Smoke-Break

Word count: Approx. 4,000
Notes/Warnings: None.
Summary: Written for the prompt(s): You go outside to smoke a cigarette only you realize you’ve forgotten your lighter.

“Need a light?”

Startled, I looked up from patting myself down for my Zippo—which I’d apparently either forgotten back in my cubicle or lost somewhere—and grimaced around my unlit cancer-stick. I’d thought I was the only one up on Initrode’s roof. “Yeah, if you don’t mind,” I muttered around the now soggy filter.

The tall drink of water who’d offered to light me up produced a lighter like a magic trick. Odder than that, was that the lighter was a Zippo identical to my own. It even had the same ace of spades design on the front and back.

Goggling, but managing not to gape for the sake of my cigarette, I watched him flick it open and on singlehandedly. Then I was belatedly half-bending, needlessly cupping my hands around the strong, unwavering flame.

“Thanks,” I exhaled upon taking the first drag of my midmorning relief. The guy nodded, gracefully disappearing the lighter into the left breast pocket of a grey suit that must’ve cost what I made in six months. The watch I’d caught a glimpse of when he flicked the Zippo open had looked prohibitively expensive. Like a Bulova, or something. Toni-er than a Rolex, but less showy. A glance down showed that his shoes were every bit as impressive as the rest of the outfit, speaking of more than just money, but good taste, as well.

I finished cataloguing the guy’s net worth and looked into his dark eyes. He was smiling rather bemusedly, bordering on amusedly, and I knew I’d been caught sizing him up. So I cleared my throat and glanced away, falling back on an old stand-by of mine when I was flustered. “Coffin-nail?” I offered, holding out the slightly battered pack of light menthol American Spirits. But the guy apologetically flashed impressive dental work that’d probably put some dentist’s spawn through all four years of undergrad.

Thinking of my three years of majoring in Undecided in community college, I absently wished one of my parents had been a dentist. . . .

“Thanks, but I don’t smoke,” the Samaritan said in a smooth, confident baritone as I waved the pack enticingly at him. My eyebrows quirked up of their own accord then furrowed.

“Then why do you have a lighter?” I asked, and the guy blinked.

“Because you needed one,” he replied simply and my eyebrows shot up again.

“Oh-kay.” I distanced myself slightly, but decidedly, by a few steps toward the distant ledge. I had neither the time nor the inclination to start a conversation with this guy just because he’d provided me with fire. I had an appointment that I intended to keep.

The guy merely continued to smile at me like a movie star, all perfect teeth and perfectly symmetrical face. So symmetrical, in fact, that it barely seemed like a real face, but like CGI or something. I rolled my eyes, muttering under my breath about people who can’t take hints. “Anyways, thanks for the light, buddy. Catch ya later.”

Which was his cue to then move away from where I was standing and go be weird somewhere I wasn’t. But he still just stood there, watching me, smiling that pleased smile.

Finally, after a few puffs on my cigarette and more than a minute of pointedly ignoring the guy, I realized that it’d be up me to do the moving. So, sighing, I turned, meaning to walk away, toward the side of the roof that had the small building that housed Initrode’s central air-conditioning system. I’d go around the far side of it and have the privacy I needed to do what I’d come up here to do.

It was a plan. And I schlepped toward the shed, already having dismissed the guy. It wasn’t until I reached the central air shed and stepped around the far side and saw him again—standing near the ledge and looking out into the overcast sky, then down—that I began to think something was up.

“Holy fuck! How’d you g-get here?” I gasped, one hand going up to cover my suddenly rabbiting heart. The guy took his time looking up at me, and meanwhile I stepped back till I could glance over at the place I’d last seen him.

No one there, of course.

Shaken, I looked at the guy, who was watching me again with those amused dark eyes. “H-how’d you do that?” I stammered again. It should’ve been impossible for him to get from there to here without me seeing him. And I would have seen him if he’d sprinted all the way across the roof, big as he was. Six-foot-five at least and built like a wall of muscle—he had a physique that couldn’t be hidden even by his yuppie suit—that much meat moving that fast would’ve caught my eye as it went by.

The guy’s smile widened and he nodded at the empty air to his left.

“That’s a pretty final step,” he noted calmly, and I froze, goggling at him once again . . . there was no way in hell he could possibly know—no way. People snuck up to Initrode’s roof to smoke all the time, as evidenced by the butts littering the rooftop, which only got swept up periodically. Even the brass knew about it. Hell, some of them even came up here to smoke, and worse. I was just another schmoe, killing his lungs on a smoke-break.

At least as far as he knew. And despite what he’d just said—surely a coincidence: a casual noting of the ten-story drop to the green lawn below—that was as far as he knew. I was just being jumpy and paranoid; my default setting of late . . . especially since making up my mind to do what would’ve once been unthinkable.

As I watched, the guy turned and put his foot up on the low ledge, leaning over and looking down. He whistled and I shuddered.

“A very final step,” he repeated, glancing at me for a hot second before looking down again. I drew myself up and crossed my arms over my narrow chest, taking a drag off my cigarette.

“I wouldn’t know,” I told him stiffly, as if I hadn’t been doing exactly what he was doing with my smoke and lunch breaks for the past seven or eight weeks, trying to work up the nerve to— “I don’t like heights.”

“Then what’re you doing on a roof?” The guy blinked over at me, still smiling that damned smile, like an ad for toothpaste and happiness.

“Not that it’s any of your business, but I come up here to smoke.” I waved the cigarette before taking a deep drag. My hand was shaking, I noticed. All of me was, in fact. “What’re you doing up here if you don’t smoke?”

The guy finally stopped admiring the view and looked at me again, his smile fading to a markedly more solemn expression. “I’m here to win friends and influence people,” he said cryptically, but earnestly. I snorted.

“Yeah? Well, you’re doing a real bang-up job, there, pal.” I flicked my mostly done cigarette off the roof and turned away from the ledge and the guy. There was no way I was doing this with an audience. It could wait till later today. Or tomorrow. It’d already waited for nearly two months. What was another day? “See ya around.”

“Yes, you will,” the guy called after me as I walked away, and I paused for a moment, then hunched my shoulders against the sudden wind, and walked on toward the stairwell.

When I got there, I almost looked back . . . but in the end, I let myself inside and leaned against the door, panting for breath, equal parts relieved and dismayed. I didn’t realize there were tears on my face till I got back to my cubicle and sat.

*

They next day was a Wednesday—usually a busy day for us Initrode-drones. I only got to take one smoke-break, and when I did, it was with Ali MacPherson, and he never smoked on the roof.

As we stood in front of the building, the requisite fifty feet from the entrance and in the smoking shelter, I found myself glancing up at the roof of the building while Ali went on about fantasy football and which teams he favored.

I could see a face looming over the edge, watching the shelter, and even from a distance of ten stories I thought I recognized the guy from the day before.

Shuddering, I looked away and drew hard on my coffin-nail.

*

I didn’t make it up to the roof again till the end of the day on Friday.

It was just as well. I’d gotten a lot of work done—work that would’ve been passed on to Ali, and Danny Fleischler in the event of my absence. And their workloads were already heavy enough without having mine tossed on top of it till Initrode could hire a suitable replacement—and had enough time to recover the zen that the guy on the roof had disturbed with his chipper presence.

Today was definitely the day. There was nothing stopping me. Hell, I was even down to my last cigarette, which would make the whole thing so much more poetic.

Not that I cared. A swan-dive was a swan-dive. It was all the same to me, I supposed. But it was satisfying to know I wouldn’t be leaving loose-ends like unfinished projects and unfinished packs of smokes.

After shutting down my computer for the day, I grabbed my briefcase and jacket and made my way to the roof. I took the stairs, slowly, my mind humming, but blank for some reason. I felt no fear, no regrets. I just really wanted a cigarette, and after that . . . well, there was nothing after that. I couldn’t imagine life after that final cigarette, and didn’t want to.

I just wanted the kind of peace that only oblivion could bring: a cessation of everything.

When I got to the roof it was unpopulated by anyone, save myself. I even checked around the back of the stairwell and all around the central air shed. I scared the hell out of some pigeons, but otherwise found no signs of life.

Smiling a little at my own inability to turn that last thought into some sort of gallows humor at my own expense—or even a pun—I trudged slowly to the edge of the roof nearest the shed, dropped my briefcase and lit my cigarette. Then I leaned over the edge and looked at the yards of empty air between myself and the ground. The grass below was so green and full of life, it hurt my eyes to look at it, and they started watering. I wiped at them and blinked a lot, and more tears fell from my face and were lost to the ground below.

“Fuck,” I breathed, putting one foot on the ledge. The other soon joined it, and I was balanced on the ledge, smoking my cigarette and teetering back and forth on heel and toe. “That is one final step,” I muttered, imagining the spray of red on the green below. I wondered briefly if blood was nourishing or destructive to grass, and was jolted from my thoughts by a voice from behind me:

“Yep, there’s no coming back from a drop and a stop like that one.”

I was so startled, I lost my balance, pin-wheeling my arms as I began to topple forward . . . but then, mid-topple, my body froze from the neck, down. Literally. I couldn’t move it to—again, literally—save my life. But I didn’t need to, for the toes of my shoes also seemed to be arc-welded to the ledge.

I didn’t realize I had been screaming until, once more startled, I stopped to gasp in a breath and look down—I nearly threw up—then dead ahead, no pun intended. Not twenty feet away, a lone pigeon was suspended in mid-air, as if it, too, had been frozen. And it was only then that I noticed the world beyond it seemed to have been frozen as well: traffic on the distant highway; the few people walking across Initrode’s back parking lot to their cars; the trees, which had been caught in the middle of waving in a stiff breeze; even the clouds in the overcast sky seemed to have stopped moving.

All of which was impossible.

“Yes, it is. At least if one subscribes to Newtonian Physics for an explanation of the universe,” the same voice that’d startled me into committing a suicide I was no longer so sure about said in the most chipper tones. I felt a presence beside me and rolled my eyes to my left. There, standing on the ledge—no, not on the ledge, but on the thin air about two inches beyond it—was the guy from Tuesday. Smiling. “Which, I must say, I don’t.”

“What the fuck?!” I screeched at the guy, who was dressed in a different suit—blue instead of grey—but equally expensive. His eerily symmetrical face was far too sanguine for my liking. For the fact that he was standing on nothing but air and I was frozen in the midst of plunging to my death. “What’s going on?”

“An intervention, of sorts,” the guy said in that same calm, amused baritone. “Divine intervention.”

“Who are you? What are you? Are you doing this?” I demanded, looking away from his serene face and toward the ground once more. It wasn’t getting any closer, but I still wasn’t comforted. I was suddenly sweating bullets. “Jesus!”

“Not quite,” the guy said with a chuckle. “But, yes, I am the one who slowed down space-time so we could have our little chat.”

I blinked and nearly threw up again. “’Slowed down’? Fuck, you mean I’m still falling?!”

“Yes, only very, very slowly.”

Looking at the guy—who for once wasn’t looking at me, but frowning down at the ground—I took a deep breath and forced away my nausea. “What are you? Why’re you doing this—saving my life?”

“I’m not saving your life,” the guy informed me, his dark eyes meeting mine rather solemnly. All traces of amusement were gone, now, and I felt a sudden rush of panic. “I’m not here to save your life, but to offer you a choice.”

I laughed raggedly, wondering if that lower intestinal gurgle meant I was about to shit my britches. “And what choice would that be, as I plummet very, very slowly to my certain death?”

“That’s just it: I’m here to offer you the choice of life or death.” The guy tilted his head consideringly. “If you choose the former, I can simply reach out and pluck you back from the ledge. If you choose the latter, I can simply cease the throttling of space-time and let you plummet. It’s that simple.”

“Oh, yeah?” I demanded almost angrily, thinking, for some reason, not of myself and the bottom line, but of all the starving children in the world, all the people with terminal diseases, all the people in car crashes—thinking about them and wondering what in fuck made me so damn special. “Well, who am I that I get a choice about living or dying while in the midst of the dying?”

“That’s for you to decide, isn’t it?”

“What the fuck do you mean by that?”

The guy’s eyebrows shot up and he smiled again—just as cryptic as his answers—almost slyly. “If you wish to find out,” he said, turning back toward the ledge and stepping onto it. He hopped down onto the gravelly, cigarette butt-littered roof. “I suggest you make the appropriate choice. Shall I snatch you back from the jaws of death? Or let you fall into them?”

I couldn’t see the guy anymore, but I could hear his footsteps getting further and further away. By now, I was sodden with sweat to the point of it actually dripping from my face to make the long journey to the ground. Between the first and second fingers of my left hand, my cigarette was still burning, wafting smoke past my face.

Below and away from me, life crawled on at an infinitesimally slow rate.

I thought once more of all the people who would kill, maybe literally, to be in my position. The starving, the terminally ill, the fatally injured . . . I thought of them, and I thought of myself: a useless, hopeless, hapless, waste of skin, taking up precious oxygen in a world with too many people and not enough resources. I thought of my days at Initrode—all the same, all deadly-dull and soul-destroying. I thought of the college degree I’d never gotten in the major I’d never settled on, and all the wasted money and years before I’d finally lost all hope and settled for the first decently paying cubicle-jockey job that came my way.

I’d sold my soul for a 401K and dental, and had never had any illusions about it.

I thought of all that, and swallowed my gorge, opening my mouth to tell the guy—whoever he was—to just let me fall. That anything would be better than the rest of a life that’d gone so horribly awry, and become as hopeless as it was pointless.

Let me fall, I opened my mouth to say, and all of a sudden, I was thinking about Ali MacPherson’s last big barbecue. I hadn’t gone to it, of course. But he’d made sure to invite me, as he had been every spring and summer for the past three years I’d been at Initrode. I’d never said yes to any of the invites, but I’d always been somewhat surprised when I kept getting them. Surprised not only that someone liked me, but liked me well enough to invite me to a social gathering.

That led to me thinking similar thoughts about Danny Fleischer, who’d recently taken to inviting me to join his bowling league, the Lightning Strikes.

(“I can’t bowl. Never done before it in my life,” I’d always said, and Danny always laughed, his bright blue eyes twinkling.

“Isn’t it about time you learn, then?” he’d retort, with easy good humor and something else that I couldn’t be a hundred percent was flirting, but I had my suspicions.)

I thought of my neighbor, Mrs. Mizlaburski, bringing me soup when I got the flu in February. She’d risked catching a dose of the same just to make sure I was eating and not drowning in my own phlegm—her words.

I thought of the hopes my parents must have had for me, once upon a time, before my mother died and my father became little more than a shell that’d followed soon after. . . .

I thought of all this and closed my eyes. The wetness dripping from my face this time wasn’t sweat, but tears. I’d made my decision.

Slowly, the world around me began to move again. The wings of the pigeon near my frozen body began to flap faster; cars on the distant highway began to creep along more quickly. The people crossing the parking lot began to walk at a speed my eyes could detect. The trees were suddenly a-flap and a-wave in the renewed breeze. The clouds began to scuttle along in their courses once more.

And I began to topple forward. . . .

*

Numb, my mind buzzing, I stumbled as I stepped out of the front doors of Initrode. As I passed a sleek, silver garbage receptacle, I absently dug in my jacket pocket for my smokes.

They went into the garbage without a second—or even a first—thought.

I couldn’t seem to think or hold onto a thought after what had happened—and what had happened?—on that roof. My memory of it was already starting to fuzz over, like it was something that’d happened years and years ago, to another person, even.

I remembered . . . I’d gone up there to smoke and . . . something else. And I’d nearly fallen off the ledge, though what-all I’d been doing on the ledge was a mystery that became even more of an enigma when I tried to access it. The same with the day prior and, alarmingly, the days and even weeks before them. I felt as if I’d forgotten something momentous, and yet, how could I have, unless I’d sustained a head injury?

I didn’t think I had, anyway.

These thoughts and others troubled me as I made my way to my POS car. And so I didn’t hear the voice calling my name until someone caught my arm. I jumped and let out a little scream.

“I made my choice, now leave me alone, for God’s sake!” I almost sobbed, out of nowhere, as I turned to face my accoster, hands up to defend myself. For nothing, it turns out. I found myself cowering from, of all people, Danny Fleischler.

He looked just as surprised as I was, to say the least.

“Whoa,” he said, holding up his own hands in placation. “Calm down, it’s just me—are you . . . alright?”

I shuddered, trying to think up a plausible answer for that question. Finally, a tiny, confused: “No, I don’t think I am, Danny,” slipped out of me, confused and ashamed.

Looking concerned, Danny’s hand slid up from my arm, to my shoulder and he squeezed comfortingly. Bright blue eyes searched my own and I looked away.

“Jesus, you’re shaking, Taylor, and white as a sheet!” he said, giving me a once-over quite unlike his usual ones. His hand on my shoulder was warm and strong, and I did draw some measure of comfort from it. “Listen, I had a league practice tonight at Mid-City Lanes, but . . . jeez, you look like you could use a stiff drink and an open ear.”

I shook my head. Then nodded. Then shook my head again. Danny’s eyebrows went up halfway to his hairline.

“Okay,” he said gently. “I’ll take that as a: yes, Daniel, I could use an ear and a drink. Especially if you’re buying. How aboutO’Flaherty’s?” he asked, and I nodded once, warily, still half-numb and half-terrified of what, I didn’t know.

Danny slipped an arm around my shoulders and guided me off toward his Audi, which wasn’t parked far from my car, thankfully. I think my legs were about thirty seconds away from giving out.

Unlocking the car with his key-fob, Danny then opened the passenger door for me.

“Are you gonna be okay?” he asked again, solicitously, leaning on the door and waiting for me to answer. I slid into the seat, my bony ass hitting leather with a muffled thump as the last of my energy and strength went right out of me.

“I really don’t know,” I replied, looking up at him. The worry in his eyes grew more pronounced, and he closed the door without another word. He jogged around the front of the car, a tall, burly guy with broad shoulders and a kind, boyish face behind his neatly trimmed face-fur, and opened the driver’s side door.

“You can smoke in my car, if you like,” he informed me as he got in, trying on a smile, but it only made the worry in his eyes stand out all the more. And for some reason that warmed me. Made me feel as if maybe—just maybe—I would be okay after all. “I don’t mind.”

“Actually,” I said softly, shuddering as a feeling of nausea and vertigo—of falling—came over me and went in the blink of an eye. I glanced away from the rearview mirror and his concerned eyes. “I just quit.”

END