1
A nurse in white clogs hurried along the corridor. She had to give the boy with the cuckoo clock heart a sedative. His family stood around the bed like awkward strangers. The doctor, a smoked-down cigarette between his fingers, had excused himself. He had been trained to observe the observable. The dusk was all old doors and blank windows, a memorial to lost sailors.
2
The crowded elevator disappeared between floors. Pedestrians stood weeping at the crosswalk. She still loves you, said the old man walking a dog on a rope. I smelled the salt of the nearby tears. It took two or three matches before the light would stay lit.
3
The light doesn’t last all that long, of course, but as long as it lasts, we become like souls with red-painted toenails, the fallen factory chimneys along the Merrimack, dancing peasants scantily clad amid the snow of a Russian prison camp.
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Human Smoke
Nicholson Baker