I stood up from the dirty step ladder and looked at the back door. I thought that I might as well see, and walked over taking my cup of tea with me. I opened the door a crack and saw Farzan leaning against the wall in the dark. He was lighting up his cigarette and in a second it was glowing pink. I entered the room.
Farzan glanced at me as I walked by him and propped open the alleyway door. My body stood between the plastic frame and the door itself.
I leaned over and took his cigarette from him.
After the first inhale I said, “Whenever I smoke past, you know, the line-- the bottom part-- I get a sore throat the next day,” I said. His face was blurry in the dark. “I’ve noticed it. I have a sore throat today because yesterday my friend gave me one, you know?”
“That’s the bad part,” he said. “The bottom’s bad. You see some people throw them out when they’re halfway.”
“Yeah,” I said. I continued smoking the cigarette and between inhales sipped my tea. Against the dividing walls I heard the slams and shakes of boxes being piled and dropped on the other side. I could hear the shouting of my coworkers as they continued with their job. I felt Farzan would, at any second, take his cigarette from my hand and tell me to get on my way.
I glanced at the burning tip of it:
Oh, but I knew he wouldn’t.
“I’m quitting when I turn eighteen,” I said.
“You’re not eighteen?”
“No,” and I laughed.
“It’s different at college,” he told me.
“Yeah, I know.” I looked straight into his face now. “I mean, I’ll still smoke weed,” --I continued to stare-- “But not cigarettes.”
He shrugged and I dropped my gaze.
I let it go.
More noises racked against the inner wall, while we, in darkness, kept letting the dead afternoon sink in. I drank my tea in big gulps and studied the cigarette with an abstract interest: I should leave. I should leave.
I inhaled and looked up.
The darkness dropped from the ceiling and fell like powder onto everything below it. The powdered shadows. The blurry, powdered smiles.
“Do you think I’m immature?” I asked.
“Kinda. Why?”
“Because Riyas said I was. ...And that new kid said I looked like a baby, or something.”
“No, no, you’re not.”
“Really?”
“No, no, no. You’re fine.”
“I’m average?”
“Yeah.”
I leaned my head back against the door. “Ok,” I said. And then, quickly, I brought my head down again: “You know, I think since I’ve started working here I’ve gotten worse. It’s like since I got a job and actually started working I’ve been so much more immature than when I was in school.”
I had my fingers under something.
“No, that’s not true,” he told me. And I looked at him thinking, You wouldn’t know. But again I dropped my gaze and I let it go. (I removed my fingertips). I closed my eyes and let the powder dark cover everything.
“Mmmm..” I said, because the word was a pully, setting my mind off to follow trails of thought. I wormed around with some for a while-- daydreamed myself into a sleep-- and found one that somehow led back to my eyelids, which I opened to see Farzan still in front of me-- not a bone moved. That was the weird part, though-- not a bone moved. And we looked at each other in a shaded trance, both in a mental and physical paralysis.
The world was a vacuum.
After a couple seconds he hunched forward as if to touch me, but hesitated... He took the cigarette from my hand.
I stared at him inhaling it. “I don’t know how to grow up,” I said. I could feel those words in my tobacco flavored mouth.
Farzan said: “It’s easy. You just think.” He gestured toward his temple.
“I do think!” I said.
And that’s when Farzan began his terrible smiling.
“I read a lot,” I said. “Which is not something... Whatever.” And my ineffective words floated into the darkness...
My fingers couldn’t squeeze underneath it.
“...And I watch movies.” My fingers scrabbled pointlessly: “Serious movies.”
Farzan smiled. “What kind of serious movies?”
“You know.”
“What’s one movie?” He was smiling and my previously-cold fingers began to go berserk, just trying to hold on.
“Dead Ringers,” I said. This was the first movie that came to mind, after what felt like months of groping. “One is Dead Ringers.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.. And Little Miss Sunshine. And Clockwork Orange, you know.”
Farzan was maybe about to laugh.
I looked at his shadowy face. “Reservoir Dogs..” I said, trying again. (Pushing, squirming, heaving, looking...)
Farzan smiled, the teeth pressing through.
“Have you ever seen Reservoir Dogs?”
He smiled.
I kept staring at his face and his teeth, and my fingers scratched and bled. My fingers hurt. My fingers hurt:
I should leave. I should leave.
And then I found it. My fingers slipped under.
I watched him inhale the last of the cigarette and then throw the butt aside. (My hands lifted up the box). “Alright, Farzan,” I said. And he glanced at me as I left the room. (My hands let it drop to the floor).
The room echoed and the walls rang.
