David Martinez
David Martinez
I am a Brazilian American writer who lives between Arizona and Ceará and has lived all over the US, Brazil, and Puerto Rico. My memoir, Bones Worth Breaking, was listed as one of Esquire's Best of 2024 as well as featured in Poets & Writers Best New Nonfiction.
Time Takes a Cigarette
She thought once she was smoked, it would mean the end of her life—and she was right. It was the end of a life. It was the end of everything she had ever trained for and fantasized about, the end of every anxious and impossible daydream. Now she lies on the asphalt, stained with lipstick, burned to the stub, part of her filter coming loose.
She’d dreamt of the lips wrapped around her, dreamt of what she knew would be a legendary first inhale, of her life burning away in glory, her love burning both inside and outside herself, producing and billowing that smoke she had been created to give. The burning hadn’t even hurt. What was painful now was that she was still alive. She was a butt. She shouldn’t be alive. Yet here she was, stomped into the tar and feeling the vibrations of cars as they passed close to her. What did cars know? They hadn’t been bred and purposed for a single use.
Now what?
She could feel her yellowed center, the stain where the smoke had pulled through her, and that had, in the moment, filled her with a sensuous joy, the proof of having been used, and used so good. She had been enjoyed, and what was better than that? Isn’t that what her entire creation had been about? Now all she has are her memories, no longer dreams.
In her life before, she was part of a community of other sexy carcinogens, stuffed together in a pack hidden in a young woman’s bag. She shared a space with powders and pills, and of course, other cigarettes who would sometimes return to the pack half-smoked and dazed and muttering. “God. Oh God, that was amazing.”
They would come back halved, no longer slender, no longer whole and virginal but full of experience. Beauty—that pure, smooth, elegant, untouched charm—they knew, were bred to know, did not last. It did not last even very long. Neither did experience. So, when half or partially smoked cigarettes came back, all others hushed and listened, asked for details, sensations, repeated stories, and they got them.
One day, they knew, they would all be gone, and the empty packet would lie in the bottom of a garbage bag or on the street. The impermanence was part of what gave their lives meaning, purpose. It was the act of giving themselves, burning their lives, over to the fantasies and dreams that caused them to roll and rub together in their tight pack that loosened and jostled with each member lost. Friction! That’s what it was, and that’s what they longed for.
But now, here she was, sans purpose, smoked and squished and battered and still alive out in the street, on the side where no wheels roll and no feet walk. Staring up at the sky. Not even in the gutter. She would give anything to be whole again, to be smoked again. No one had ever told her about this. No one had ever come back a butt. Everyone who had come back came back diminished but with at least some future left.
It would have been better, she thinks, if the experience hadn’t been exactly what she was promised. But it was. The red lips (the stain still around her waist) pursed around her. Sucking. The flame at her top. The flash of pain. Then the pull. The sweet and unstoppable suction. The smoke, her smoke, her life, flowing through her, hollowing her out from the inside. It would have been better to have been lied to, not to know, for desire never to have been ignited. Or at least to have been extinguished the moment she was.
The world turns. She feels it rotate, sees it in the sky she can’t turn from. The knowledge of the movement, of racing through time, is soothing. The planet spins and she has nothing to do with it. At least there’s that, and what else, really, is there?
A car passes. She feels first the vibration, then the wind as it whips by, and she realizes she wants to follow it, at least the movement, and she begins to feel the inkling of wonder, the hope of a hope of a prayer of desire transferable from being used and smoked and life sucked up all into movement. What was the point of just lying there, sinking into the asphalt as the sun rises and with it the temperature, which, without spark or flame or that delirious pull, is only discomfort and pain?
When the next car passes, she lifts the paper at her end where the filter is beginning to fall out, and it allows the air of the aftershock to twist her. It must be a truck or a semi because it doesn’t just twist her. It flips her almost to the height of the wheel. She hits the ground and tumbles a few times before rocking onto her belly. She laughs out loud, laughs so loud she shakes. She begins to feel free in a way she hadn’t even in the pack, waiting for her life to begin and end, the weight of that expectation of life crushing her. The laughter surprised her. She discovers she likes being surprised.
Pieces of her, she knows, had been plants once, plants, leaves, wood, tar. But by that reasoning, she could also say she was once dirt and air and water. Now she is in the dirt. Face down. And threatening to go back to it. But she is alive nonetheless, alive in a way she had never conceived of.
She waits for the next car.
There are voices, other voices. She tries not to eavesdrop, but muffled as they are, they begin to come through so loud she can’t help but try to decipher them. It’s a loud, almost-silence, like the time she could hear the whisper in a church from inside her pack when the young woman who owned her was forced to go one Sunday. Yesterday. Maybe earlier today. She doesn’t know. She’s a cigarette butt.
Most of the voices moan. Some of them are silent, so silent a dog couldn’t hear. Some are dead.
—You!
That voice wasn’t muffled at all.
She didn’t acknowledge.
—You! Yes, you! I can feel you thinking over there!
She tries to shut her mind down, hoping it will deter whoever is yelling in that deep, loud, and irritating voice. She feels in an instant so old, so old and used. And she supposes she is. The voice is draining and makes her sluggish.
She feels the next car approach, listens to the black tar rumble, and she almost misses it. It’s too late when she exposes herself, that ripped spot, to the aftershock. It doesn’t carry her far. Either the car is small, or she doesn’t lift her teared and wounded self in time, but it is enough to turn her over.
—You shouldn’t be thinking over there. It’ll come to no good. You shouldn’t be thinking.
With effort, and an ability she never knew she had, she tilts herself toward the voice, louder and closer now. It’s another butt, not from her package, and it looks like it’s been outside a long time. For a moment, and perhaps because at her angle it’s hard to see, it looks like he’s standing straight up on his own. She notes that after the moment’s over, this isn’t the case. He’s stuck to a piece of grayed gum. They look like they’ve been together so long that they’ve taken on the color and shape of one another. Maybe the gum has seeped into him, she thinks. Maybe. But it is also obvious that he—they at this point—have been subject to rain or a sprinkler or drainage because the gum-butt has become deformed, lost a good portion of what should be their previous shape, and has been twisted into a half-melted-looking, soggy face that droops in toward the concrete. The moment the image becomes clear, she wishes he would droop, that the grotesque face would droop right off the curb and into the gutter, to be washed away, though the moment the thought comes to her, she is ashamed. Who is she, burnt and torn and yellowed, to make judgements like that?
—I’m sorry? she says.
—You’re sorry for what?
—I mean, I didn’t hear what you said.
Even the shape that looks like a mouth seems to move when the gum-butt speaks. It’s not a mouth, she thinks. That would be absurd. It just looks like a mouth.
—I said you shouldn’t be thinking. It’s dangerous.
She sways, but this time it isn’t because of an aftershock. She doesn’t notice, but this time she does it herself out of her own discomfort. —I didn’t mean to offend.
—You didn’t offend. I was just offering advice.
—In that case, I’m sorry for what I was thinking.
—How would I know what you were thinking? I could only hear the noise of you thinking, not the contents. I’m not a mind reader. Anyway, I never pay attention to the contents of anything. Too dangerous. Might make one think, and thinking leads to movement. Why would you apologize for your thoughts? What were they?
—I don’t remember, she says. If she had been able, she would have blushed.
—Good! That’s good! Forgetting is a great start. Most thoughts aren’t remembered. It’s partially why they’re so dangerous. We have them. Sometimes good ones. Sometimes not. (We can never know the difference.) And then we forget. But I’ll tell you what’s not dangerous.
—What?
—Advice. That’s why I give it.
—Oh
—Here’s another piece: Stop floundering about like that. It’s better to wait it out. Too much heartache if you push yourself. Besides, if you get a good angle like I got, you can spy on lots. Take your trajectory, for example. I saw it. I saw you flying over me, still lit with your last burning bits flickering and falling out as you spun and tumbled into the street. I saw it. I saw you at your most intimate, at your death. I see others, too. You’re not the only one. Does that make your death feel less special, to know you’re not the only one? To know you’re like everyone, that that makes you more like everyone than anything else? Anyway, the others have more sense than you. They’re silent. Lie face down or face up in the street. Don’t say a word.
—But isn’t doing something better? Isn’t it Better Than Just Waiting Around to Die?
The gum-butt doesn’t laugh.
It’s hard to believe that anything good still exists, she thinks. Everything’s shit. The world is shit. —That sounds so boring.
—It is. It is boring. But it’s better than the alternative.
—What’s that?
—Pain.
—Pain?
—Pain. Pain of failure. Pain of being wrong.
—But isn’t the absence of hope only pain?
—Sometimes yes. Sometimes it’s nothing. But is the greater pain no hope or hope shattered?
—But what else is there?
—Take Philip over there. (At least that’s what I call him since I’ve never heard him speak. Everyone must have a name, even if they don’t speak, even if they’ve never spoken. Even if they’re dead. Especially if they’re dead. Even if they’re nothing.
—Who?
—Philip. Philip over there.
—Where? I can’t turn. I can’t face anywhere but here.
—Well, he’s a wrapper. Don’t turn around or you’ll startle him.
—I can’t. I can’t turn. Don’t you listen? Can’t you?
—I haven’t seen him move all my life or my after life or whatever you want to call it. He’s been there my whole time, and I haven’t heard a peep, not the beginnings or whiffs of a thought.
—Why is that good?
—Because he’s safe.
—What does that mean?
—Does everything have to mean something?
—No. Yes. I don’t know. I know nothing.
—That’s true. That’s the truest thing you’ve ever said. You don’t know how true.
—How would you know? You don’t know everything I’ve ever said.
—I don’t have to. To say one knows nothing is the truest thing one can ever say.
He’s trying to impress me, poor thing, she thinks. That’s sad. That’s so sad. —You made all that up.
—Of course I did. I make up everything I say.
Silence
She wants to move. Maybe moving will make her forget her predicament. Maybe moving will become her new state, her new desire. Obsession. Everyone needs an obsession—for happiness’ sake.
A foot passes, the heel almost crushing the untorn part of her, and she rocks.
—See that foot? How it walks over you? See? No one pays attention. You’re not noticed. You don’t need to think so much when you’re not noticed.
—Does that mean that life unnoticed is life unimportant?
—No. But yours isn’t life.
—What is it?
—It’s after.
—After what?
—After life.
—But I’m not dead.
—Sort of.
—But I’m not.
—Yes, well, everything kills you eventually.
—Happens to everyone.
—Happens to us all.
—Yes, yes.
—So now what?
—What what?
—In the meantime.
—In the meantime of what?
—My life which is the afterlife but not death or after death.
—I don’t know.
—Who knows?
—No one.
—Oh, what do you know?
—Nothing. I know nothing.
—That’s right.
The butt loses herself, can no longer tell if she’s her or if she’s him or if she’s Philip alone and silent. Whose voice is whose? —I can’t even tell who I am anymore when I’m next to him or when I’m her. This can’t go on.
He drones.
He’s eying me, she thinks. He’s speaking on and on and he’s eyeing me, studying me in a way that terrorizes me. —You’re stretching the conversation to keep me here.
The words come out before she realizes she’s speaking them.
—It’s true. I like talking to you and will be miserable when you’re gone. I can no longer imagine my life without you. Will you marry me and be glued with me here forever? This gum will last longer than either of us ever will.
—Of course not.
—Then I shall never stop talking, and you shall have to stay here and listen out of politeness until you change your mind. Unless someone more interesting comes along, then you’re free.
And he does talk. For a long time. Cars drive, and she loses the will to lift her torn corner. She’s not sure if night passes, another day. Rain. Heat. Spinning earth. His droning voice tires her, weighs her down like chains, like sand, makes her tired. His droning drives away thought and will. Not all thought. In a flash, she realizes this is one way to forget having been smoked. In fact, she had forgotten it, and in forgetting, she wonders whether she wants to, whether remembering is better than forgetting, than nothing. She’s already paid with her body, with her desire, with her youth. She might as well remember through the pain. Forgetting is a state she could stay in. If she wanted. If she wanted the state of being talked at.
She thinks under his stream of speech, thinks and waits, and feels the tremble of another car coming her way. She lifts her torn part…and flops onto her face.
—I see what you’re doing. I see what you’re up to. But I warn you. If you leave, I’ll never function again. I’ll forget you out of hate, and then you’ll see. You’ll have never existed. You’ll see. You can’t refuse me and expect to have peace.
She picks herself up and flops again, not even needing a car this time. She does it out of sheer disgust. And it works.
And he does forget her. She becomes like a dream, like the shadow of a dream, and he does forget her. He forgets her and all she ever was to him, and he refuses to know all she ever was to herself and keeps only her abandon to grow his disdain. He loved his disdain more than he loved the life he used to have bit now has forgotten along with her.
And he was right. The gum does outlast him. He tears piece by piece in the rain and sun and the rain again, and the gum blackens, blackens until it fades into the concrete, until all it is is a black oval-ish smudge of congealed dirt.
She drifts away, her fate unknown.
Maybe she’s off in wide pastures now, the ones that sprout between eternal cities, eternal homes and fields and buildings so large and vast there is no way to count them. Maybe she follows trails down to cows who never smoke and past children in playgrounds who sometimes do. Maybe she falls into the drainage and floats on muck until she reaches the sea. Maybe she dissolves before any of that. Maybe she doesn’t. Maybe it all happens. Maybe she follows none of the paths. Maybe she makes her own. Maybe she did. Maybe she does.