Send electronic mailers, okay; schedule delivery, done; vet proposals and forward to legal, finito. Crushed it, but what a morning. Forty minutes just begging for the courier to come sometime more specific than between eleven and six. Been here just two hours and it’s felt like twenty.
I stretch, stand up, slide my cigs into my front pocket—
“Early start,” Colin calls from across the office.
Right on cue. Imagine looking Colin dead in the eyes and telling him to fuck off. No warning, just, Give me a fucking break, Colin, you’ve been drinking coffee at your desk all morning. Think about how many seconds each sip took, how much that added up to, how many minutes you’re costing the company. Yes?
Maybe I wouldn’t smoke so much if you weren’t such a prick, Colin. Deep breath. Imagine being alone, downstairs. Peace and quiet, pulling the tobacco deep into my lungs. Soon.
In the lift lobby, I put my lanyard into my other pocket, make sure it’s in there nice and snug so members of the public won’t see me smoking with my company lanyard on. At last month’s all-staff meeting, HR gave a half-hour talk about how we represent the company when we wear the logo, and I rolled my eyes so hard I went back about ten years to the weekly assemblies at my old school
In the lift, my reflection comes back to me in four vertical faces. I bought this shirt while at uni, and it’s gotten too big for me. The effect is of a child playing dress-up, but that feels pretty accurate anyway. Who let this kid be in charge of three interns? I try my best.
It’s still early, not quite lunchtime. We occupy one floor of a satellite campus downtown, and the lift usually takes forever to arrive with all the undergraduates going up and down the building all day. I report to work at the same time their first lectures begin, and every morning in the crowded lift with the undergraduates, I allow myself half a minute to wish I were their age again, for everything to be as it was at twenty. Half a minute as the lift rises to the ninth floor, where my office is, half a minute to let the heavy sense of displacement settle. Yeah, I know I’m not that much older than them, but twenty feels like a whole lifetime ago now. Insert joke here about how smoking ages you.
Level One. Doors open. Out the lift, out the lobby, into the morning. Deep breath. Down the half-flight of stairs, turn right, loop around to the carpark at the back—ta-da.
When I told Claire I smoked at the carpark downstairs, she said there was hardly a view. A view, ha. If I needed a view to smoke, I’d have just one hour a day, during sunset, and I’d have to run two blocks to that building with the garden—actually, I’m not even certain it’s legal to smoke there anymore. Anyway, throw in the rainfall typical of tropical climates, and the two monsoon seasons, and I might as well just give it up.
It’s the climate, this tropical heat—it bakes everything, hardens it. Everything is overcooked and shrunken. My office cubicle is tiny because land is scarce, this carpark is tiny because land is scarce, my flat is tiny because land is scarce. Not enough space, no leeway, too small to accommodate anything more than one way of living. Go to these schools, get these jobs, build a heteronormative family, happy ever after. The limitations of this world stretched taut over your chest, so tight there’s hardly space to breathe.
No space to breathe, bit rich coming from a smoker. Ah, you do what you need to survive. I just need to get this going—cup the flame and bring it closer—god that first drag always feels so good. Feels great, happy, creates some give at the edges, the world slackening its hold a little. I take a few breaths, recalibrate. In. Out. There’s nothing like this.
I blow a smoke ring for fun, watch it dissipate, grey wisps in the grey air. Everything is drab and grey and sun-worn. Some days, I hate this city so much. The heat shimmers through the concrete landscape; it spurs you to inaction. You know, the paint on those buildings was bright once.
It’s hard to fathom. The world I knew—my former everyday life of school and home and extracurriculars—seems small now, unsubstantial, limiting, yet somehow I wanted for nothing. I loved those afternoons. Then, somewhere in that drabness, I grew up, and on some tired afternoon, that dusty mid-afternoon light will be the last thing I see. The whole scene makes me panic. I can’t live here—and yet I do, I always have.
There is no evidence that indicates my life would be any different if I lived elsewhere. It’s just the romanticism of running away, the possibility of a whole new life. Every time I stand here and look across the road, I’m convinced that I’d be an entirely different person if only if I lived somewhere else. It’s completely irrational, I’m acting like not living in a converted warehouse flat is the only thing preventing me from buying a different sofa, but I’m telling you, it kind of is.
When I read The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse as a kid, I definitely thought the town mouse had more fun. My favorite author owned a stretch of cliff along the English coast, and fancy as it sounds, I can’t say I wouldn’t walk off it if I had to live there. When I think of escaping, I want a big, anonymous city, to get lost in the rhythm of Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie, free to dance and love and live my life. I’m pretty sure the town mouse was fearmongering because he didn’t want rental prices in the city to skyrocket.
Claire thought it was silly. Buy a new sofa if you want, she said, cities are all the same. The food is different, yeah, and the people, culture, heritage, all of that—but the cities are just places, the most important thing is community. Claire knows things like that. I suppose you can feel displaced anywhere or at home anywhere. It shouldn’t make sense, but it kind of does, I think.
She also said that escapism was a symptom, and when I asked if she was talking about me or her, I saw her shoulders kind of tense up. She was smiling, but her eyes were somewhere else. We were in her apartment, just us, and I knew it was a moment for one of those frank, pour-your-heart-out conversations—so I showed her that video of a rat hauling pizza down the steps of a Manhattan train station. She laughed, which was kind of the same thing.
She said I had the most romanticized view of the world, but let’s be real. Most rats don’t travel far from their homes in their lifetimes. I’m smoking in a carpark that looks onto an expanse of wasteland. I smoke in this carpark every day. If I only had the real world, and I couldn’t escape into my imagination, I’d go fucking insane from the sheer desolation of it. Honestly, just look at it. It’s not a wasteland, it’s undergoing renovation works, but it’s steel beams laid across barren earth, faded blue tarp gusting in the wind. It’s a pretty picture for a post-apocalyptic postcard. Lucky me, working in the one desolate part of beautiful downtown.
Once Claire said, if you hate it just leave. There are always other options.
I’m not particularly marketable, I said.
You could go back and finish school, she said, We’ve got all the time in the world.
It was the closest she’d ever come to “I love you,” and my heart felt fit to burst—but I rolled out of bed. She was like everyone else. She’d bought into the paper chase. I’d heard enough of it at work—paper qualifications or experience in lieu, yadda yadda—I didn’t need Claire being exactly like them. I accused her of being ashamed of me. I needed a smoke, I said. I’m going downstairs.
I never smoked in Claire’s. Usually this meant I wouldn’t smoke the whole night, but after that argument I left the building, left her condominium, stood by the kerb, lit up. I smoked the first cigarette damn down to the filter—the calm didn’t come. I lit another. The elderly guard at the security post glanced at me. He had a memory for tenants’ guests, and I felt like he had seen something in me, a weakness or failing of character.
Tobacco smoke is a trigger for Claire’s migraines. In the throes of a migraine, she often experienced temporary blindness accompanied by nausea; more than once, she joked about an illicit stash of horse painkillers. I would scrub my hands and tongue and teeth in her bathroom, fearful of seeping into her life and making her sick. Claire said she didn’t mind, I could smoke out on the balcony if I wanted, but the furthest I let myself go was sliding open the door and standing out there empty-handed. To me, it was a kind of test: if this was love, then I could stand out there and look at my things marooned in a heap in the center of her room, my smokes in a purse or pocket somewhere, and not do it. Five steps away, six tops, fish them out, easy—but I wouldn’t do it. Knowing it would hurt her stopped me, but that is not to say I never had to fight off my own selfishness—after all, the natural activity of a balcony is smoking. I won’t believe anyone who says otherwise. Yeah, they enlarge the living space or whatever, but a balcony’s not a yard, is it? No one sunbathes or barbeques or stargazes out on one. Houseplants, maybe, but they belong indoors anyway. I never appreciated balconies until I became a smoker, then bam—perfect function.
No, I’m not listening to any lies about balcony views. I don’t have a balcony, but Claire’s balcony—or Claire’s landlord’s balcony, Claire’s at the rate of four thousand five a month—had a great view of a neighbor’s living room, and that was it. Granted, the neighbor had very good Christmas lights. They were tricolored and programmed to flash in a sequence: a quick shimmer of lights, a slow blink, then each colour flashing in turn. Once the neighbor appeared too, his back to the balcony doors, a mobile phone to his ear. Good news? Bad news? The colored lights shone merrily behind him, and I saw him run a hand through his hair. On his balcony were two adult bicycles and one children’s tricycle, colored streamers dangling from the handlebars.
It couldn’t be bad news, he’d been on the line too long. Bad news come brief and businesslike, terribly sorry, take care now. I gave him a phone call from an old friend, a family member based abroad: good news about a proposal, a promotion, the birth of a child. I liked the thought of that. I supposed it was what Claire called community, having people you could call to share the small joys that bechance an ordinary life. People you called just because you genuinely wanted to ask about their weekend. Hear them tell you what they had for lunch. People you just wanted to hear the voices of because you cared about them and they cared about you too. A family of choice. Was that possible for me? I tried to imagine birthday celebrations again, guests and small parties, and it led me to fairy lights, home-baked goodies, Claire at Christmas with a can of snow spray. It didn’t seem so bad at all, a life like that. It wasn’t bad at all.
I turned back to Claire, who was sat up in bed reading.
I’m going to quit, I said. For you. I’ll quit.
In the darkness of night, there was only the dim orange glow of her bedside lamp, lighting up the side of her face, falling upon the sheets she had draped over her. She was beautiful. A Renaissance painting, light and dark in brilliant contrast, her at the center of it all.
She turned to me. In my memory, depending on my mood at the given moment, she looked at me with either amusement or sadness.
She was smiling but shook her head slowly. If you’re not doing it for yourself, she said, you’ll never stick to it.
I wanted to argue, to swear on my life I could give it up. If this was love—and I am certain it was—why couldn’t I promise her I’d move heaven and earth, lasso the moon, just for her? I looked at her through the half-opened balcony doors, Venus overlaid with the reflection of fairy lights, a painting behind polished glass.
I take one last drag and drop the cigarette butt in the ashtray. The ember glows briefly, warm and bright still, and then it goes out. Smouldering, the immutable reality of it, the light that must always go out—and often sooner, rather than later. I don’t know, they just don’t taste as good these days, get a little sour earlier than I remembered.
My parents found out during the week, while I was away at university. It was my one . . . indulgence, almost?—three polaroids and a letter from the first girl I dated, tucked surreptitiously between the pages of a novel on a bookshelf full of novels. When I received the texts informing me that I was no longer welcome home, I was in an economics lecture. Tuesday mornings, nine-thirty to eleven-thirty, with tutorials right after. I had registered for the module because it had vacancies and fitted my schedule; I didn’t care for it otherwise. I just needed the credits. Classes were boring, forgettable, completely unmemorable. I thought I would take the finals, finish the semester, and never think about it again.
I remember my phone buzzing viciously. I saw the missives and missed calls. Hey—if you can’t dump someone over text, you shouldn’t be able to disown a child over text, either. At the break, I slipped out the lecture theater from a side door. I was shaking. I counted each step of the exterior stairs as I went down the side of the building. What was I going to do about school, where would I live? The only path home, to repent, recant, renounce—it was no path at all. I was completely on my own now. I remembered the childish, unadorned joy of walking home, uniform and giant backpack, apartment blocks faded in the sun, the honey-brown gate of the flat, the warmth of the dreary, dusty midafternoon light. I was still the same person as I was then; I have always been.
Did I cry then? Maybe. Another student who had been smoking behind the lecture theater came over and spotted me a smoke. I’d smoked, of course, couple of times, but only socially. I wasn’t actually a smoker. It just didn’t taste special to me.
Still I took his cigarette, more to feel the kindness of a stranger than out of any real desire to smoke. I wasn’t expecting anything, but with the first drag, I felt myself relax. I felt happy, even. We smoked together in silence for a while, me and that gentle stranger. I knew it wouldn’t solve any of my problems, but with everything that was happening in my life at that time, it was the best I had felt in a while.
That last night at Claire’s, as I stood smoking by the curb, I saw the distant figure of a woman walking through the condominium. She was too far away to see clearly, but I knew her languid gait, the slight way her hips swayed. She moved slowly, searching.
She liked the color navy; she did not eat mushrooms and peanuts. She never spoke about her family, I never asked, and she returned the courtesy. We were just a temporary thing, a throwaway thought that had been looping longer than expected. I liked who I was when I was with her, even if whatever I felt sometimes made me feel shitty. Anxious. Afraid. Someone loved her once, met her and got to know her and fell asleep dreaming of her, loved her so much it ached. All this love, and still this someone left her, or lost her, and their loss was what they had for the rest of their lives. Who was I to think I could do any better? We had taken no promises from each other.
Through the half-opened window of the security post, I could hear an old Mandarin song playing on a radio. It was Teresa Teng singing softly, sweetly: I Only Care About You. I watched as Claire passed directly under a streetlight. She was wearing the clothes she had been wearing earlier, and I could see that she’d even put her earrings back in. All my life, I had fantasized about escape, dreamed of love, and now that she was here, I was brave enough to do neither. I realized then—certainly, unquestionably, undoubtedly—we would never have the kind of relationship where we woke up side by side at daybreak.
It doesn’t sound believable, but through no real effort on my part, I’m still on the pack that I’ve had since before Claire left. Do you think I can claim smoke breaks when I’ve stopped smoking? Pop downstairs, no one the wiser? It’s nice to have this time out from the mess upstairs. Yesterday she sent me two photographs, no captions, no accompanying message: a photograph of a street rat, and another of the interior of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. On the periphery of the theater photo, a man’s hand and the cuff of his dress shirt rested on the armrest of her seat. It was of no consequence to me, but I spent all night zooming in and out on my mobile screen, trying to decide if he was a rando with no sense of personal space or someone she’d gone to the theater with. I composed replies I knew I would not send, watched my inarticulate thoughts appear and disappear across the screen: looks fun/how are you?/when will you be coming home?/i miss you.
I look at the photo again. In the daylight, I’m leaning toward it being just a rando. In the daylight, the words emerge from their hiding places, reach toward the sun. I hit send before I can think twice.
I walk back toward my office building, feeling the hard cardboard of the pack yielding in my front pocket, hearing with each step the soft rolling rattle of the remaining cigarettes loose in the opened pack. I push through the swing door into the lift lobby. Imagine this opens onto a different life. Maybe it’s a converted warehouse flat after all, or maybe it’s just an ordinary flat, a plain, nondescript flat, front door still snow-sprayed even in July. Imagine I’m stepping on a welcome mat—my welcome mat, crazy to think. But anyway, I push open the door. In the living room is the aspirational sofa I bought when I was feeling like changing my life. Curled up on it is the person I love the most in the whole world.
“I’m home,” I call, and she looks up, and she’s smiling.
***
Graphics courtesy of Public Works by Cosmos
