Notes From The Hermitage
Requiem For A Cigarette
Three nights in a row I dream of chain-smoking, wake with my chest clogged, my breathing rough. I let out one smoker's cough after another. I am convinced I've smoked the whole night long, cigarette to cigarette. Even my tongue feels heavy and weighted. I've broken my vow and I don't know how it happened. After six weeks of avoiding anyone I know who smokes, of holding my breath as I pass smokers on the sidewalk, of bowing out of parties I know will be wall-to-wall smokers after six weeks of not one single puff, I blow it, and I blow it grand. Then it dawns on me: it was only a dream, another goddam smoking dream. I don't know whether to be relieved or mightily pissed.
A recurring dream, the most comforting dream in the world. I lie back, close my eyes, fall asleep, and it begins. A black background, nothing at all there, like a backdrop to a scene yet to be lit. Then the first ribbon rising before my eyes, a single, sinuous ribbon of smoke, climbing. I can't see the cigarette, but I know it must be in my mouth, that I'm smoking it, and I feel the rush of the nicotine throughout my body, into my blood, my limbs, and I fall into a deep state of relaxation. The world is gone. It is me and the cigarette. No, not even that, it is me and the ribbon of smoke rising from the burning tip, spiraling before my eyes, mesmeric in its power. It is all I see in the world, this thin strand, this DNA twisting against the black, unbroken, rising ever and higher. And I am the happiest man alive.
It is a going away party and a fiftieth birthday party thrown into one and I am smoking, one after the other. Everyone here smokes, and the few who don't are addicted to Nicorette gum. I stand in the November cold in a Harlem backyard where a fire has been lit and shuffle my feet to keep warm. Later, inside, dancing, I roll a cigarette, light it, return to the floor, feel the strange freedom, the thrill, still present after all these years, of drawing tobacco into my lungs. Even through the addict's need I feel the pleasure as the smoke curls inside me. I reach home after five in the morning, more drunk than I've been in several years, and wake with a headache, my tongue the size of a stale calzone, my whole body come to a halt. I wander from room to room, stumbling, smoking, thinking there is no way I can quit tonight, absolutely no way. I'll leave it till next week, maybe the new year.
I am sitting in my therapist's office, not saying a word, not even making a sound. It is one of those non-verbal moments, pre-verbal almost. I am shaking all over and staring at a patch of carpet to the left of her feet. I am terrified, I am scared shitless, I have no idea where I am or what is happening. The emotion has come over me without warning, out of nowhere, and suddenly here it is and I don't know what to do. The moment drags on, extending into minutes, into a half hour. My breathing is shallow, my arms are and chest are shaking, there are tears in my eyes. It is almost two months since I quit and for the first time, truly, I would sell my soul for a single drag. I want nothing other than a cigarette. It's all I can think about. It will make the terror go away, I'm certain of it. I feel the need in my head, every nerve is demanding it, is ordering me to jump up right then and race out of her office and buy a pack, anything, just grab one from some guy on the street.
The evening after the party, the day of the monster hangover, at some point, around six, my mood turns. Why not now? I ask myself through the haze of an glutinous head. If I can't do it now, right now, then when can I? It is late evening, and to my great surprise and horror I find myself cleaning out the ashtrays, searching for the matchbooks, the packs, the strays pouches of tobacco. I am convinced there is no way I am going to quit, that it is impossible after a hangover, that I can't just make the decision on the fly, like that, and think I'll actually go through with it. It's just another way of failing, I say, trying to convince myself not to quit, to give it a week, a month, to build up to it. This is something I've been saying for six months.
As I argue with myself, I dig through old travels bags, through suitcase pockets, knowing loose cigs are hiding there, making the decision as much with my actions as with my thoughts. I throw out the trash and I'm left with a few papers, some tobacco. I roll a cig, light it, smoke as I would any other, not thinking this will be one of the last, that tonight is the end. A half hour later, I roll another, light it, and smoke it with the same casual ease. Before I've run through the papers, before I've told myself this is the last smoke, before I've had a chance to savor the end, I take it all up, the papers, the tobacco, the lighter, and I carry them to the waste chute in the hallway and throw them in. I smoke my last without knowing it. I don't even remember how it tasted.
Ranbir Sidhu
Ranbir Sidhu is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize in fiction and his work has appeared in
The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, Zyzzyva, Other Voices, Press and a Houghton-Mifflin
college reader among other publications. Trained as an archaeologist, he has worked in
California, Nevada, Israel and France. One of his finds, a 3000 year old woman,
made cover skeleton of Biblical Archaeology Review. Most recently, he worked for
the United Nations in Sri Lanka. Recently, he received his first royalty check.
It was for 99 cents and for a story published over ten years ago.
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