Ashtray

Ashtray

by Quinn Tyler Jackson

When she took a seat beside me at the dance club, I was already three drinks into a seven drink night, there to hear the music and watch the movement on the dance floor. She was with a girlfriend, drinking a rum and Coke. She appeared to be searching for a lighter to start up her cigarette, so I held out mine, already lit. After putting the tip of her smoke to it, she nodded her thanks.

I had long since learned that, in the dance of unspoken signals and messages in the night club scene, lighting a woman’s cigarette was an invitation to start a conversation. When she told me her name was Sarah, I replied by letting her know mine. The direction of conversations at a dance club hinged on the next few words out of either party’s mouth: whether wit or triviality, what either of us said next would determine not only how long the conversation would continue, but its general tenor. Our conversation jumped about enough to keep me engaged.

“I often think about how the sun is eventually going to burn out,” she eventually said, brushing her just-past-shoulder-length black hair over her ear as if preening. She had soulful eyes. “It scares me.”

“Do you think that matters?” I asked. I leaned back into my seat and lit another cigarette. “It’s a long way off.”

“I think a lot about things like that,” she replied. Her smile showed her perfect teeth. “I know that most people don’t, but I do. I can’t help it.”

“Well, I doubt you’re going to find many people who come to a place like this, see someone as attractive as you, and have them want to talk about when the sun is going to burn out.” I sipped my drink and then explained, “These people haven’t even figured out how the rest of their night is going to go, let alone the next billion years.”

Sarah’s laugh shook me inside. I knew that I should not let my guard down, but maybe it was the drink, maybe it was the nice feeling that came with the fact she was putting so much enthusiasm into the conversation; I let it down despite my better judgment and returned her laughter. Eventually the conversation went to where I lived, and I admitted that I was staying in a hotel room.

“For how long?” she asked as she put back some of her drink.

“About a month,” I replied. “Give or take a week.”

“Is it a nice room, at least?” she asked.

I paused to think. The room was mostly empty. Other than the banged-up furniture it came with, it had my saxophone, notepads, laptop, and a half-dozen changes of clothes. “Kind of barren, but I like it that way,” I finally said. I sipped my drink and then added, “And what’s more—when the sun explodes in a billion years, I won’t lose much.”

She half-grinned when I said this. “What happened about a month ago?” she asked.

“I woke up.”

Sarah looked closely at me. “Care to explain? I’m curious.”

“Simply put, I’m no longer attached to as much as I used to be.”

After a few moments to consider, she finished her drink and smiled at me again with those perfect teeth of hers.

* * *

My lungs ached. As I opened my eyes, my first sight as they struggled to focus was the half-full ashtray on the end table beside the head of my bed. I smoked a brand with a white filter; half the butts in the tray had fake cork ends, and a few of those had lipstick smudges on them. I reached over with my right arm, expecting Sarah to be in the bed, but she wasn’t.

Now that my eyes were completely focused, I could see the red numbers on the clock: seven in the morning. The bathroom sink was running. I closed my eyes and imagined my head under a cold stream of water.

“This place has no fridge or stove,” she called out from the bathroom. “You weren’t kidding about barren.”

“I’ll treat you to breakfast down the street,” I replied through my cigarette-smoke-glossed teeth. “After I freshen up.”

She walked out of the bathroom, her black hair wet from having showered. “That would be nice,” she said, smiling. In the morning light, her eyes sparkled. It was then that I fully realized what I had done; she couldn’t have been a day over twenty.

I got out of bed, pulling the sheet over myself out of false modesty. After reaching over for my boxers and pulling them on, I went into the bathroom. A quick shower and thorough scouring of my teeth later, I came back into the bedroom, feeling ten years younger than I had when I’d awoken. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, smoking her brand.

“Let’s go, then,” I said as I pulled on a clean turtleneck. She butted out her smoke and followed me out to the hallway.

* * *

“What prompted you to abandon everything?” Sarah asked me as she cut her bacon into two pieces.

I sipped my coffee while I formulated an answer to her question. In the light of day, with no alcohol in my system, and half a cup of coffee in me, she looked good even against the backdrop of the cheap café where we were eating. “I awoke every morning feeling as if I was only half a being,” I finally replied. “Try as I could to make the feeling go away, it got worse, rather than better.”

Sarah nodded that she was listening as she chewed her food. She placed her fork to her lips with an almost perfect delicateness.

“I came to feel,” I continued, “that my feeling of half-being was tied to my endless pursuit of unicorns other false gods.” I turned my plate halfway around and started on my hash browns. “Then I remembered how life was when I was about your age—assuming you’re about twenty-something or so.”

She smiled and said, “Or so.”

“Thereabouts,” I said, almost choking on a small chunk of greasy fried potato. “I didn’t need so much back then. You understand? I didn’t need all of the things and people I found myself surrounded with all those years later.”

“All those years? How old are you?” she asked.

“Twice your age, or so,” I replied. She appeared to blush, but kept to her breakfast, so I continued. “I didn’t need most of the things and people around me. If I didn’t need them when I was your age, how had I started to need them later on?” I shrugged. “But I acquired them anyway, and came to believe that I needed them. Each of these attachments had a price.”

“What price?” she asked between forks.

“I had to give up dreams, hopes, desires that were truly me. To know person X, I had to stop talking so much about subject Y. And so on. That, I determined, is where the ‘other half’ of me had gone.” I pushed my empty plate to the middle of the table. “So I walked away from all of that. I no longer needed to sacrifice and compromise my being, since I no longer needed to be around those people, with those things.”

Sarah’s face suddenly appeared very sober. “I don’t know if I could walk away from everything around me,” she finally said. “I have two jobs, and am proud of being able to have it all.”

I started to chuckle. “Nobody’s asking you to leave anything,” I assured her. When the waitress came, I paid for the food and Sarah and I parted company.

* * *

It was two weeks before I met her again, at the same club. This time, she was sitting by herself when I walked into the smoking area. She acknowledged my presence when I entered the room, so I sat close to her and pulled the ashtray closer to myself and lit up.

“Hello,” she said, smiling widely.

I suddenly felt as if no time at all had passed since she and I had eaten breakfast after our night together. “Hello, Sarah,” I replied. “Are you still worried about the sun going out in a billion years?”

“You remember my name,” she said. “Are you still living the minimalist life?”

I nodded yes.

She started to laugh heartily, so much that her perfect teeth showed and her full beauty came out to play. “We’re a few weeks closer to doom since the last time we talked,” she said.

“Indeed, we are. The clock is ticking. Tick. Tick. Better find a bomb shelter.” I looked to my left and right as if the club was about to be hit by a nuclear blast.

She put her right hand on my forearm. Her fingers felt gentle through the material of my shirt and I remembered our night from two weeks earlier. “I’ve been thinking about what you said,” she said.

I took my cigarette from my mouth, tipped the ash from the end of it into the ashtray, and returned it to my lips. “And? Come to any conclusions?”

“I wish I could do what you did,” she said.

“You’re too young to be empty,” I returned, placing my hand over hers. As my skin touched hers, I asked myself why I had put my hand there, and settled on the idea that I did it to comfort her from an unspoken angst in some way.

As she looked into my eyes, I noticed something inside her own eyes that spoke of a deep gloom that could only be noticed in a certain light, at a certain distance, under the

exact conditions she and I were now in. This young lady, only about half my age, was in agony. The beauty of her features hid her sorrow well; when she smiled, almost everyone else’s heart would soar the sky like a free bird to see such perfection on a human face. Somewhere inside Sarah’s soul, however, was an inky darkness that was struggling to get out, to be free of its chains. At the center of those amazingly bright eyes of hers was a dark beast. I knew that beast because that beast stood behind me every day as my own shadow.

“Then again,” I mumbled, “maybe you’re not.” I leaned to her right ear and whispered, “Did you miss me?”

She leaned to my ear in response and whispered as quietly as I had to her, “Yes, I did.” Her cigarette had gone out, so she took mine from my mouth, put it between her lips. I lit another one for myself.

“Do you want to give everything up and be free of all that?” I asked. I picked up my drink and took a long sip from it. “It may not be what you need to be free. Everyone’s different, you know.”

She continued to stare into my eyes, that darkness at the center of her clearly fighting just behind the thin mask that was her perfect young face. “It’s an intoxicating thought,” she admitted.

I broke our stare and scanned the smoking room for another couple, eventually finding a young man and woman seated a few yards away in a dark corner. “You see those two? The man’s wearing a red shirt and the woman has her hair up.”

She looked about until she’d spotted them and then said, “Yes.”

“Tell me what you think they’re discussing.”

Sarah shrugged and said, “No idea. Maybe he’s saying something like, ‘Let’s have sex.’ That would fit right in at a place like this. I certainly get hit on enough around this place by guys like that.”

I chuckled. “Probably. When you stop being attached to things and people,” I said, “you think less about what is going on in your own self and start putting two and two together about what is going on around you. You start to see how utterly ridiculous almost everything really is, and best of all, you….” I stopped myself.

“Best of all you what?” Sarah eventually pushed, her eyes intently locked on my mouth as if she was waiting to see what I was about to say.

“Best of all,” I continued, “you stop worrying about when the sun is going to burn out and destroy the planet, and you start to live your life with a certain amount of clarity and freedom from the shackles inside your heart and mind. You stop hearing your shadow scream at you for its freedom once you free it and start listening to it whisper its advice in your ear.”

I could tell from her expression that she was listening to what I was saying. I didn’t want her to; I wanted her to get up and run away from me as if I were some kind of crazy man she’d met in a night club. But she stayed in her seat, watching and listening as if I had something to say. Everything bright and cheerful in me wanted to explain to her that once one had reached clarity and freedom, there was no seeing the world through the haze of deception one had become used to over years of self-defense against the truth about the world; maybe that would scare her off. Everything bright and cheerful in me, however, was not what she was looking at. The darkness behind her pupils was fixed on everything dark and melancholy in me. She had seen past my friendly face and was

appealing now to that part of me that kept my decency and goodness in balance such that the end result evened out and kept me from being destroyed by imbalance. She was beseeching my shadow.

“Do you understand what I am saying?” I finally asked. Although I was not putting on a face, I imagined that my face must have appeared very serious to her. This was the face that she longed to see on another human being.

“I want to see things the way you do,” she finally replied.

“No,” I said. “You want to see things the way they really are. It’s not the same thing. There’s nothing interesting about me or how I see things.”

She continued to stare into my eyes.

“The sound you hear, the one that makes you worry about the future, is your shadow, hollering to be free. I can see it in your eyes, kicking and screaming.”

She blinked, as if embarrassed to have been staring so intently, but then she regained her composure.

I did not expect that I would say the next words that came out of my mouth, but my shadow betrayed me and let them be released into the noise. “If I were so damned enlightened, I would get up right now, walk away, and never look back. I wouldn’t want to need you, or anyone else for that matter. I wouldn’t feel the loneliness of seeing only one brand of cigarette butts in my ashtray in the morning.”

She shushed me by putting her right index finger over my upper lip until my mouth was closed. In the pounding of the night club music around us, we did not speak another word, but instead sat, smoking and drinking, for what seemed like hours but was probably only a handful of minutes. When it came time to get up, I did, and she followed me again to my hotel room. Her cell phone started shaking and glowing a few minutes into our walk, but she turned if off and put it in her purse.