With a little less than half his mind on the cigarette between his lips, Dave mistook a drag. A sharp bitter slice caught at the back of his throat. He began hacking at it, his brain still thinking about the thing he couldn’t stop thinking about. Shortly before his smoke break, he’d heard Lizzy, manager of another team/office pregnant lady, asking Carol, occupier of the cubicle next to Dave’s, if she’d received the anonymous email that was just some weird article from an address that was just some numbers, and Carol saying no and telling Lizzy she shouldn’t open it, and Lizzy, so vehement about not opening it, hadn’t even let Carol finish her warning. ‘Anyway, yeah, I didn’t get it,’ Carol said, before Lizzy said, ‘Huh,’ and went back to her office. 

Huh? That was it. 

Dave hacked at the sharpness again and it got sharper. He held his smoke out in front of him and looked at it like it had picked on him in grade school and lost a couple inches to him during puberty. He thought for the fifty-eighth time in three weeks that smoking was the stupidest thing he did and as long as he continued doing it, it would be hard for him to have any intellectual ground to stand on. He wasn’t really concerned with cancer or emphysema so much as someone taking him seriously as a thinker or even a person to talk to—it wasn’t 1968 anymore, it wasn’t romantic, it wasn’t tough. But then again, how many someones were there, really? 

He quickly found himself back at Lizzy’s use of the word weird, he hacked again, thinking one more hack would do the job. Weird?

“You alright?” Evan asked from a billowing cloud of vapor.

“Yeah,” Dave said, the word punctuated by another hack at the thing still clinging to the back of his throat. Weird though? He thought. How did she know it was weird when she didn’t even open it? He’d been going for overwhelming when he sent it. It wasn’t weird, it summarized a study done by the U.N.—the United Nations for God’s sake—and it layed out a scenario wherein: even if the human race were to throw the parking brake, spin the steering wheel and drive as fast as their global economics and industry could take them away from all the cattle farms, clogged freeways, coal plants, and other catastrophe making, the Earth would continue to warm for at least another thirty years. Dave, having looked around and seen no sign of any governing body doing anything other than speed towards a cliff’s edge without so much as a thought of tapping the brakes, while barely trying to make good by dropping international treaties and proclamations out the window like empty Big Gulp cups, wondered how a person—youngish, smart, bright, pretty, liberal, full of ideation and climbing the corporate ladder at an efficient rate—like Lizzy, could justify squeezing out a kid into this death trap that couldn’t even boast seat belts anymore. 

He wished he could have seen her face when she’d asked Carol about the email. Get a better idea, some idea. He’d been disappointed in her not seeing the obvious insinuations he was anonymously trying to make. Mostly he was baffled by Lizzy thinking 946851000@troubadour.net would be sending out company-wide emails containing links to harrowing articles about climate change. He didn’t know her well and wasn’t on her team and they’d only ever shared a head nod or how are you in the break room, but impressions had been made. Perhaps he’d overestimated. 

He took another drag out of spite—for himself or the smoke he wasn’t sure. He watched Evan’s cloud drift off into traffic, thinking there was no way vapes were any better for you than cigarettes, no way. At least cigarettes were dry. Vapor was inherently moisture and moisture, by logic of drowning and the like, had to be one of the worst things you could fill your lungs with. He kept this spiel to himself, knowing Evan didn’t want to hear it for the sixteenth time. Their relationship was tentative and based almost entirely on these bad habits. The amount of people at the office stupid enough to be doing such things was slim and the entirety of those who weren’t women stumbling towards a harrowing middle age were two, Evan and himself, so Dave did his best to keep Evan clear of the hypocrisy. It was only a matter of time and research for his theory to be proven out anyway.

“It’s crazy,” Dave said, looking across the busy street, distracted from his distraction. A woman sat alone and idle in an empty parking lot, a phone to her ear. The exhaust of her SUV, which could comfortably seat eight and only sat one, looked worse than one of Evan’s concentrated exhales, only without the respite of an inhale. 

“What’s crazy?” Evan asked, following Dave’s disapproving gaze.

“That people do that,” Dave fought against his irritated throat with another drag. A war of attrition he wouldn’t lose, but continued to feel stupid about. 

“Check their phone?” Evan asked. 

“No,” Dave said. Evan wasn’t stupid, but optimism, Dave theorized—in this day and age—was tantamount to it. “Never mind.”

“What, that she’s sitting there with her engine running?”

“I mean, yeah,” Dave said, a little meakish for his taste. 

“C’mon, dude, I bet you light up a smoke after you start the engine, get whatever music you listen to going, and whatever else, before you make the most efficient use of every precious drop of gas, right?”

“I guess,” Dave mumbled into the butt of his smoke. He wondered again for the sixty-third time why he invited Evan on breaks. Figuring Evan was probably wondering for the eighty-ninth time why he ever said, sure. 

#

Dave tapped at his pack of cigarettes, stood it up on his desk, flipped its top open, and eyed his last two smokes. He felt stupid about doing this for the fourth time in the fifteen minutes since he’d shown up, which was an hour earlier than he had to be at work and would require him to make up some excuse and leave early. It was stupid. There was a growing list. The best thing would’ve been to lay low and not give anybody any reason to suspect him of anything, but he couldn’t help himself. He definitely could, but he didn’t. His mind went over how he rushed to get to the office early and didn’t stop on his way to drop eight dollars and seventy-nine cents on a pack. For the four hundred and fifty-eighth time, he wondered why in the hell he still smoked, flipped the pack shut, and went back to idly bouncing back and forth in his chair.

He’d spent over an hour sitting at his breakfast nook table the night before—the only desk-height surface with accompanying chairs in his shoebox of an apartment—scanning articles for Lizzy the pregnant lady in hopes that he’d find just the right one. He couldn’t stop thinking about her lack of reaction to his first effort, and even found himself so concentrated on it and her, that at times he had to backtrack whole paragraphs while reading. He kept wondering if maybe he’d overestimated her, thinking her decision to make a baby might be little more than something along the lines of everyone else, like: ‘We have all the other things two hetero people might want in a diminishing middle class, and at first we weren’t interested, vacations and all, but then we were desperate for a little person to trap inside our growing anxiety about getting old and being alone. We even get lonely sometimes now. So we started doing a lot of unprotected sex, and soon loneliness won’t even be an option once we’ve got little Jeffrey or Angela or Dumpsterfire on the way.’ Dave knew she didn’t talk like that or think like that, but still found himself giggling while perusing “Severe Drought Caused by Climate Change Main Instigator of Syrian Civil Conflict,” wishing they’d used the word ‘war,’ which was what it was. Conflict took some of the teeth out of it.

She wasn’t stupid, an optimist maybe, but not stupid. Dave was very much of the opinion you could tell a lot about a person’s intelligence by the way they spoke, and she spoke well, which was really the source of his building exasperation at how she could do such a thing in the first place. She had to know there was a bleak future waiting out there for little baby Dumpsterfire. To be safe though, he’d landed on a more blunt approach and went with, “Climate Change and What the Syrian Civil War Forebodes.” Forebodes really sold it. 

 He wasn’t sure his prolonged search mattered much now, though. It was going to be a juggling act trying to get a look at the impact—if any—the emails would have on her when she opened them up. He knew what time she came in, 9ish, so he could try and sneak some glances or time a trip to the breakroom in such a way that he could walk past right as she got settled and, at the very least, saw the emails there in her inbox. He was beginning to wonder if he could get out of there and come back and have nobody notice he’d already been there. Get a pack, have twenty-two smokes and not be suspicious. The stupidity was compounding around his ill-conceived plan. It wasn’t even a plan, he’d just been all fired up when he got out of the shower.

He looked up from his last two smokes and realized he hadn’t even signed into his computer yet. 

“Hey! Early bird,” a guy named Greg said as he whizzed by Dave’s desk, turning Dave’s heart into one of those springy, cartoon, door stoppers. 

“Yeah,” Dave mumbled, long after Greg was off to another part of the office. His phone read 7:46 a.m. and he was really starting to question this whole venture and whether the term, this venture, couldn’t be broadened to include, not just his emailing articles about the slowly approaching apocalypse to a pregnant lady, but also his life and everything in it. 

Dave pulled his errant hand away from his last two smokes for the sixteenth time, rested it on his mouse and left it there, motionless.

#

As 9ish approached Dave kept his eyes peeled and his head on the proverbial swivel. He felt like he’d feel even more stupid if he showed up early for no reason, even though he had, in fact, shown up early for no reason. So when Lizzy speed-walked past his cubicle, her eyes stuck on the carpet in front of her boots, he had a bit of a shock at seeing some version of the thing he thought he wanted to see. Unable to stop himself, he popped up like a gopher and gawked as Lizzy practically threw herself down into her chair and pushed her head against its fancy, manager, neckrest thing, the momentum carrying her around until she faced the wall. 

“What’d ya suppose that’s about?” Carol asked, gophering out of the cubicle next to Dave. 

Dave, already jumpy from his doing everything other than playing it cool, laying low, and allowing himself one of his last two smokes, almost clutched the pearls he didn’t own when she asked this otherwise innocuous question. 

“Yeah, I don’t know,” he muttered to the glass of Lizzy’s office, “she looks upset.” 

“Ya think?” Carol said. 

Normally such a tone would have brought up some ire in an almost always grumpy Dave, but at that moment, pretty sure he was seeing a mild shake in Lizzy’s shoulder, he couldn’t tell where his feet ended and the ground began. So he said, “Yeah,” and didn’t look at his feet to see where they ended.

“Between you and me,” Carol leaned forward, put her elbows up on the edge of their shared cubicle wall and waited for Dave to join her in the physicalness of secrets and conspiracies. His pressing his butt and hands into the edge of his own desk seemed to do the job. “There’s been . . .” Carol paused and looked back over her shoulder at all the people in the world who didn’t give a shit about their conspiracies and secrets, “com-pli-ca-tions.”

The word was whispered and dragged out into a full sentence of roughly five words. It took Dave, who had to scrape his eyes off the back of Lizzy’s head again, a second to register just what was complicated. Carol must have seen this delayed flashbulb of realization fire in Dave’s face because she sadly nodded in the affirmative. 

“I know,” Carol mouthed then, keeping her conspiratorial posture long enough for it to be deemed properly sympathetic. Then she sank back down below the cubicle’s wall. When his thoughts settled down enough for him to think, he figured Lizzy must have gotten his emails already and that was what was distressing her, because the pregnancy and her husband and the amount of money they both made after taxes were probably pretty good. It certainly had nothing to do with the baby, the baby had to be fine. It was his emails distressing her to the point of staring at walls or crying or whatever she was doing in there. Probably the emails? Almost certainly.

The guilt he was trying to deny made him glance despite his better judgment. Only it wasn’t the back of Lizzy’s head his eyes bounced off, it was her eyes that his eyes were sucked right into, like they’d been pulled on a string. He saw the upset in her and wasn’t good at peopling enough to register whether it was a general type of upset she was throwing around to any takers or if it was very specifically being beamed at him. 

Without any thought to it at all, Dave raised his motionless hand up next to his face in a gesture some might refer to as a wave. 

Lizzy did not wave back, instead the corner of her mouth turned into an agitated little question and she tucked herself into her desk with a military purpose. 

#

Dave sat at his breakfast nook table/desk, looking at the cheap Venetian blinds hanging floor to ceiling over the sliding glass door that led out to his little balcony. The evening’s light made them glow vertical lines into his breakfast nook/kitchen/dining room. He didn’t like the idea of people looking at him in his place and had hung the cheap blinds over the otherwise naked expanse of glass. He knew the sun was blasting that naked expanse, reflecting the world back at any potential looky-loos. But he also knew there were specific angles one might catch—either by chance or skill—angles that would allow them to see him sitting there in a t-shirt, holding another t-shirt, breathing heavier than a man should breathe while just sitting there in a t-shirt. 

His masturbation was a small celebration of the day’s sizable victory. For after he’d sat himself back down, stunned at Lizzy’s dismay, a real sense of paranoia began creepy-crawling. Even though troubadour.net email accounts were something from his junior high years and he was almost certain Miller, the IT guy, wouldn’t have heard of it, and they’d have to know his IP address to know where the links were emailed from, he’d been pretty sure he was finished. For those first fifteen minutes or so, he’d braced himself, waiting for some office building plaza security guy to come watch him put his things in an empty paper box and maybe Peter, the HR guy, would stand there and watch too.

When Evan, for the first time in some time, came to his cubicle to ask him if he wanted to do a break, the knots that had loosened like the laces in shoes you only ever slip on, unknotted themselves altogether. 

On break, Dave told Evan his theory about how if you look around at people in their cars on a nice day—like a perfect, 72 degrees, sunny, maybe a little breezy day—you’d find almost all of them would have their windows up, which meant they had their AC on very slightly or their heat on very slightly. None of them able to enjoy a perfect day driving around with their windows down. Evan appeared almost impressed. ‘That’s crazy,’ he’d said, ‘It’s like one of the best things you can do.” Dave agreed, it was one of the best things you could do. Then, unable to help himself, he indicated how it was an indication of how separate human beings were becoming from their environment. This got a slightly less enthusiastic, ‘Yeah, huh,’ from Evan, before he pursed his lips around his vape and made it make its continuous hissing pop noise. Even so, as he returned to his desk, Dave practically dared Lizzy to look at him accusingly as a new and bolstered man. She hadn’t. 

Now that he’d excised those bolstered feelings into the T-shirt he let drop to the floor, Dave decided to swing his hammer of justice a little truer than he previously had. He tipped a large glass of juice to replenish his fluids and began his search of very specific terms. 

He went with: “The Ethics of Having Children in a Climate Crisis,” plain and simple. Then one from an online magazine even he thought might be a little harsh, one that didn’t dilly-dally with their severity and find some guy for the last paragraph to reassure everybody about there still being time to pull the parking brake and spin the steering wheel and drive like bats out of hell in the other direction and not just admit the human race is pretty much screwed. 

Their headline was: “To Breed or to Definitely Not Breed.”

He went to work on time the next day and waited, and waited some more, and the clock in the bottom corner of his left-hand screen and the one on his wrist and the one on his phone, all ticked past 9 a.m. like it was just another minute of another day. Then they all whirred right through 10ish and 10:30. As he began to feel his triumph surge and dwindle and mix with a tentative feeling that could have been the opening act of appendicitis, he reluctantly inched his head over the partition until Carol caught sight of him. 

“She alright?” He asked it as nonchalantly as he could muster, as though he didn’t really care, but was, after all, a person, who was just putting forth a perfectly compassionate question about another person. 

Carol turned the corners of her mouth towards the floor and shrugged her shoulders. It must have been clear to her he was waiting for just a little more, so she gave him just a little more by mouthing the word, com-pli-ca-tions. 

He mouthed the word, oh, as he sank back down into his chair. His appendicitis feeling crept up into his stomach and pulled down on itself. In all his triumph and vindication, he’d managed to forget all about this ominous word Carol kept throwing around. It wasn’t until then that he’d allowed himself to realize the what and the possible hows of com-pli-ca-ted. Really realize. A memory of Lizzy suddenly burdened Dave’s brain, hands pressed into her lower back, 4ish months of belly pushed out like show and tell, her pretty smile flashing as the middle-aged lady smokers gathered around her like she was the end of a pilgrimage. He remembered the exchange of anecdotes between the group, those who had had children and those who had only known people who had had children. As if all child-having were the same throughout time, even especially if you were dumping one out into the rapidly approaching apocalypse. 

This last nasty thought made his sinking appendicitis feeling pinch at some portion of his insides and the pinching made him hope Lizzy would show up fresh from a business lunch, well-fed and smiling, ready to open her emails because everything else in her life was going so swimmingly. 

She didn’t, and it was at this point that disaster struck.

#

Eighteen sleepless hours later, Dave leaned forward in a waiting room chair and felt a hand placed softly on his shoulder. Perhaps the only soft thing about his stepfather Bruce he’d ever known. A recent change in light of current events. Everything had changed. 

“It’s gonna be alright. . . . She’ll be fine,” Bruce said, large question marks hiding in plain sight. 

The lurch in Dave’s gut, the jerk in his knee—based on what the doctor had laid out slowly and deliberately about his mother’s condition—was to brush the hand off, turn to Bruce and tell him things were not alright. Things were either going to be hard or get bad and “alright” was pretty far from factoring in. He’d heard the tears waiting in Bruce’s declarational questions though, and it stopped him from turning or saying anything. He knew Bruce was talking mostly to himself, because even though Dave loved his mother more than any other person on this lonely planet, by simple calculations, her wellness or lack thereof, would affect Bruce in a much more brutal and drenching way. Dave would miss lunches and phone calls and dropping by just to say hi because it felt like it had been a while. Bruce would miss that while—whole days, months, the rest of a lifetime. Very probably maybe, according to the doctor. 

The reiterative pat of Bruce’s soft hand sent Dave straight through the floor, where he found himself knotted in the throat and gagging on sobs. 

“It’ll be alright,” Bruce told the universe a second time.

“Yeah,” Dave choked, nothing left in him that could confront either himself or Bruce about the reality of the situation. So he didn’t, he just placed his hand over Bruce’s while they waited for some type of future to come crash into them. 

When he was able to finally catch an even breath and feel his cheeks begin to dry, Dave dug into his front pocket, pulled his already half-crushed pack out, and contemplated them. He squeezed his anger and hurt into the pack, then stopped himself. The sway of their availability, harder to set aside than he’d ever want to admit.

“You’re still doing those, huh?” Bruce said, echoing the sentiment of Dave’s mother. 

“Yeah,” Dave said. 

He shrugged off Bruce’s hand along with this well-worn point of contention between the three of them. He felt ready to leave their soft truce behind just as quick as they’d found it. 

“Ah, I’m sorry,” Bruce said, his voice weighted with regret.

Dave’s elbows bent and he slumped back over his knees. The tone of Bruce’s assent made him want to find those same feelings—soft ones. So he pushed his smokes back in his pocket, tapped the edge of Bruce’s knee and told him, “It’s alright.”

#

Dave stood in the break room, gripping the handle of the coffee pot as if it were the only thing keeping the undertow of everyday shittiness from pulling him back out to his cubicle and the looks Carol will give him. Letting him know that she knows and feels terrible about it. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been slumped over the counter looking down into someone’s empty coffee mug. It felt like he’d been in the same slumped position since the hospital. He pushed at his empty pocket for his smokes, knowing they were in some other part of his life. The same half-crushed pack from the hospital. He’d guiltily dragged himself away from Bruce, lit one outside the emergency room doors, stomped it out after two drags and hadn’t craved one until now. He wanted nothing more than to fill the mug in his hand and teleport to the parking lot where he could light new ones off the old ones and sip and not have to see that look on anyone’s face or acknowledge that they were acknowledging ‘his loss.’ 

It was his second day back after a two weeks off that was both too short and too long. He was realizing there was no right or proper time for mourning. A person was gone for the rest of the time you’d be around. Never to be heard or seen again. Favorite things gone with them: meals un-recreateable, jokes that lingered from childhood and survived the teenage years, to reblossom in adulthood, would now fade until gone. All things large and small, wiped from the face of the Earth. There was no time frame to properly mourn and two weeks felt intensely too short. 

At least it did when it hadn’t felt entirely too long. His and Bruce’s unified soft truce, born in the dead of an emotional night, didn’t look the same when it woke up the next morning in their new reality. Its hair twisted up against one side of its head, eyes puffy and dark, the sour smell of sleep, the sharp smell of morning breath. They’d done their damndest to clean up their getting along minus mom and make it presentable to itself—Dave had even felt a quiet pride in his efforts—but there was too much history between the two men and the person who had actually joined them together was gone. 

Mom.

Dave let go of the coffee pot, thought about putting it back in the machine and instead, slouched down into a chair that managed to be more uncomfortable than the hospital waiting room’s. He felt he had to decide whether he should try to hide his mope and keep it in a personal place where none of these people he really knew had to see it or whether he should wear it like a shirt he couldn’t quite pull off, but had been so expensive he had to try. When he was about ready to give up thinking altogether, round-toed boots and purple leggings took a step past him, stopped, and turned. Another soft hand was placed on his same shoulder in that same way. So gentle was it that it didn’t even startle the concentrated contemplation of his mourning. It felt like it belonged there, like he’d been waiting for it.

“Hey, Dave, sorry about your mom,” was softer than the hand.

The citadel of discretion he’d brick-by-bricked throughout his adult life wanted him to bristle at this woman and whatever nameless individual had shared his most personal news. However, when he turned to commence his bristling, he saw her belly first, hovering there next to his head, and when he looked up he found Lizzy’s eyes coated in some type of compassionate wetness, a sad tilt pushing a laugh line on one side of her face. It was as if she were reaching out with magical power into an ocean he only just realized he’d been drowning in. When his eyes dropped back down to the belly hovering by his head, he was unable to catch the mope and keep it restrained. It jumped out of his shoulders and face like someone had turned a valve. She could have just walked by, got whatever she’d come in there for and been on her way. He wouldn’t have even lifted his head. But she hadn’t and so he had.

Lizzy, soft hand on his shoulder the whole time, lowered herself into the uncomfortable chair next to his and leaned over her unborn child to take his hand in both of hers. They sat like that until Dave’s blubbers died down to whimpers. He pulled his third tissue as sniffles came in to finish things up. His hand only left hers when he had enough coherence about himself to feel weird in the world again. 

“There, that’s good,” she said, giving his shoulder a couple gentle pats. He believed her.

Unable to put this woman through another bout of his sobbing, Dave sought to change the subject and said the first thing in his head that managed to poke out into the half-light. “How’s your kid-having going?” he said.

Lizzy smiled at his peculiar question like a person he could get along with and said, “It’s a lot.” Finally pulling away from him to place both hands across her pregnant belly, she made small concentric circles of meditation Dave knew he’d never grasp. She tilted a blissful smile down at her stomach and it brushed against Dave’s loss like branches in a breeze. 

When she looked up from her ruminative hands, eyes twinkling, Dave asked, “Can I ask you, like, a kind of a personal question? Since we’re being vulnerable and whatever.” His mind had entered a fog that made his stupidity gentle.

“As long as it’s only kind of personal.” 

Her smile broke through his fog to tell him it was a joke.

“Do you worry about having a kid? Like, you know, now?” 

“I’m scared shitless,” she said.