, of course, and just sort of planted there on the creaking tile with no apparent plans re: getting dressed): Hi! I’m Gary.

Me (glancing over my shoulder): Nice to meet you, Gary.

Gary: How’s your day going?

Me: Fine man, yours?

Gary: Pretty good. But then every day is good when you’re retired…

Pause. Gary looking at me with his crazy blue eyes.

Me: Retired from what Gare?

Gary used to be a railroad engineer. As in the guy who drives the trains. All across the country. For like 20 years. He can tell you everything you care to know about trains and a whole bunch of other stuff you couldn’t care less about. I always quiz him about the trains.

“So what’s the maximum grade you can go up Gare?”

“Well that depends on the train of course, but every set of tracks has a thing called a ruling gradient, and that determines the minimum size of the locomotive you can have on that track, based on the steepest climb. So you always have enough power. Sometimes just barely enough power though, boy let me tell ya… (long winding digression about times when Gary has had barely enough power).”

Although he’s massive and chatty, nobody pays much mind to Gary. He has a lot of very short conversations where the other person says things like “mhm” and “oh yeah” and “you bet” and then leaves without ever once looking at him.

One time I asked him: “Was it lonely driving the trains Gary?”

“Oh sometimes, but I liked the scenery. And I’m not married so I always looked forward to days on the track.”

I like to think of Gary as something of a legend among railroad engineers. I imagine that when a locomotive died close to a town, Gary would just get out and use a big chain to pull the train the rest of the way. He’d arrive at the station, stomp over to the person in charge, and say: “Hi! I’m Gary. My engine died ten miles back.”

“So how’d you get here then?”

“Oh, I just pulled it the rest of the way.”

“Pulled the whole darn train!?”

“That’s right,” Gary would say, looking somewhere in the middle distance, smiling at nobody. “I pulled the whole darn train.”

Yesterday, when I got out of the shower, Gary was standing as usual and I asked him a train question. But, instead of answering it, Gary said:

“Are you the guy I gave a neck rub to the other day?”

“Uh. No Gare.”

“Oh. Well, I really straightened that guy out so if you ever need a neck rub then maybe I could give you one. Sometime. If you wanted to.”

“Hmm. Gotta tell you Gary it doesn’t really appeal.”

“No?”

“No. As in, like… No.”

I got dressed in a hurry, said goodbye, and went up the ramp to the main floor, then out the main entrance into the sun. It was a nice day and I felt a little bad for not being kinder to Gary, who might be very lonely. Sometimes I think maybe he never leaves the locker room. Maybe he just stands there all the time, powering himself on some sort of internal fission. The cleaners come in and sweep around his huge feet, and use the vacuum to get the worst of the dust out of his hair. “Hi!” He yells over the vacuum’s roar, “I’m Gary!” But the cleaners pay him no mind and go about their routines. When they shut off the lights Gary’s blue eyes emit a glow that he casts in slow curves around the room, like the sweep of a train’s headlight.

This morning I came into the locker room and asked him how his day was going.

“Good,” he said. “But then every day is good when you retire.”

I looked over my shoulder at him standing there smiling and naked with those crazy eyes and his hair messed up from the night’s cleaning.

“What did you retire from, Gare?”