“Don’t worry,” he tells me, “maybe you’ll fail upwards.”
Comments like this are why I’m always encouraging Rich to quit smoking. Who needs a smart-ass during your moments of stress-reduction?
Here’s Mikhail in a busted chair, some ergonomic locus of swivel and command. He flicks ash into a plastic cup. It’s a corner office, nothing here but dead carpet. I think of Gupta, wonder if it was a room like this where they did what they did to him, whip and wire and bamboo shoot, a rubber bucket for the human run-off of him.
Mikhail is runty in the big chair.
“Yo, I’m the CEO,” he says. “Your ass is fired!”
“You’re going to have to buy my shares, Mike.” I tap a cigarette out of the pack and tug it free with my teeth. Mikhail does silver magic with his Zippo, cups me flame. A team. A family.
“How’s the boss treating you?” I say. “Working hard or hardly working?”
Up here, I’m only good for pleasantries, the national patter.
“Work is for bitches,” says Mikhail, puts two fingers out, ash tweezed between them. His thumb is hammer-cocked. “A cap to the motherfucking dome. Know what I mean? Fuck toil, bro.”
“I’m with you,” I say, my words weak, unmeant, me here in French blue, an office-brightener tie. There’s grit in the combs of his thermal shirt, dull smears in his pants. His father, the super, sends him crawling through the ducts and tunnels of this heap. Asbestos hunts. The job, he told me, is to tack up false partitions, fool the Haz-Mat guys.
“I should learn computers,” says Mikhail, “they use them in the big buildings, niggers like me be using them for air-conditioning and shit.”
“Niggers?”
“That’s right.”
Mikhail gets up on the window sill, chops the air, slips a wire back into the smoke alarm.
“What about me?” I say.
“Guess you done slid the python eyes, G.”
We bump fists like ballplayers do.
I’m down.
Every few months I get another newsletter from the National Smokers’ Brigade. How do they know? An eye in the sky? An intercepted e-mail? Each time I have to remember the last time I was drunk, the last time I ever even drank. There was a guy at the bar, goatee and a patriotic T-shirt, “Don’t Tread on Me,” that colonial snake. He had a clipboard with a pen on a string. He rambled on about Jefferson, Rousseau, jabbed that pen around. I guess I must have signed the form. This was years ago. I don’t remember much. The night ended the next morning in the emergency room, a doctor with another clipboard, a metal one, hinged.
“Why do you do it, son?” the doctor asked.
“Go shoot a speedball,” I told him, “and you’d never ask anybody that question again.”
Some people give up the cigarettes with everything else. Me, I was pretty sure that without nicotine I’d be swinging from the shower nozzle in no time. You have to keep something between yourself and the truth of yourself or you’re dead, was how I figured it. Still do.
The upshot is that I get this newsletter from time to time, bumper stickers, membership pins. The Brigade, I gather, is funded by the tobacco lobby, but they play themselves up grassroots, an astroturf campaign. It’s always the same lead story in the newsletter, a trucker bar somewhere that won’t comply with the local smoking laws. The goose-steppers, the anti-smoke Gestapo, they’ve shut the joint down. We threw all of our boys and Patton at them, but the Reich has finally won. Or maybe it’s the Reds. Either way the barmaid can’t make rent and the Constitution is a paper scrap borne off on criminal winds. No veterinary school for the barmaid’s son. He’s headed for the mills.
Those anti-smoking bastards, I’ll think, spark up another square. Then I remember there is no barmaid, no son, and I start to hack up sour chunks of myself, toss my cigarette in the can. Still, it would be nice to stay pissed, to get my hands on a Ruger, or a Desert Eagle, join the brigade. We would puff away in a toolshed and plot the nicotine secession. Let us not forget, one of us would rasp, there are millions like us, ready to die for freedom.
Dying for something, anything, is tricky, though. You’d better be sure you believe. There was a time, I must admit, I might have been willing to die for Katrine. Or at least, as she would say, discuss the possibility. We had a good amount of discussion before we called it quits. Breaking up, she said, should take at least as long as the together part. Otherwise, what was the point? Even when we knew it was over, each of us was waiting for the other to make the move, to assume the mantle of villainy, to blink. She blinked, I told myself when she finally left, like maybe here I was — Jack the Man. I was watching a lot of the History Channel then. I pictured footage of me in deep conference with my close advisors. What if there’s a CIA inside the CIA? What if she screwed that guy at work?
The greeting on Katrine’s answering machine, it’s so honeyed, so wise. Anyone would marry that voice, those cadences, those warm conjunctive halts. Sometimes I call just to hear her sing her poem, the one fashioned of a certain disappearance—“I’m not here right now”—and her deep sweet oath to “get back real soon.” Like the solution to a riddle that will spring the maiden from the dragon’s lair, all you have to do is speak the digits, say your telephone number into the machine, but even that’s too much for me. I let the tape roll out. I am the insufficient son, the older, gruffer one that fails at the cave mouth, back broken on the stones, guts strung up in trees. My type has a seemly sibling who will prevail.
I hang up, draw another smoke from the foil.
All it takes is a morning with the spreadsheets to glimpse the four horsemen of fiscal apocalypse thundering toward our dream of an IPO. There’s Plummeting Ad Sales, in his scorched robes, on his maggot-shot horse, waving a scythe. I bolt from my desk, pass two design guys in the next room arguing about the new homepage art. Don’t bother, I want to tell them, but in this business you can trash a perfectly good career leaking catastrophe an hour before it’s official.
Martha is in the corner office, cooing smoke. It’s hard to tell Martha’s age, but the drop of her face, the veins in her hands, remind me of my mother right before she got sick. When your mother is dead, maybe every woman over a certain age reminds you of her. You’ll find it in an eyebrow, the varicose nova on a stubbly calf, beckoning you to bury your head on her breast and weep.
My advice: Don’t do it.
“How are you, Martha?”
“Fucking pricks don’t pay for their newspapers,” she says. “Grab one, say ‘Get you next time, honey!’ Get fucking this next time! I got rent, you know.”
“Tell me about it.”
“I am, you moron.”
“I know that, Martha,” I say.
“Fuck you, too,” she says, flips her More to the carpet, grinds it out with her espadrille. “You pricks are all the same.”
True, and probably I owe Martha a few bucks myself, but the way things are going I’ll need them. Now Rich walks in, a silver pin stuck in his lapel, his hair slicked back in the style of men who seem to be saying, Hey, go blow, my hair is slicked back, and on weekends I know joy.
“Big doings on your floor, buddy. I’m smelling napalm.”
“What?”
“My only advice for you is to remember to tape the bottom of the box. Got a light?”
It hits me in the stairwell, that pin. The Smoker’s Brigade. Comrade. We could start a cell here in the building, rig Martha with dynamite girdles, send Mikhail on recon jobs through ventilation ducts into the Lysol’d HQ’s of pinklungers. Rich and I would vie for the fealty of our troops until one of us, probably me, came up python eyes in his biopsy. Unwilling to wheeze my way to the Great Smoking Section Beyond, I’d pass my Desert Eagle over to Rich and shut my eyes.