Page 82 of Two Marlboros

She smiled and continued to caress me. “No, you don’t. Bu you can always count on us for anything.”

“I know.”

She barely shook her head, but never interrupted her caressing.

“Call me a little more often. I want to know how you are and if you need anything.”

“Okay.”

Her hand left my face, a sign that she had now told me everything; but as I turned to go home, she stopped me again.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, then took two steps toward me. “And don’t smoke too much!”

I felt embarrassed, perhaps because smoking belonged to what I called “the new me”, someone I could not accept yet.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to know.”

On tiptoe, she left a kiss on my head. “I’ve known for a while, what do you think? I’m your mother.”

I thought back to all the mints I had eaten to hide the smell and how many packets I had scattered who knows where so I wouldn’t take them home. What a fool.

It was time to go, but not before thanking my mother. I encircled her in a humble embrace, in a gesture that asked forgiveness for everything I had done and all the sorrow I had given her. And when we parted, I was certain of one thing: she would be the only woman I would ever love.

Before going home, I stayed and walked around the neighborhood. My nose still ached a little, but it wasn’t the biggest pain I felt. I thought back to the words Nelly had said to me about trying to face my father, and I realized that having listened to her had nothing to do with courage or feeling like an adult, but only with a foolish hope that he might see me again as the son I had been. Only, obviously, that hadn’t happened. In fact, everything was the same.

I would have given anything to be important to him again. Or maybe it would have been enough for me to be important to just one person, any person. For that reason, almost as if it were a necessity, I already had the phone in my hand listening to the ringing sound.

“Hello,” said his voice, after only a few seconds of waiting.

“Hi. Sorry to call you again this evening.”

Alan laughed. “Don’t worry about it. In fact, I was actually wondering how it went.”

I smiled and blushed. It was weird to know that he had thought of me. No one ever thought of me. At the same time, however, it was comforting.

“Crappy, as I thought. If you’re free, we can get together and I’ll tell you about it.”

“Actually...” he began, and my smile died moment by moment, “...I’m busy tonight. Ash and I are going to a club.”

“Oh,” I only replied. I felt disappointed, perhaps because for a moment I had hoped that he would always run to me. After all, it was just a silly expectation, like all the expectations I had.

“Look,” he said with a hint of hesitation, “let’s do this: I’ll wait for you at home and, in the meantime, I’ll call Ash and see if he’s okay with you coming with us, okay?”

Again, I felt comforted by the idea that he was concerned about finding a way to fit me into his life. It was a very sweet thought.

“Thank you,” I replied, with a renewed smile on my lips.

I said goodbye to him with tears in my eyes. It had only taken me ten minutes of interacting with my father to feel shattered, tired not only of the day but partly of life itself. Alan’s presence had somehow prevented my fragile balance from breaking completely.

I slipped into a less traveled lane and heard moans of pleasure. Hearing those two boys make love aroused me, but it was more sordid to hear one of them vomit soon after. There I had the realization that the people of the day - families, retirees, couples, workers - had given space to their counterparts lurking in the shadows. Indeed, when darkness fell and the air became crisper, there came the night people, people with their own story to tell and which was often hardly ever anything good.

I was in the middle. Split between what I had been and what I was. A vulture of the night who would rather have lived in the sunlight than hidden in cones of shadow.

I walked to the subway with my hands in my pockets, tight in my shoulders, afraid of what I would find as I turned the corner. For if you left the streets lit up and full of storefronts, the ones for the people of the day, there would pop up shadows on the walls, specters of broken lives, of ecstatic boys with a syringe planted in their veins. I walked past one of them and observed him: a hemostat bracelet and a monster entering him, devouring him, and making him feel invincible. I wasn’t looking at them to feel superior, no: I was looking at them because I was afraid, afraid of ending up like them, afraid of needing something to tell me I was a hero, because I couldn’t tell myself that, let alone being one, just like I hadn’t been that afternoon. So, I let my gaze rest on their expressions of enjoyment, their forced laughter. I let my mind wander to the newspaper reports of boys crushed by a pill, of young men in comas, of out-of-control girls whom someone had destroyed.

But what would it be like to feel invincible, even for a moment?

16

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