I despise smokers.
With their receding gums and teeth like overripe bananas going black with spots. Never cheap out on anything that separates you from the ground: shoes, mattresses, and your teeth. Or their Duchenne smiles with perfect teeth and imported memory foam mattresses I couldn’t afford even after several months’ salary.
***
After graduating from a liberal arts college, I made cold calls from lead lists purchased from companies that trafficked in personal data at an unlicensed real estate company. The office had a half-man-sized fishtank glowing with blue light next to the front desk. The small thermometer always read 29°C; algae grew wantonly on the edge of the glass because of the cleaner’s idleness; five or six blood parrots floating and sinking around some plastic-like aquaplants. The break room had unlimited refills of salted soda crackers, Lipton Yellow Label, and central air conditioning with no temperature or airflow control. Work started at 9. Every day I arrived at exactly 8:58, inserting my finger into the punch clock. By rights I shouldn‘t have arrived early (because someone might brand me an overly eager corporate buttlicker), but the machine often needed three or four fingerprint attempts before it would register.
I always felt this job was fairly lonely. A workstation used to have two people: one to handle the conversation, one to look up and dial numbers. Now there was only one person per workstation and the computer would automatically filter and dial numbers for us. We just needed to repeat the greetings, then ask whether they were sick of their life enough that they were interested in selling their houses. The suspicious pauses and the flatness of the robot’s voice were still unsolved, and people hung up once they realized it was not human (the data shows within 0.85 seconds).
My coworker stood in the stairwell smoking through a half-opened square window every lunch break. She was slim and tall. She looked pretty when she smiled (two dimples and eight white, straight teeth). I wondered whether she’d been an ugly brace-face in high school, always with bits of food caught in the wires. I ordered roast goose fried rice in an oyster pail for lunch and looked through the restaurant’s reviews while eating. A few bites from the end, I scrolled past a one-star review with three exclamation marks: “They clearly used duck meat while calling it goose; will not be returning!!!” I looked at the scattered pieces of meat embedded in the rice; acid welled up in my throat. My coworker came in when I was about to throw away the oyster pail. The tiny break room had one table and two chairs, so she sat across from me. We shared a dry little relief that we still had jobs, then we reassured each other that we’d always be fine because robots would never fully imitate humans. “Our voices are real,” I said. “Robots can never replace what’s real.”
“Let’s hope so.” She never ate anything. She just drank a cup of not-sugar-not-milk-not-coffee (a decaf latte with artificial sweetener and almond milk) for lunch.
A blood parrot died this morning, and the cleaner had been absent for a few days, so it just floated in the water, up and down.
My coworker said it must be a bad sign. I nodded.
When I was job hunting, my mother called to tell me to pay attention to the work environment. “It would be best to have windows,” she underscored. The office did have a window. One. A floor-to-ceiling window completely blocked by dense overgrowth and some short trees with red leaves. The manager said it didn’t matter. “Phone lines didn’t need to go through the window, so tell me the difference.” If the manager said it didn’t matter, no one would say it did. The short tree had long branches that swung violently in the wind. There was a harsh sun shower with raindrops larger than soybeans one afternoon. Then the dazzling sunlight filtered through the dark red leaves and swaying branches, casting patterns like the fluttering aquaplant on the wall.
The office was attached to a residential complex with a private clubhouse, a gym with floor-to-ceiling windows along the entire wall, and an artificial lake (by the lakeside: No Swimming/No Release of Animals/No Diving/No Fishing/No Boating). Perfect. I thought to myself, then I called my mom to inform her about this job. I made sure I mentioned the floor-to-ceiling window (not that it was the only one in the entire office) and that the office was next to a lake (but not that only residents of the complex could walk by the lake—we couldn’t even get past the security gate). I have to emphasize the nature part.
We earned about a thousand dollars a month. After taxes, rent, food, discounted coffee, train fares, electricity/water/internet/management fees, there was probably a little leftover. “It should be enough to buy two or three packs of Natural American Spirit Black after each payday,” my coworker said. “It has truffle as the top note and sparkling sweet rosé’s middle and base notes,” she added. Which made the price of $20 per pack seem almost charitable because the world was marking a plate of Tagliatelle al Tartufo at $42 and a glass of Ruinart Rosé at $28.
“Oh,” I replied, “so cool.”
After lunch, the manager told us all we could pack up and go home after work that day. No need to come in tomorrow. Or the day after. Or the day after that. The latest electronic voice package was put into use yesterday, and the results were unexpected: the average continuous call duration with the machine was virtually indistinguishable from that of a real person (no one realized they were talking to a machine). Also, the cost of using the voice package was less than half of what it would have cost to hire people.
After getting home, I felt like going out to the balcony for a smoke. But I didn’t have a balcony, so I opened the window instead.
I didn’t smoke. And I didn’t know where the urge was coming from. The only cigarette I had was one my coworker gave me when we left. We left so easily — we didn’t even need a cardboard box (the job only required a microphone headset). Standing next to the clock-in machine, she held her not-sugar-not-milk-not-coffee in one hand and reached into her pocket with the other. “Celebrating the advancement of technology and the progress of humanity,” she said, looking at me as she opened the pack of Natural American Spirit with her thumb.
I didn’t smoke, and so I didn’t have a lighter. I kneaded the cigarette until it was half unraveled. I watched the brown, dandruff-like debris for fifteen seconds before I slipped the other half into my mouth and started chewing. Saliva dissolved the remaining paper. Teeth pressing, grinding. The tobacco bloomed in my mouth.
Truffle, sparkling rosé, memory foam mattress. Liar.
Scalding and acrid, my tongue had fallen off.
***
I despise smokers.
For a long time afterward, there is a metallic taste in my mouth. I suspect that afternoon, I might have gnawed on the metal railing of the balcony. But I don’t have a balcony, so maybe I was just gnawing on the windowsill.
Kate Xu is a student and writer currently based in Connecticut. She writes weird stories and collects limited-edition colored vinyl. You can also find her work in Hobart and Polyphony.