Page 111 of Two Marlboros

“I knew I would find you here sooner or later,” he exclaimed.

The moment he uttered that sentence, I knew that this was a goodbye. He would never come to his senses again, just as I would never return to being his fellow student. In front of me there was a stranger, and I did not know how to start a conversation with him. There would be no more afternoons on chemistry or chats about the concert of the week before. These things, no doubt, no longer interested him. For a moment I felt like the child I was the first time I had smoked.

“What happened to you?”

Those could have been our last words, our last conversation. I had to be ready to say another goodbye.

“It’s none of your business, I already told you.”

It wasn’t going to be the only goodbye. There were things I didn’t know with absolute certainty, but I had understood them. I had hoped to the end that they were not true, but they were.

“It was Harvey, wasn’t it?”

Another person who was leaving my life. Another person I had wanted to believe different. Yet another disappointment, yet another extra in the play that was my existence.

“This is neither the time nor the moment.”

Ryan looked around, but I didn’t care to be heard. I just wanted to understand where I had gone wrong, even that time.

“Just tell me why you got into this shit.”

Ryan’s face grew gloomy. The shadows on his face became darker and hollow.

“You don’t have the right to ask me that. You just don’t have the right.”

“What do you mean?”

He took two steps toward me, until he towered over me.

“It means you can’t come and ask me now, after years of literally not giving a damn about me.”

“What are you talking about?”

He advanced again and forced me back.

“That your problems always came before everything else. You were always so into yourself, too busy playing the victim. That’s why you have no right to ask me how I am. It’s too late and I’d rather stay in this shit, as you call it, than rely on you.”

“Ryan...”

“No,” he retorted immediately with, a nastiness in his gaze that I had never seen in him. “It’s over, Nathan. Deal with it. And if you need anything, don’t hope for my help, because you no longer exist for me.”

I watched as our friendship emitted its final tailspin before crumbling forever. A chasm opened inside me, inside which I sank for endless seconds. As I fell into it, I wondered when thelast time we had really shared anything was, but the truth was that the last concert we had gone to together was perhaps 1996. I couldn’t even tell if he had a girlfriend or not.

Ryan stopped staring at me, turned his back to me, and advanced toward his little group.

“Wait.”

He paused, hands in his pockets. “What?”

“Who’s Waitch?”

He turned around. With him, so did the other two men who were there. One of them twitched his fingers and came toward me. He had portentous biceps and bloodshot eyes. He could have knocked me out with a breath.

“Take your friend’s advice and get lost,” the man intimated. “You don’t want me to persuade you, do you?”

He uncrossed his remaining fingers, and I grasped the notion. I stepped back just enough to tell him I got the message, then turned back to look at Ryan.

“I won’t abandon you like this,” I said again, perhaps hoping for a reaction from him, but his face betrayed no emotion. His eyes stared vacantly at me.

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