Benson & Hedges Deluxe 100s
I take my morning oatmeal tepid now, not hot. After I pour the agitated water from the electric kettle over the instant oatmeal mix, I wait. And I pass the time by smoking two cigarettes. Benson & Hedges Deluxe 100s. I smoke one for my lover, who is no longer with me, and one for myself, who cannot let him go.
I remember the last breakfast we shared. We had stopped at Rudford’s on our way to Balboa Park. He ordered a short stack of blueberry pancakes and a side of oatmeal. His usual. I had the benedicts. My usual. He barely touched his oatmeal, so I finished it for him. It had gone lukewarm, but I hated wasting food.
The rest of that day felt like our breakfast. Usual. We strolled down the main promenade of the park, dropping a buck into the didgeridoo player’s hat and ducking into the Timken to scan the Russian icons. Sitting on a metal bench in Spreckels Organ Pavillion, we split a churro, licking coarse sugar and sharp cinnamon off our fingers. When we arrived home, I napped while he read. Together, we made a modest dinner of seared chicken and roasted vegetables with a salad kit, and we watched an exposé about the disappearance of a troubled teenager in Modesto while we ate. He washed the dishes, and I dried them. Then we shared a quiet cigarette on the balcony, got ready for bed and crawled under the sheets. He curled against me like a parentheses, and I fell asleep to the familiar rising and falling of his chest. Everything was ordinary.
The next morning, my alarm didn't wake me, which was unusual. A slant of light from the window had walked across the comforter and trampled my face, rousing me in a state of confusion. It took me a minute to register my situation — I was at home, in bed, at noon, well past my starting time. And I was alone. Which was not unusual, especially at this hour.
I got up and walked to the kitchen. It was lifeless. There were no coffee dregs in the pour over carafe or oatmeal bowl soaking in the sink. Glancing at the front door, I saw his keys hanging on the snail-shaped hook he brought home from a work trip to New York. I walked back to the bedroom and called him. I heard a faint hum in the sheets, then nothing. Then a faint hum, then nothing. I don’t need to reach for his phone to know it was buried in bed. That’s when I noticed the beads of sweat building on my arms and a metallic taste in my mouth. I opened the door to his side of the closet. Nothing was out of place. His shirts were still carefully hung by colors, and his shoes were stacked in neat rows from casual to formal. Something was abnormal. A flash of fire spit up my spine at the realization that he was gone.
The rest of that day was hazy. I remember getting caught in the looping rituals of a seeker. I systematically searched each room again and again and again and one more time again. I called his phone and answered it and held his and mine to either side of my face hoping to open some kind of channel that might connect us. A cosmic switchboard. I walked backwards into the kitchen, spin-jumping around in hopes of catching a glimpse of him in my periphery. Instead I found a half-empty pack of Benson & Hedges Deluxe 100s. Our pack. It was his brand when we met. I had smoked Camel Crushes for the joy of popping the little ball of menthol between my thumb and index finger. But I made the switch, not as a compromise. To feel closer. Like an us. I tapped out a cigarette from the pack, turned on the gas burner, tipped my head towards the flame and lit my cigarette. We had always smoked on the balcony, but today I sat on the tiled kitchen counter, knees pulled up to my chest, blowing smoke into the range hood. I hunted the room and my memory for clues to explain where he’d gone.
I lit another cigarette and tried to retrace our steps. Something must have happened, something extraordinary, to create this void. But what? Everything we did was so normal. That morning, breakfast at our usual spot. That afternoon, walking around our normal weekend haunt. That evening, a typical supper enjoyed on the couch with a favorite television program. Start to finish, it was a wholly unremarkable day — except for that errand at that mall. How could I forget? He had a return to make at a store in this old mall I’d never shopped before.
To get there, we had to take a freeway exit I’d never taken before. It dumped us out in a wizened suburban subdivision with rows of ranch homes carved out by cinderblock walls and decorated with rusty bars on the windows. We wound through the twisty neighborhood until the road straightened and the mall came into sight. At a distance, it looked like any mall — hulking and angular with large department stores set against each other like castles in feudal Japan. When we got closer, the rot was apparent. There was a trailer parked by the front entrance flying a tattered sign advertising a two-ring circus that had long since pulled up stakes. The “S” in the Sears sign listed to the left, threatening to fall. Yellow banners clung to the JCPenny’s windows. Everything must go.
He had found a parking spot close to a set of glass doors. I asked if I could stay in the car, and he obliged. I watched him cross the cracked asphalt and pock-marked sidewalk. The automatic doors spread open like a yawning snake, casual and cautionary. Coaxing a cigarette from the pack of Benson & Hedges Deluxe 100s, I stepped out of the car and lit up. Any vestige of the mall’s original sheen was obscured by a patina of blight. Browning jade plants languished in crumbling planters. A breeze blew life into a pair of empty Fritos bags, which waltzed across the sidewalk and disappeared behind a dumpster. The only sign of life besides me was a lanky black cat reconnoitering a planter, walking around it and around it and around it. I watched its loop until I became unsettled, and I turned away and saw him walking towards me. I was glad to get back in the car and drive away from that place.
***
I unlocked my phone and opened the map app, but I couldn’t remember the name of the mall. I tried searching for the store he had visited yesterday, but there were no results. Searching wasn’t working, so I pulled up the map and pinched my fingers into the rough position where we pulled off the freeway. Still nothing. I’d just have to drive it.
His car was in the carport. It was a beater, but some recent engine work had made it more reliable. And we never minded smoking in it. That’s how I drove down the highway, with a Benson & Hedges Deluxe 100 between my lips. I took the offramp we had taken yesterday. Like before, it deposited me onto a twisty road through a decaying suburb. When the street straightened out, I saw the mall ahead and felt a pang of hope. Everything seemed the same. There was the circus sign in taters, the precarious S and the yellow signs. The space closest to the glass doors was open, so I parked there and walked across the cracked asphalt and the pock-marked sidewalk towards. The automatic doors didn’t yawn for me, and I almost walked face first into the glass. I took a step back and waved my hands in the air trying to trigger the sensor. Nothing. I turned back to the doors and noticed a piece of paper taped to the inside:
Dear valued customer:
After twenty-six years serving you, we have ceased.
I read the sign and read it again. And again. I cupped my hands around my eyes and pressed them against the glass, trying to see someone inside. A janitor or a security guard or a kid with pretzel samples. Or him. But there was no life. I knocked on the doors, lightly at first, but with increasing fervor. I called through the doors, asking for help, for someone to open the door, for someone to open the door and help me. I can’t say for certain when the knocking turned to beating, but my fists were hitting the glass with all of my strength. I felt the glass flexing under the force of my fists, and I closed my eyes anticipating the rain of glass when they burst. The shard shower never came, and I started resenting the flexibility of the glass, its cool ability to withstand me. I hated the glass and how it separated me with utter indifference from the answers inside the mall. I cursed the glass doors, and the workers who installed them and the bastard who locked them. My beating fists straightened out and turned into punches. With each blow I left smears of blood on the glass, crimson Rorschach tests left not long enough to find any meaning. I felt the small bones in my hands starting to pierce the skin on my knuckles, revealing their delicate structures before splintering into a fibrous pulp. I screamed into the nothingness of the glass doors trying to reach anyone beyond this arbitrary stopping line. “Open this fucking door,” I screamed, drawing every molecule of oxygen out of my lungs and forcing into my diaphragm. “Open this fucking door. Open this fucking door.”
