The visitor stared at the yellow man, and the yellow man glared back at him. The silence that settled between them, however maddening, was not absolute; it was punctuated with inhuman sounds; machines that beeped and whirred; rubber soles that squeaked on the linoleum floor just outside the open doorway; the hysterical wail of a car alarm somewhere in the distance, suddenly strangled short in mid-cry.
At the moment, Steven Parker, the man sitting in the visitor’s chair, could not imagine a hell worse than this. Eons seemed to pass before he finally roused himself to speak.
“It’s finally starting to warm-up out there,” Parker exclaimed with an unconvincing smile, quickly looking away to study his work boots while his words died in the stale air. He gazed out the window, to where a maintenance man was trimming the lawn along the edge of the parking lot. This wasn’t much of a view, but Parker had grown tired of looking at the yellow man’s leathery skin; the claw-like fingers with the yellow-brown nicotine stains; the milky, unfocused eyes. This was not the friend he once knew, this joyless sack of bones; it was an albatross, a curse, an abomination.
It would have comforted Parker to know that this would be his last loathsome trip to Hevven Memorial Hospital. His stomach turned at the mere thought of the sterile décor, the smell of sickness that seemed to penetrate every thread of fabric, every molecule of air, the feeble attempts to gloss it all over with faked pleasantries and vapid conversations, the latter meant to avoid, yet somehow highlighting, the stark reality that everywhere, everywhere, death was creeping forward to embrace the living. As he reflected on these things, Parker found himself confronted by a sudden revelation: he wanted the yellow man to die, and not out of any sublime faith in God’s will, or some misguided sense of altruism. He wanted the yellow man to die because the yellow man repulsed him, and these prolonged visits to the Cancer Ward were a total fucking drag.
The yellow man’s real name was Robert “Buddy” Soulever, the owner of Soulever Brothers Construction, a shrewd and tenacious man who shrugged off the indigence of his childhood to eventually become a self-made millionaire. In life, Buddy had possessed the build of a lumberjack with a temperament to match. In death—or rather, in the midst of death—he more closely resembled a pile of sallow skin pulled taut over a skeleton of twiggy bones.
Gone was any resemblance to the Buddy Soulever who had once been the fearless center of his high school football team, the young scrapper who once took on three grown men in a bar fight at Rusty’s Cantina in his home town of Hevven, Massachusetts, and had walked away without so much as a hair out of place. After months of chemo, that thick head of sandy blond hair had become a forlorn memory, diminished to little more than a few scattered wisps that sprouted at random from a spotty scalp. Also gone were those mischievous blue eyes, the mischief replaced by a look of perpetual self pity and the blue replaced by a filmy gray. It would have been nearly impossible for a stranger to judge his true age. He could have been sixty, perhaps even seventy years-old. Few, even those who were closest to him, would have guessed that Buddy had just turned fifty-two last month.
In spite of these things, after dozens of visits, Parker had discovered that he was beginning to lose all sympathy for his friend and former mentor. Somehow, somehow his friend was gone, replaced by the living skeleton that now glared at Parker from the cold comfort of its funerary bed. Buddy was not the kind of guy you wanted to feel sorry for; he was the kind of guy you met up with at the Ninety-Nine to toss back a few beers after a hard day’s work; the kind of guy who got riled up watching football games on television, and who could always be counted on to crack loud and often inappropriate jokes whenever a group of pretty young college girls walked by. Moreover, Buddy was disgustingly wealthy, and it was always a struggle to pity those with means. But what it really boiled down to, in Parker’s mind, was this: If a hot-tempered, dauntless millionaire like Buddy Soulever could get cancer, then anyone could. That glaringly obvious fact, above all else, is what bothered Parker most.
At last, the yellow man picked up his notebook and began to write. Parker refused to look at him, but he could hear the pencil as it moved across the paper, and the sound made him clench his teeth until his jaw began to ache. It sounded, to Parker, like a rat scratching around inside the wall of an old house. It was a sound with which he had become all too familiar over the course of Buddy’s infirmity. Still clenching his teeth, Parker continued to stare out into the parking lot. The trees were mostly bare, but the little brown buds were starting to emerge, the grass was thicker, greener, and the sky was the kind of clear, optimistic blue that made you feel as though anything were possible; all signs that summer was creeping back into New England. Summertime in New England, reflected Parker, is there anything more beautiful in this world?
Meanwhile, one claw-like hand moved slowly across the paper, feebly clutching a pencil in its grip, as the other claw-like hand steadied the pad. Finally, the scratching stopped and the yellow man held up the notepad so Parker could see what he had written there:
Got any smokes? I’m dying for a cigarette!!!
Parker read the message. Shook his head incredulously. The yellow man sighed through his nostrils, and something deep within him made a sound like a child’s rattle. His milky eyes stared back at Parker with a look that bordered on contempt. This was yet another thing that Parker hated about coming here, to the hospital. He was tired of this repartee—if that’s what you could call it. Why did Buddy have to be so damn stubborn? Why couldn’t he just use the damn voice box to speak? At this point, who cares if he sounds like a goddamned robot?
“Sorry,” Parker muttered. His large, calloused hands fidgeted restlessly. “But even you must see the irony in your choice of words.”
The yellow man pulled one arm out from under the crisp white hospital sheet. With no small amount of effort, he held his hand up in the air with the knuckles facing the ceiling. One by one, the arthritic fingers curled down, leaving only the middle one aiming at his former employee. Cancer or no, he had not lost his sense of humor.
“Look,” Parker went on, “not that you would be allowed to smoke in a hospital anyways, but the worst thing you can do in your…” He fumbled for the proper words, but could not find them. “Shit, I mean, you can hardly breathe as it is, Buddy.”
Before Parker could even finish, Buddy had already begun to scrawl a new message on his notepad. After a moment, he flipped the notepad around so that Parker could see his latest handiwork:
Don’t be a prick!!
Just be a pal and give me one FUCKING CIGARETTE!
These last two words were written with reckless abandon, with the bold and jagged lines of an angry child, the tip of the pencil all but perforating the page. The effort of writing the note had taken its toll, and Buddy felt his flabby chest muscles clench as he was overtaken by a terrible coughing fit. Still hacking, Buddy ripped a tissue from a box on the table beside him, just in time to catch a stringy wad of phlegm as it erupted from his mouth. Giving his mouth one final swipe, Buddy rolled the tissue into a sticky ball and dropped it into the plastic waste basket that squatted on the floor beside his bed.
Parker bowed his head and pretended to examine his work boots, unable to conceal a thinly veiled look of disgust. He attempted to make small talk for a while. How about that draft trade, Buddy? The Patriots will be unstoppable this season. I don’t know about you, Buddy, but I for one can’t wait for the summer to get here. They say it’s gonna be a scorcher. I guess that global warming ain’t that bad for us New Englanders, y’know? You know, the company’s doing fine, Buddy. You don’t have to worry about that, my friend. We just got that new Mystic Power contract…
Buddy only stared out the window with vacant eyes, not even feigning interest. It was no great secret that he would not live long enough to see the coming summer, never mind the Patriots’ pre-season opener in Foxboro. As for the future of Soulever Brothers Construction, the small empire that was Buddy’s brainchild and legacy, the yellow man found that he cared nothing for the company, or its future endeavors. In fact, the fruits of his labor could wither on the vine for all he cared. The yellow man was both childless and divorced. His recent diagnosis—two to four months to live—combined with the fact that no woman would want to come near him, let alone screw him, assured that he would remain childless and divorced through the bitter end. Realistically, it would have been impossible for him to father a child anyway, since the chemotherapy had likely lowered his sperm count to nil, but it would have been nice to at least have the option—and the hope—that some part of him would live on after he was gone.
The stark reality that he was the last of the Soulever bloodline was only now beginning to dawn on him. His parents were long dead and his older brother, Teddy, a childless bachelor himself, had died of throat cancer four years earlier, eliminating the chance of any would-be heir to the Soulever throne. It was as though cancer had waged a personal war against the Soulever family. This sudden revelation, that he was not only a victim but a target, bothered Buddy far more than his own impending doom.
Cancer. Motherfucking cancer. First Teddy and now me, he reflected. Buddy never knew how his parents had died—he was so very young at the time, and his memories of them were vague at best. It wasn’t until he was a grown man that he’d finally found the courage to ask, and that’s when Teddy told him, while lying on his own death bed in some other cancer ward, that their family had a history with cancer.
A history with cancer! What the hell was that supposed to mean, anyway? Buddy wondered. He thought it sounded like something you’d say in reference to a former lover, not a terminal disease. Now me and my ex, thought the yellow man, we sure as shit got a history. We loved each other so goddamned much that it ate us alive. It burned so intensely that it devoured us. Even during the divorce, that love burned and burned, only then it had turned into a bitter, twisted thing that felt a lot like hatred. But maybe all hatred is borne of love, thought Buddy. Had he read that in a poem somewhere? Buddy couldn’t remember, but he thought it was possible. He had never had much of a mind for poetry. Maybe that’s why we hated each other so damned much…because we loved each other too damned much.
Buddy turned this around and around in his mind. Odd that he had never had these thoughts before. He wondered if this was a sign that the end was truly near, like some brief flash of light before the darkness came. If only he had realized these things before, perhaps he could have saved his marriage. Our love was pure in the beginning, and over time it transformed into hate. No, not transformed. It metastasized. Yes, that sounded about right. Perfect, actually. Our love metastasized into something ugly and malignant, something like cancer; it just ate and ate and ate, until there was nothing left to consume.
He reflected on these things as Parker droned on. Licking his lips, Buddy considered writing another message to Parker, this time flat-out demanding a cigarette. Never mind the fact that Buddy had hired Parker, a high school dropout with no skills or experience, out of pure pity, and in doing so saved the boy from a life of menial, dead-end jobs. Never mind the generous salary, the yearly raises, and the Christmas bonuses, all of which had given Parker the financial stability to support a wife and baby girl and to eventually move them, all three, into a nice little house in the country. There was also that one time, many years ago, when he had loaned Parker a small fortune to save that same house from going into foreclosure after Parker had gambled away several paychecks on some “surefire” bets that did not pan out. Parker had been so thankful for Buddy’s endorsement, he had actually wept. Now here was Parker, that ungrateful bastard, refusing to acquiesce to a simple request from a dying man. Hell, all Buddy wanted was one lousy cigarette!
Buddy actually grasped the pencil in his hand as he considered jotting down a quick little note to remind Parker about these many acts of charity. In his mind, he had already written the note, and Parker was blubbering like a baby as he exited the room, on his way to the store to buy a pack—no, fuck that, make it a carton—of Marlboro reds, Buddy’s tobacco of choice. But some thin strand of decency prevented him from writing such a message, not because he felt bad about laying a guilt trip on the poor fellow, but because it seemed indecent to remind a friend about such favors, even if that friend looked at you as though you were something he’d like to scrape off the bottom of his shoe. Besides, the thought of gripping that pencil again made Buddy’s head swim. In fact, it made him feel downright exhausted just thinking about it.
***
After an hour or so—in truth, he was not sure exactly how much time had passed—Buddy glanced back at the chair that Parker had occupied, the visitor’s chair, and was not the least bit surprised to find that it was empty.
Prick didn’t even have the common courtesy to say goodbye, thought Buddy. He smiled at this little victory, somewhat amused by the fact that he would no longer have to indulge his young protégé. Score one for the dying man!
Tethered to the rail of his bed was a remote control, an antiquated gadget that was roughly the size and shape of a brick. Buddy lifted it just enough to hit the POWER button and settled back against his pillow to watch JEOPARDY! On the opposite side of the bed was another small rail with a completely different control attached to it; this one held a single button that controlled his morphine drip. Buddy pushed the button twice and the television host’s congenial voice—was it Alec or Alex? Buddy could never remember which—began to fade, replaced by a black and dreamless sleep.
***
Later that night, Buddy awoke to the flicker of the small television that sat perched on a ceiling mount in the corner of his room. The morphine had run its course. He was wide awake now, and restless as hell. He picked up the remote and flipped through sixty or so channels of absolute shit, finally settling on the Discovery Channel.
As he waited for his eyes to adjust to the dim light, he felt a hitching pain from somewhere deep inside of him. Twisting, he leaned over the bed rail to hack up a fibrous wad of phlegm into the waste basket. When he was a teenager, they used to call those things lungies, or loogies, or something like that. The coughing fit lasted nearly ten seconds, which was a long time to go without breathing, and ended with him clutching his stomach with one hand and using the other to wipe away a sliver of phlegm that clung to his bottom lip like a blob of jelly. When the pain passed (in truth, it never fully passed, but only became more tolerable) he reached over and pressed the morphine button again. Pressed it once, twice, three times, knowing no matter how many times he pressed the button, the dose would be regulated, and the pain would only be blunted ever so slightly.
On the television, a male narrator was describing what the world would be like if the human race just up and vanished. The narrator’s voice was deep and passive, almost indifferent, as scenes of a desolate New York, one overrun by vegetation and wild animals, flashed across the screen. Something about the narrator’s voice struck a chord in Buddy, and he found he could relate to the indifference about the end of days.
When the show was over and the credits began to scroll across the screen, he picked up the remote control in a trembling hand and clicked the POWER button. There was a soft crackle, like a static electric discharge, and then the screen went suddenly black.
Darkness flooded the room, broken only by the otherworldly glow of his IV and EKG monitors. As the morphine worked its way into his bloodstream, Buddy closed his eyes. Now, the darkness was absolute. He thought that this must be what it is like to live inside a womb. For some reason he could not articulate, this thought seemed to comfort him. He closed his eyes, listening to the rhythmic bleep of his heart monitor.
After a time, the yellow man slept.
***
Sometime later, during the small hours of the night, the yellow man’s second visitor arrived.
An unfamiliar sound dragged Buddy out of the warm embrace of a morphine-induced sleep. For a moment, he remained still, his vision still blurred by the drug, unable to focus on any recognizable shape in the room. Listening, he realized that the sound was coming from below him. Buddy had grown up in a very rundown house— practically a shack, really—and this reminded him of the sounds the mice would make as they rummaged through the kitchen at night in search of crumbs. Perhaps, he thought, this was the sound of a mouse, skittering across the floor. He dreaded to think that a hospital as reputable as Hevven Memorial could have a rodent problem, but it was not entirely out of the question. He listened again, and realized that it (whatever it was) had managed to crawl into the waste basket. Grimacing in pain, he pushed the UP button on the railing of the bed, and held his crooked finger there until the bed elevated him to a suitable enough vantage point that he could see over the edge.
Something moved beneath his bed. No—it was in the waste basket. Yeah, in the waste basket, burrowing into the snot-filled balls of tissue paper he had deposited there throughout the day.
As Buddy’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, he found that he could actually see movement beneath the layers of tissue, as though something were building a nest inside there. There was a rustling sound amidst the paper, and then—and then—
Something emerged from beneath the pile of tissue. It was a golf ball-sized wad of mucus—an accumulation of all the phlegm Buddy had discharged into the waste basket over the course of the last twelve or so hours—and it was moving.
The phlegm-ball crawled up the side of the waste basket and fell to the floor with a wet little plop. From there, it crawled into the darkest corner of the room, leaving a trail of glistening mucus in its wake. The yellow man watched, fascinated, not quite sure if he was awake or dreaming. Once in the corner, the blob seemed to find strength in the shadows. It made obscene little sucking sounds, as if drinking in the darkness, as it rapidly metastasized. At last it stood, trembling and glistening, a dark growth that was easily the full height of a ten year old child. The glistening mass spoke to him in a voice that sounded like muddy water being slurped through a straw, a voice that seemed to be cancer incarnate.
“Buddyyyy…”
Buddy looked at the morphine button and grimaced in disbelief. “You gotta be shitting me,” he whispered, his voice barely more than a raspy exhalation through his ravaged trachea.
“Buddyyyy…” the mucous blob repeated in its watery voice. “I can give you what you neeeeed…”
Out of habit, the yellow man picked up his pencil and notepad and began to scribble a message. Then it occurred to him that this was just a dream, and that he could speak normally if he put his mind to it. “What—?” he croaked. “What do you want?”
“Whatever you neeeeeeeeed…” came the cheerful reply. The black mass pulsed and throbbed, still suckling on the shadows.
“Oh, yeah? How’s about a smoke?”
In the dark corner, a small flame popped to life. Buddy’s olfactory senses were not what they used to be, but there was no mistaking the pungent smell of sulfur. The tiny flame trembled as it moved, bobbed up and down, and then winked out. There was a greedy sucking sound, and then a small orange dot appeared in the darkness like a tiny comet. The smell of smoke wafted across the room, straight to Buddy’s nostrils. The familiar smell of burning tobacco sent a longing through Buddy that seemed to shake his very soul. His mouth began to salivate and, somewhere in his conditioned brain, a series of chemical reactions demanded that he MUST HAVE NICOTINE!
“As you wish,” replied the thing in the shadows, as though reading Buddy’s mind.
A pack of Marlboro reds floated slowly out of the shadows, hovered for a moment just beyond Buddy’s reach, and then dropped softly onto his blanketed lap. In disbelief, he picked up the pack and fingered it. It seemed so real, that familiar cardboard rectangle, right down to the smooth cellophane wrapper. He shook the box. He had smoked long enough to recognize the heft and feel of a full pack of 20 Class A Cigarettes, and this one was full, by God!
Buddy’s yellow nails scratched at the clear plastic wrapper, at last tearing it loose and letting it drift to the floor. As soon as the inner foil had been ripped away, the smell of the tobacco hit him like the familiar perfume of a long lost lover. This act of kindness was so sudden and unexpected that he almost wept with joy.
Got any cigs? I’m dying for a cigarette!!!
He’d written this desperate plea to Parker only hours before. And how had that ungrateful son of a bitch answered him, after all those years of friendship and generous employment? Sorry, Parker had said, but even you must see the irony in your choice of words.
For a moment, the lights on Buddy’s monitors all faded. As this happened, the black mass slopped forward, holding out a lit flame to the bedridden man.
Jackpot! thought Buddy. He clutched a cigarette between two permanently nicotine-stained fingers and leaned forward to accept the light, no longer caring if this was real, a dream, or a drug-induced hallucination. For the first time in months, he was happy.
At last, he smoked.
With the first drag, a feeling of euphoria washed over him. It sent shivers of pleasure throughout his entire body. And was his mouth dry? You bet. The cigarette tasted like shit, too, but the second drag was better than love itself.
“Look,” he croaked through a cloud of smoke, “I know this isn’t real, but thanks.”
“The world no longer cares for our kind,” the visitor stated in a benevolent voice.
“Our kind?” Buddy asked.
“The smokers.”
“Oh, tell me about it,” Buddy grunted, exhaling a smoky sigh. “Used to be, you could sit in a bar and have two-three drinks, relax with a smoke and shoot the shit. Nowadays, it’s like we’re diseased or somethin’. They managed to push us out onto the sidewalks, hoping we’d all just dry up and die. These pansy-assed health nuts are like the goddamn Gestapo or something. They tax the shit out of cigarettes, all the while claiming they want to put an end to big, bad tobacco, but really they’re just getting fat and rich off us smokers. If they really wanted to ‘save’ us from ourselves, they’d outlaw tobacco illegal and shutdown all the cigarette companies, but that’ll never happen so long as there’s a buck to be made.”
“Soon, you will die…” the blob stated in a clinical tone. “Soon, there will be no smokers, as the people of this world have forgotten how to indulge in the simple pleasures.”
Buddy snorted in disgust. “Well, I won’t have to worry about that pretty soon, will I? Not unless there’s a smoking ban in the afterlife.” Buddy took a long drag from his cigarette, chuckling to himself.
Buddy’s visitor leaned in closer to him, gurgling softly in his ear. Its voice was barely more than a whisper. “I have been told, by a rather reliable source, that God is not a smoker.”
“Yeah, well, that figures.”
“I hear there are no small pleasures to be found in the afterlife. But, of course, there is a chance I am mistaken.”
“I sure hope so.”
“If I may be so bold,” the phlegm blob said in a conspiratorial tone, “I know of a place where small pleasures are appreciated. A place where they actually encourage you to indulge in any form of pleasure you like.”
Already down to the filter, Buddy took a final drag from his cigarette. Frowning, he extinguished the butt in an untouched glass of water on the nightstand by his bed. He began to salivate again. Those pesky nerve receptors were already crying out for another fix.
“Go ahead,” his dark visitor urged him.
“Huh?”
“I’ll pass no judgment on you if you want another.”
Buddy smiled, inhaling the sweet scent of tobacco as he drew another cigarette from the pack. “Listen, friend, I don’t suppose—?”
“Why, of course.” The blob slopped forward, inching its way across the linoleum. It moved with a wet sound, a slimy sound, a Welch’s-Grape-Jelly-being-squeezed-out-of-the-bottle sound. The cigarette poked from its rudiment of a head like a mosquito proboscis, the tip glowing cheerfully in the darkness. There was a brief flash of light as it lit Buddy’s cigarette. In that brief flash of light, Buddy saw its face for the first time, and he was not surprised to see that it actually looked like a giant glob of grape jelly, only darker, and tangled with veins. His visitor slowly inched back into the shadows, its presence marked by the glowing ash and the lingering smell of sulfur.
“Thanks,” Buddy murmured.
“As I was saying,” it continued, “I know a place where such pleasures are valued. I can take you there, friend. If you want to go, that is.”
Buddy listened intently to the thing in the shadows as it described this other world. Smoking one cigarette after the other, he marveled at the thought of such a place, a place where one could indulge in any pleasure, great or small, without bounds.
“All you have to do is bring your addiction.”
Through a haze of smoke, Buddy dreamily watched the blob as it shifted around in the shadows. “That’s it, huh?”
The black mass made a squelching sound as it sucked on its cigarette. “Well—” it gargled, exhaling, “—there is one minor stipulation.”
“I’m listenin’,” Buddy said, raising his eyebrows.
In the darkness, the phlegm blob’s face twisted into the grotesque semblance of a smile as it delivered its well-practiced rhetoric.
The yellow man and his visitor talked on through the night, until the first brush of dawn began to lighten the sky. Then, just as the first warm rays began to creep tentatively into his hospital room, the yellow man, fully swayed by the phlegm blob’s oratory and with a sense of delirious abandonment, began to unplug the cords and cables that anchored him to the world of the living.
The creature lurking in the shadows grinned around its cigarette as Buddy Soulever’s heart monitor fell into a flat line, emitting a steady whine as he collapsed against his pillow. With his last ounce of strength, Buddy ripped the IV line out of his wrist, feeling that old familiar craving tugging at his brain, the one that told him he MUST HAVE NICOTINE!
He smiled at the irony.
He was dying for a cigarette.