^The Authors’ Atrium

My doctor ordered me to cut back on tobacco consumption. I told him I’d take it under advisement. While that didn’t work for the IRS, it might with him.

He asked how much I smoke. I gave him my measurement in matchbooks rather than cigarette packs. He wrote something down. Inferring from the handwriting, it’s a recipe for mulberry pie.

I must continue to smoke. If only to uphold the legacy. The problem arises when I see my contemporaries. Nobody does it properly anymore.

It used to be handsome, well-dressed people holding civilization’s foundational success in their fingers and inhaling its pneuma.

Today it’s a guy in a parking lot wearing garden shoes, jorts, and an ironic t-shirt sucking on a straw attached to a pager that smells like blue raspberry while thumbing through twelve-second vertical videos.

Where is the craft? Where is the ritual? Where are the keepers of the flame?

The rituals of lung cancer and emphysema I can do without.

Spoken like somebody who shies away from the blaze of truth.

I’ll show you truth. Your fellow “keepers of the flame” smell like a landfill fire and cough in the middle of other people’s sentences.

I’ve never coughed in the middle of your sentences.

I wait until the end, out of respect. Although I would thank you to keep them shorter.

All that aside, though, look at the tradition.

There’s a detective who rated the difficulty of a case in pipes. Not hours, pipes. That isn’t a failing of character, that’s a unit of measurement.

There’s a caterpillar on a mushroom with a hookah who cross-examined a lost child. The most unqualified therapist in all of fiction still cut through the mental haze while producing a physical one.

And a wizard blowing smoke rings that turned into ships and sailed across a halfling’s ceiling.

What do we see any longer? Heroines mulling over green tea. Men of action chewing sticks of Wrigley’s.

Make mine nicotine.

The caterpillar is a cautionary tale. The child left with a headache and an identity crisis.

The wizard I’m not even going to discuss. A man of a certain age sitting very still and thinking. That’s just good posture. Smoke rings or not.

And your detective also had other “amusements,” didn’t he? Of the “seven percent solution” variety?

Which one threw his pipe into the sea?

Poe, it was the captain. He tossed his pipe overboard because it no longer calmed him, and he was too far into the thing to be calmed by anything. Best pipe scene ever written and he never even lit it.

And, Bronte, as for the detective, don’t judge his virtues by his vices.

At least the captain had some sense.

For the life of me, I don’t get the romanticizing.

Just because some hard-boiled P.I. snaps open a lighter and holds it inches from the ruby pout of a woman whose intentions are unclear—even the glint of the fire vanishing into the abyss of her dark eyes. Time standing still as the cherry of the cigarette begins to smolder and the first wisps of smoke emerge, creating a living veil between them, reminding us we can’t truly know anyone...

It’s all stupid. Very stupid. Very, very stupid.

While this debate has been invigorating, I have a date with my back step.

The doctor said cut back, not quit. That leaves room to negotiate.

I’m heading out for a cigarette. Unfiltered, just as the truth ought to be.

As expected, running away just as soon as I was winning.

He hasn’t come back.

No.