massaged his cropped hair as he gazed out the window, cut off in his own quiet like he was the only person in the car. I could tell that he rarely concerned himself with any of his brother’s white noise. He rolled down his window halfway and ushered in the buzz of traffic and a frigid morning breeze. It had slipped my mind that winter comes to the desert. I put on the rumpled jacket I had used as a pillow. The car was so darkly tinted that the white light from his open window looked alien to my bleary eyes, the color of emptiness.
I asked him for a cigarette and he obliged, lighting it for me without a word, without meeting my eye. The quiet ones do this. They exert control by giving nothing out, and it’s this blankness that makes them unpredictable, as dangerous as the loud ones are obvious. But this kid’s silence also made him somehow genuine. The one person so far who wasn’t trying .
I opened my window and zipped up my jacket, blew smoke into the harsh light. The one time I’d smoked since Suzy left was that last time here with Sonny Jr. But it soothed me now, as it used to in the morning, back when I’d smoke a pack and a halfa day, starting with the one I’d put to my lips the moment I got out of bed: before I brushed my teeth or even looked at myself in the mirror, standing by the bedroom window and slowly waking myself in the sunlight, amid the drifting curling smoke, those five minutes like a silent prayer to prepare myself for whatever the day might bring. Suzy sometimes joined me by the window. We’d share the cigarette.
I realized now why I had quit. It wasn’t to get healthy. And it was only partially to rid myself of the nostalgia for my old habits with her. I was at work the day she left the house; she took all her clothes and only the possessions she had acquired before we met, which amounted to some Vietnamese music cassettes, a few books, and a collection of small framed watercolor paintings of Vietnam landscapes. And of course the red journal. Everything else remained: our furniture, the jewelry I’d bought her, all our photographs together, framed and unframed. I came home that evening to a fully furnished house that felt as empty as her half of the bedroom closet. To my surprise, her crucifixes still hung on the walls and her porcelain figurines—the various Jesuses and Virgin Marys and Saints this and that—still peopled the shelves, as if in knowing my resistance to religion she had purposefully left God’s presence to save me. Or mock me. I found myself sinking into the sofa and not quite believing that she’d actually gone through with it, abandoned me. I remember smoking a cigarette on the front porch that night, watching the fog amble in from the bay, and deciding that after a carton a week for three decades—since I was fourteen, for God’s sake— that cigarette would be my last one. I was quitting not because I wanted or needed to, and definitely not because I thought it would be easy. I was quitting to punish myself.
We were approaching the southern end of the Strip. As thebrother lit up another cigarette, I flicked mine out the window and gazed at the mountain range of hotels that bordered the highway. At night, I remembered, amid giant digital screens flashing promises and exaltations, these same hotels towered over the city like monuments, some with mirrored walls that—as you traveled past them—trembled in the wash of glitter and dancing light, as though the city were too alive, too troubled with hope, ever to fall asleep.
But now, in the desert dawn, there was a lifelessness to the way the valley’s light fell across the Strip and to how the shadows pooled beneath the hotels like melted paint. Framed by the Martian mountains in the distance, the Strip looked like an artist’s rendering of some alien civilization, with buildings erected from every culture and time in history, every possible mood, and with no consistency save their garishness and size. In the
I asked him for a cigarette and he obliged, lighting it for me without a word, without meeting my eye. The quiet ones do this. They exert control by giving nothing out, and it’s this blankness that makes them unpredictable, as dangerous as the loud ones are obvious. But this kid’s silence also made him somehow genuine. The one person so far who wasn’t trying .
I opened my window and zipped up my jacket, blew smoke into the harsh light. The one time I’d smoked since Suzy left was that last time here with Sonny Jr. But it soothed me now, as it used to in the morning, back when I’d smoke a pack and a halfa day, starting with the one I’d put to my lips the moment I got out of bed: before I brushed my teeth or even looked at myself in the mirror, standing by the bedroom window and slowly waking myself in the sunlight, amid the drifting curling smoke, those five minutes like a silent prayer to prepare myself for whatever the day might bring. Suzy sometimes joined me by the window. We’d share the cigarette.
I realized now why I had quit. It wasn’t to get healthy. And it was only partially to rid myself of the nostalgia for my old habits with her. I was at work the day she left the house; she took all her clothes and only the possessions she had acquired before we met, which amounted to some Vietnamese music cassettes, a few books, and a collection of small framed watercolor paintings of Vietnam landscapes. And of course the red journal. Everything else remained: our furniture, the jewelry I’d bought her, all our photographs together, framed and unframed. I came home that evening to a fully furnished house that felt as empty as her half of the bedroom closet. To my surprise, her crucifixes still hung on the walls and her porcelain figurines—the various Jesuses and Virgin Marys and Saints this and that—still peopled the shelves, as if in knowing my resistance to religion she had purposefully left God’s presence to save me. Or mock me. I found myself sinking into the sofa and not quite believing that she’d actually gone through with it, abandoned me. I remember smoking a cigarette on the front porch that night, watching the fog amble in from the bay, and deciding that after a carton a week for three decades—since I was fourteen, for God’s sake— that cigarette would be my last one. I was quitting not because I wanted or needed to, and definitely not because I thought it would be easy. I was quitting to punish myself.
We were approaching the southern end of the Strip. As thebrother lit up another cigarette, I flicked mine out the window and gazed at the mountain range of hotels that bordered the highway. At night, I remembered, amid giant digital screens flashing promises and exaltations, these same hotels towered over the city like monuments, some with mirrored walls that—as you traveled past them—trembled in the wash of glitter and dancing light, as though the city were too alive, too troubled with hope, ever to fall asleep.
But now, in the desert dawn, there was a lifelessness to the way the valley’s light fell across the Strip and to how the shadows pooled beneath the hotels like melted paint. Framed by the Martian mountains in the distance, the Strip looked like an artist’s rendering of some alien civilization, with buildings erected from every culture and time in history, every possible mood, and with no consistency save their garishness and size. In the
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