Around three in the morning he felt a particularly manly urge, the sort of vital and ineluctable urge that distinguishes the real men from the mere males. So he left his recon post outside the building he’d been patrolling, and walked around the block to search for the scratch that would satisfy his itch. The early spring air was brisk and clean, as sterile as it was likely to get before the onset of the dirty humid summer. The streets he walked on were so lifeless that you could hear the crunch of an ant as you trod upon it. Even the hungry cats of the horny neighborhood seemed to have turned in early.
He hadn’t walked long, perhaps a few clicks of the sidewalk around the circular block, before he chanced upon a convenience store—it lit up his path as if it had opened just that night, and just for the purpose of his finding it. As he approached the entrance he instinctively unbuckled the sheath that housed his blade. He reminded himself that there was nothing to be afraid of inside, and as if to reinforce this, he said aloud, with an almost incantatory reverence, “This is a safe place, there is no danger here,” punctuating his chant by re-buckling his sheath. And then the automatic doors opened for him and he stepped through.
The store itself was literally nondescript, nothing at all remarkable about it, or, more precisely, its shelves were so ordinary that his eyes wandered away from them without leaving anything imprinted in his brain’s memory banks. Boxes of various shapes and colors stood next to bottles of various sizes, but they seemed to only exist to draw attention away from themselves and toward the direction of the counter. There behind a bulletproof transparent plate stood a man and woman of indeterminate age or origin—they looked like anyone you might pass on the street, and who you’d perhaps honor with a glance before turning your eyes toward something of greater interest. They gave him an impatient stare, as if they’d been waiting for him for a very long time. The woman leaned over to the man and whispered something to him, and then the man cleared his throat and said, “Well, sir, will that be all?” Then the woman nudged him and he said, “I’m sorry, I meant to say, may I help you, sir?” The old woman nodded and looked relieved.
“I don’t know,” said Adam, “I’ve forgotten why I’ve come in here. I wanted something, but now I can’t remember what.”
The woman’s face suddenly took on a most disconcerted shade and she raised her hand to interrupt the man who was about to speak, and she said, “I think we can help, sir. I think it’s allowed. Here, have these, I believe these are what you wanted.”
She handed Adam a package through a slot in the window. He reached for it, but the woman held on for a few seconds, looking into his eyes with something that was either fear or mild amusement—he couldn’t tell—and only released her grip when the man gently squeezed her shoulder with a trembling hand.
“Thanks, thanks a lot, how much do I owe you?”
“Oh, no, please” said the man, “nothing at all.”
“It’s on the house,” shouted the woman, as if hoping that the whole world would hear her, and she added with a great sigh of relief, “now you may go.” She’d played her part, and so she made a motion with her head in the direction of the door. Adam took the hint and exited. Once outside, he unwrapped the package he’d been given, and held the contents up to the light. Cigars—that’s what the label said, in thick black letters against a plain white background. He removed one and examined it, as if unsure whether the thing was actually what had been advertised. He sniffed it lightly at first, then ran it slowly across his nostrils, inhaling deeply. It certainly had the odor of an unlit cigar, it even felt and looked like a cigar. And yet something seemed off, inauthentic, as if everything that had happened all night, from the first urge that took him away from his station to the walk to the store to the acquisition of the cigar to the walk back to his post, was one set-up after another, all united under one whole set-up. He began to suspect that he was the actor in someone else’s script. But then the thought came to him, Aren’t we all just clay figures in someone’s menagerie? He didn’t know why he thought such a thing, but it felt right; in fact, it felt like the most correct thing he’d ever thought in his life.
When he returned to his post, he settled back into his nook outside the building. Sitting there in the bushes, on a tarp over a hollowed-out area of the earth, he was awakened once again to the purpose of his mission, and all his dissent was drowned in that moment. He unbuckled his blade and sliced away the top of a cigar, and lit it up, raising an acrid fog beneath the tree. And with his manly urge now sated, he leaned back against the tree, under the shadow of the slanted light, and exhaled a great cloud, and waited for the ineffable thing to announce itself.
