Page 101 of Two Marlboros

“Shoot.”

“What were you doing awake at that time last night?”

Oliver’s blood-smeared face appeared, his shredded face and that mute cry that became a screech of braked wheels on the asphalt.

“I had had a nightmare.”

Oliver’s face a step away from mine, his eyes mirroring my guilt, my reflection growing further and farther away, his body wincing one last time, then letting go of death.

“Sorry,” Nathan whispered.

Oliver in the kitchen preparing something, turning around and it was no longer him. There was no more love and understanding, only hatred spilling from his eyes, only coldness enveloping me, as it had enveloped him months before. Olivercoming within an inch of my nose, his blood dripping down my eyelashes, running over my eyes and lining my cheeks.

I gasped, as I had that night.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to,” he said again.

I took a deep breath: nothing was real, it was just images.

Nathan circled my wrist with one hand and stroked my skin with his thumb. He then went back to the newly created drum and finished licking it, closed it with both hands and put it in the cigarette packet. There was warmth on my wrist, where until a moment before there had been his fingers.

“And what were you doing up at that hour?”

“Harvey’s fault.”

I guessed why and chuckled. “I see.”

“No, it’s not like that.”

His gaze was lost in the void, like when he had come here, disappointed in the evening with him, which again was the problem.

“I’m afraid he’s getting into some kind of trouble.”

I waited for him to say something else, but he merely pointed his eyes into mine, as if they might give him some answers. However, when he realized I had none, he lowered his gaze.

“He is the only thing I have left from my old life.”

I brought a hand to his thigh and stroked it.

“There is one thing I have learned in these nine months, and that is that the past cannot come back. No matter how hard you try to visit the same places again, to be with the same people... it won’t be the same. It can’t.”

He sighed. “Yeah.”

He moved his hand closer to mine stroking his thigh and with his index finger began to outline the contours of my fingers. I paused so that he could do it more easily, then I just rotated the hand I held on to his thigh and our fingers crossed. I soughthis gaze, which I found lost in the void, however, and realized that for him that brushing of our hands was nothing more than instinctive play.

“There’s something off when you’re with Harvey, isn’t there?”

Nathan’s gaze became alert again, and at the same instant he withdrew his hand.

“How do you always know everything?”

He chuckled, and I followed his example.

“Oh, by the way,” he added, and out of surprise he lifted his legs so that he almost hit me. He composed himself again in his own way, fumbled in his pants pockets until he pulled out a crumpled, stained piece of paper. “Look at this.”

I took the slip of paper in my hand with a hint of disgust and, when I had removed the most important creases, looked at it. It was a piece of paper that looked like it had been torn from a pad and had, in the header, a symbol I had seen somewhere before. Underneath, there were two columns: the first showed words, the second a series of numbers, a date and a place. I immediately intuited that the correct reading was by rows.

“It’s sort of like a table, at first glance,” I commented.

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