“Savor the fine tobacco flavor for me, Sport,” he’d say, thumb the hammer back.
“Fuck toil, bro!” Mikhail would shout.
“Do the prick,” Martha would hiss.
Downstairs, everyone is weeping and hugging, or readying a lawsuit. There’s a rented cop in my cube.
“Personal files only,” he says.
The boss sticks his head in, his face flushed, teary, trauma-elated.
“You were great,” he says. “You did great work. We all did. They didn’t give me a chance. I could have turned this thing around.”
“I missed your speech,” I say.
“Anything I can do for you, let me know,” he says. I almost ask him to hold down the tape at the bottom of the box.
When my mother was dying I kept going down to the street to smoke. You would think I would be some kind of pariah lighting up outside a cancer ward, but no one paid any mind. Bald men, bald women, bald teens sat out in the summer twilight in their gowns. Cut open, sewn shut, garlanded with IV lines, poisoned with their futile glowing cures, they puffed away like wild heroes.
I would stand nearby and remember a day when I was not much more than six, seven, see myself sitting on a beach with my mother and father, the two of them slung low in canvas chairs beneath a striped umbrella, smoking, drinking sodas, laughing over secret words, sticking their filter-tips into the sand.
That day I stood up before them with all the theater of the firstborn child, my feet clamped to the cement lip of the artificial lake our town had built for us, our neighbors, whomever else was good and kind and willing to pay. It was early summer and my birthday was, as my mother had noted, on the horizon. I pictured it a pack mule in the distance, heaped with trinkets, absolution, cheer.
“What do you want for your big day?” my father asked.
He wore the sideburns of his time, the kind no retro-styling can ever seem to honor. We are Saigon, those sideburns said, Altamont, Nixon under the rotary gust. We are heart-smashed and uncertain and looking to score. My father, with those whiskers, was one of reason’s priests, on the lam from chaos, cabal, a lit stick of disaffection in his lips.
My mother, she was spilling out of her swimming suit cups in all her freckled wonder, moving maybe past voluptuous motherhood into some other great, rippling power. The coils of her hair were lit up with warning flares of white. She visored her eyes with her hand, regarded me as she often did, as though secretly awaiting the moment I would cease to astonish her with my devotion.
“Yes, honey, what do you want? Another Tonka toy?”
That birthday animal lumbered up, buckled under lashed-down treasures — injection-molded soldiers, many-speeded bikes. Beyond the beast stood me, a vision of me, the most perfect boy the world has ever known.
“What I want for my birthday,” I said, “all I want, is for both of you to stop smoking.”
It was my moment of genius, if it is true we are each of us blessed with one. They quit, of course, for a while, at least. Wouldn’t you, if you were as strong and beautiful as my mother and my father were one summer when our town built a beach?
I stop off at Gupta’s. He’s flipping through a skin mag, all those smears of color, angles of receipt.
“That’s what my ex-girlfriend looks like,” I say.
“Is this what you did to her,” says Gupta, “or what you saved her from?”
“I said looked like her. How’s it going?”
“Very well,” he says. “I’ve got an assignment. A magazine overseas. Real money.”
“What about this one here?” I say.
“I’m not talented enough to write for this one. I don’t know all the ways to describe the big tit.”
“You can learn that,” I say. “You just have to care.”
Gupta laughs, reaches back to my carton, the soft-packs.
“No,” I say.
“Box?” There’s a shade of panic in his voice, the order of things thrown.
“No,” I say.
“What do you want?”
“I forgot,” I say.
“No one forgets,” says Gupta. “You didn’t forget. Our brains carry blueprints for a thousand years. There is no such thing as forgetting. You just can’t find it right now.”
“So, in a thousand years someone will remember what I wanted just now?” I picture a man like me, a man of my build, my coloring, my gait, stitched, gathered, helix’d with my codes. He sits in his commuter pod and whistles through space, maybe en route to Jupiter to sell some ads. A vision of Katrine, stepping out of the bath tub, explodes with the terror of endless sameness in his mind.
“Exactly,” says Gupta, pounds his fist on a great glossy ass.
I’m almost out the door when I remember.
“I know what I want,” I say. “I want something new. Something light. Less tar.”
Gupta slides the gleaming thing across the counter. There’s a new world there inside the package, new words ringed around the paper, new speckles on the tip. Life, people, happiness, a jaunty, easeful kind of breathing. I’ve seen print ads for this brand, admired them, or more than admired them. I have communed with them. They have spoken to me from billboards, from the backs of scented magazines — no cowboys, no mountaineers, just a handsome couple poised at the end of a plush settee. Maybe they’re Katrine and me, hosting a party, the heave of voices, the crush and chatter, friends in the living room, on the threshold, in the vestibule, the two of us puffing there so elegant, our free hands laced together on the cushions, our free hands squeezing, pulsing words of oath: I Love You, I Love You, Let’s Make it Work, I Love You So Much, Let’s Not Ever Ever Quit.