The Nicotine Chronicles

by Lee Child

  “Excuse me?” he’d say.

  “You heard me.”

  I remember how Mom took her time opening the long box, removing that first pack, slowly pulling off the cellophane, folding back a corner, doing her wrist snap and flipping the cigarette directly into her mouth without touching it.

  The whole time, of course, the enormous Reich Marshal Malcolm knelt at her feet, crisp green uniform yanked down to blue-veined, shiny ankles, face pressed to the carpet

  “El gape-o,” Mom snaps, talking around that Salem angled out of her mouth.

  Reich Marshal salutes. Obliges. Proceeds to clamp his hands on his nether-cheeks, with great theater, as if gathering the strength to pry himself open. While he works, Mom positions the dinner candle, I go back to my coloring book. Use the green for Jiminy Cricket’s face. Orange for his eyes. But how to color the little cigarette I put in his mouth? You can’t color white, so I go with yellow, with red for the tip. Same with Tinker Bell. Peter Pan, Captain Hook, I give them all cigarettes, all twirling plumes of smoke. Tinker Bell’s Kool almost looks like another wand.

  “Ready?” Mom calls, after she works in the long fat candle, giving me a wink over the prone wannabe-Nazi.

  Reich Marshal thinks she’s talking to him. He replies, all aquiver, in a strange fake accent. British but not, like he’d watched an old Sherlock Holmes movie and wanted to sound like Watson. “No ma’am. I am most certainly not ready. I will never be ready. This Reich Marshal has been to the veld, let me remind you. Captured by natives. Who had their savage way with him. Unspeakable duress! Unspeakable . . .”

  He was the only person I’ve ever seen who actually harrumphed. It went with his mustache, what Mom called his pregnant caterpillar, the same ginger as the brush cut under his military hat, but faded under his nose, which he was always wiping with a folded handkerchief the same martial green as his outfit. For a man buns up, hosting a candle in his sphincter—the Reich Marshal had enormous dignity.

  “Why, if I told you I was put in a pot and boiled with rodents, I’d be painting too pretty a picture. You can’t do anything these primitives have not done already. Done worse. Done repeatedly. The nightmares!”

  His speech was part of the event.

  “You know Hitler hated tobacco,” he might rail another day. “The Führer was the first man in the world to ban smoking. For Jews! You see the irony. He would kill them by the millions but he wanted them healthy! No tobacco before the gas. Eventually he banned smoking for the whole nation. Such a visionary!”

  Floss might indulge him for a moment, before lashing out. “Stop talking, scum bucket!” He was a regular. Sometimes Mom would switch out the Polaroid and give me the little Super 8. The Kodak Instamatic M2 movie camera. If he heard the whirring, Reich Marshal did not let on. Of course—do I have to say it?—the sight of a man on the floor, doing the kinds of things Mom did to men, the kinds of things men did in font of her, was hardly shocking. It was normal. It was my normal.

  The movies were strictly for Mom. Her idea of fun. But not great for blackmail. Not that she ever used the word. She sometimes called these transactions “arrangements.” Plus, she explained, it was harder to get money from people for Super 8s. They’d need to have a projector, a screen, enough know-how to wind the film in the sprockets to actually see the thing. But a Polaroid is a Polaroid. Portable, effective, and so easy that a child—me!—could shoot them.

  Sometimes I heard her on the phone to one client or another. “If your wife doesn’t believe me, darling, we’ll take the polygraph.” While she talks, I get the wink, and some Johnny Facecream, whichever human ashtray she’s plopped her feet on, squirms and eeks under a bun-stubbed Newport.

  “Mama likes her pollies, right, Johnny?” All the mouches—half men, half couches—were “Johnny Facecream” to my mother. Beefy furniture who paid.

  Dr. Ono, Reich Marshal Malcolm, Johnny, Johnny, and Johnny—to me they were zoo animals. The cabinet gave me distance. “Pretend you’re at the movies, honey.”

  And I did. I did. I became a voyeur, and a professional, almost before I could read.

  Mom had a credo: “I believe children should have jobs.”

  * * *

  But listen, I hear you wondering—if you’ve read this far—what is the story here?

  What is any story? One Smoking Bottom, then another Smoking Bottom? There was this, there was this, and then there was that. Do you read to find out what happens next? Or do you read to flee what’s happening now, while you are reading?

  Mom was once premed. She knew things. Like how, drug-wise, nicotine is peculiar; how it changes from stimulant to sedative, the more you do. The phenomenon—how up turns to down—is called “Nesbitt’s Paradox,” after the doctor who discovered it in 1969. Mom claimed to have dated the actual Nesbitt, as a very, very young woman. He got her into tobacco action. Her eventual specialty. Mom owed some of her style, her technique that is, to Dr. Nesbitt. Beyond his paradox, Nesbitt also had a theory about sex and cigarettes: that, counterintuitive as it sounds, cigarettes were not, inherently, oral items. In fact, as he laid out in a keynote paper delivered at the Airport Hilton in Queens in 1971, to the National Society of Nicotine Studies, suppressed ethnographic research suggests that early tobacco users did not restrict themselves to breathing in the burning leaves. Rather, there is significant evidence that the first tobacco aficionados—in still not wholly understood rituals—would carve elaborate pipes, some long as flutes, and decorated with intricate filigree—then fill their bowls with cured leaf, set them aflame, and, after a few puffs, insert the pipes in the shaman’s anus, what Nesbitt’s treatise labeled “the Shamanus.” The upshot: rather than the lungs, that nicotine’s chemicals were delivered into the bloodstream via the porous, nerve-dense rectal portal. Special tabs were cut to slide over the burning leaf, forcing the smoke through the pipe and out of the opening.

  I’ve seen the Polaroids the doctor himself took of the pipe extended between his own ample nether-globes. In a sense, these were early selfies. But this is not the point. Leave that aspect to panicked doctoral candidates looking for an angle. The point is that for half a minute, a minute tops, what smoke was trapped in the pipe’s interior escaped and entered the client’s alimentary canal, an even more effective nicotine-to-bloodstream delivery system.

  Dr. Nesbitt himself—at least in my mother’s telling—liked to “wear” his native pipe extended from his rear and do a kind of Pan-inspired goat-dance around his living room. (Back then, my mother did outcalls. This was before the big bed and secret cabinet setup, before Mom had her headquarters. Before me.)

  But still . . . just marching out a sample butt-sub does not a story make. Did I mention—my memory again!—that it wasn’t till two years ago that I came upon the book of Polaroids, the ones I took, and under that, an older box, taken by who knows? Rifling through them, I made two (to me) shocking discoveries.

  One: that what Floss had written on the chests of her most flamboyant customers, like Dr. Ono—what I’d seen her write before I could read—were two words, CIG PIG, vividly rendered in Mom’s trademark shade: Scarlet Desire.

  Two: that one of the gentlemen she’d scrawled on was a man of note. In this case a jowly, big-haired, orange-tinted real estate heir and lout-about-town. His special fancy involved two women and one lit cigarette; specifically, lit and inserted in the vagina of Woman One, who stood astride the head of Mr. Orange Tint, eye-to-eye and belly-to-belly with Woman Two, who also straddled him, perfectly positioned to pull herself open, tilt her pelvis toward the ceiling, and urinate, so that a small fountain arched onto that smoldering cigarette clamped in the labia of the woman before her, ashy pee-drops falling directly onto the face, and lips, of the big soft orange man below.

  And yes, the man liked to talk the whole time, mostly about how “filthy” the two women were. Mister Orange, possessed of some weird, or weirdly predictable, shame, would not even remove his own tighty-whities. Would not expose himself. But he was
always eager for the ladies to expose themselves, to put on their brazen display, poised (as mentioned) nipple-to-nipple over his own prone loaf of a body. He liked to get wet, then explode in shock that “these whores” would spray him.

  “Men,” one of Mom’s favorite quotes, “are not mysterious.”

  All they want is to be listened to, Mom explained one morning. They don’t even want what they say they want. Not really. What they want, what they really want, more than anything else, is to be listened to. Especially powerful men. All power is cosplay, really. They all want to tell their secrets.

  “Because they’re lonely, Mommy?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “They’re not lonely?”

  “Not just, honey. They have people around them. And everybody sort of listens to them. They want to be important men. Some of them, they are important men. But deep down, deep deep deep deepity down, they want Mommy to tell them they’re not really powerful. Deep deepity down, they’re worms. And they want Mommy to know. They want Mommy to see, and to hear what they can’t tell anybody else.”

  “And that’s what you do?”

  “That’s what Mommy pretends to do.”

  “You pretend to listen?”

  “Yes.”

  We had our talks, in the morning, while she drove me to school, her eyes meeting mine in the rearview. At red lights, we would both stare out the window, at the faces of the men walking by with briefcases on their way to work. I knew, even then, that the way Mommy saw people was different from how other people saw them. What she did in our apartment—the men, the menthols, the smoke and flames—what she did was our secret. Not a bad secret. Just something we didn’t talk about. Except to each other. I was Mommy’s special helper. If I talked about it, then other kids would want to know why they couldn’t help their mommies. They’d want to be special too.

  “I understand,” I said. “It’s just, I don’t know why . . .”

  “Why what, honey?”

  When I couldn’t figure something out, I’d chew the inside of my cheeks, and if Mom noticed she’d ask me, gently, to stop. Nobody else but her could even tell I was doing it. But if she didn’t stop me I’d keep at it until I spat blood.

  “Why what, honey?”

  “Why it’s important? To the men, I mean.”

  “Why is what important?”

  “Why the men, you know, want you to listen. I mean, why you?”

  Here she stopped, and thought. Which is one of the things (one of many) that I loved about my mother, the way she never patronized, the way she always took great pains to let me know she was thinking about my questions. (Later, people would say Mom was a monster—especially therapists, early on, when I’d make the mistake of telling them what my mother did, and how she’d let me help her do it.)

  “Because,” she finally told me, smiling that funny smile she had when she was happy/sad, sad and happy at the same time, “because they know I don’t matter, honey. Because Mommy does . . . what Mommy does. And they like it. And they hate what they like.”

  She never said, Someday you’ll understand. Never said, Wait till you’re older . . .

  Instead, she told me everything. The way it was. So later on, nothing ever surprised me.

  Outside of our house, out in “the world,” my mother’s tininess always came as a shock. In our apartment, doing what it is she did, my mother towered. Even large guys, in her presence, seemed less large. Seemed small. Seemed cowed. Like the puffy orange man. A man with strange, specific needs.

  Like most men. From what I’ve seen.

  It’s all so obvious now. But then, what did I know? What does anybody?

  But forget all that. Those Polaroids are still in a box. In a safe. (Inside another safe.) Sometimes it’s nice (if nice is the word) to just have a look, to remember. When I do, I get excited. And then I get very, very tired. That’s the paradox.

  We are none of us young more than once.

  And never again.

  Just thinking about it, I need a cigarette.

  Vaping: A User’s Manual

  by Joyce Carol Oates

  Six forty a.m., first vape of the day.

  Jesus!—your heart just skids.

  * * *

  S-L-O-W helping your mom down the brick steps.

  Hate the way her fingers clutch—Don’t let me go, Jacey . . .

  Vaping makes it okay. Brain rush! (Though not as good as that brain rush the first time you ever vaped.)

  It’s okay, Mom. I’ve got you.

  * * *

  Weird how it’s still dark. Six fifty-five a.m. Like, you’d been awake all night. Mom in her room and you in yours. Eyeballs like sea anemones floating in the dark.

  Mom coughing, choking, gasping for air, could hear through the walls.

  Four a.m. brought her the asthma inhaler. Got her sitting up, pillows behind her back so she could sleep/try to sleep that way.

  Attacks are getting worse. Since last April.

  In the morning, helping Mom put on clothes. Stumbling one slender leg into the black suede trousers, then the other leg, Mom teetering, panicked, grabbing your arm. (Jesus!)

  Even going to the oncology center, your mother has got to look good. Has got to try. Closetful of clothes, some of them never worn, expensive. Also, high-heeled shoes.

  But not today. Flat-heeled shoes today.

  Next, the (hateful) walker. Foot of the stairs. Have to position it for Mom. She’s scared as hell trying to use it. Hey, look, Mom, you can’t hang onto me. We’re both gonna fall.

  Doesn’t trust the fucking walker since the time she fell. Fell hard. Looked away from her for one minute out in the driveway, fuck, she fell.

  Okay, Mom, it’s steady.

  Okay, Mom, you can let go of me.

  Wouldn’t know that Mom used to be a beautiful woman. Just a few years ago.

  Used to be chic, blond-streaked hair. Now white-streaked, and thinning.

  White of her eyes showing over the iris like a thin crescent moon.

  (How old is Mom? Fuck, not old. Forty-three?)

  Appointment is seven forty-five a.m. but we’re leaving early. In case something fucks up. As Dad says, Always keep in mind the fuck-up factor.

  Last time you took Mom for her infusion there was an accident on the turnpike—traffic backed up for miles. Oil in skid-streaks across the highway gleaming like fresh blood.

  The sky is lightening, like cracks in a black-rubble wall. Sun at the horizon like the damn city is on fire!

  S-L-O-W driving to the oncology clinic. Three point seven miles to the Mercer Street Exit. Already seven ten a.m. traffic backing up like a shit-blocked gut.

  Mom sitting stiff beside me. Staring ahead. (Seeing—what? And what is she thinking?)

  Before last April, Mom would be talking. You’re not even in the room, your mom is talking to you, casting her voice out like a spider’s thread—making sure you are there, you are connected. Kind of exasperating, expecting you to be listening and to reply, but now she’s silent like her mouth has been sewn shut, you miss it.

  And if you look at her, she won’t be smiling at you like she used to—might not even look at you at all. Panicky, staring inside herself.

  Does divorce cause cancer?—or, does the (undiagnosed) cancerous condition cause the divorce?

  Clickbait on the Internet. Crappy article in one of Mom’s magazines.

  Okay, I’m gonna take a chance. Passing on the right to get to the exit. Assholes gaping at me humping along the turnpike shoulder, must be passing ten, twelve vehicles. Fuck, it’s an emergency situation. Gotta get my mom to the clinic.

  Running over debris, part of a rusted fender, broken glass. Mom gives a scream like a little killed mouse. Me, I just laugh.

  Juuling is cool-ing. You just laugh.

  Each Thursday first week of the month early a.m. my mother has a three-hour infusion—gamma globulin. Have to laugh thinking—Gamma goblin?

  Because something is wrong with M
om’s white blood cells: immune system.

  Best fucking thing vaping does for you, makes you immune. Best damn infusion.

  Special permission for me to come to school late on those days. Primary caretaker of my mother. I need you, Jacey, please. Don’t abandon me.

  Christ! Embarrassing as hell. Mom pleading for me not to abandon her like her damn husband did. Somebody should shoot him.

  That first hit of the day, best hit. Press your hand against your chest feeling the heart pound pound pounding inside the ribs like a fist.

  Feeling good in the car. Terrific sensation, behind the wheel. The Lexus Dad left for Mom, I’m driving.

  Asshole’d have a meltdown, he knew who’s driving.

  Mom has the driver’s license, I’ve got a learner’s permit, it’s cool. Nothing illegal. Good, I remembered to grab Mom’s purse on the way out. Wallet, driver’s license. Credit cards. Cash.

  (Loose bills, in Mom’s wallet. Last time I looked, twenties, two fifties. Tens, fives. Helped myself to one twenty and one fifty and guess what?—on painkillers Mom never had a clue.)

  Brain buzzing, hive of bees. All good.

  Okay, Mom. You can open your eyes, we’re here.

  * * *

  When the high wears off, feeling like shit. Air leaking out of a balloon. Seems like the high wears off faster and faster these days.

  My size balloon: five feet eight, 123 pounds, shoulder muscles, arm muscles okay. Swim team, track team, JV football, but like the other guys vaping, kind of short of breath these days.

  Like, fucking panting.

  Coach stares at us, disgusted. Steve, Carlie, Leonard, Jacey. Coach hears us panting. Maybe Coach can smell us. (But you can’t smell e-cigs like you smell fucking cigarettes—right?) Like, Coach isn’t going to accuse anybody of anything. Even if he guesses what we’re doing behind his back. Knows he could get his ass sued by irate parents.