Sam Lipsyte - Venus Drive

“What I want for my birthday,” I said, “all I want, is for both of you to stop smoking.”

It was my moment of genius, if it is true we are each of us blessed with one. They quit, of course, for a while, at least. Wouldn’t you, if you were as strong and beautiful as my mother and my father were one summer when our town built a beach?

I stop off at Gupta’s. He’s flipping through a skin mag, all those smears of color, angles of receipt.

“That’s what my ex-girlfriend looks like,” I say.

“Is this what you did to her,” says Gupta, “or what you saved her from?”

“I said looked like her. How’s it going?”

“Very well,” he says. “I’ve got an assignment. A magazine overseas. Real money.”

“What about this one here?” I say.

“I’m not talented enough to write for this one. I don’t know all the ways to describe the big tit.”

“You can learn that,” I say. “You just have to care.”

Gupta laughs, reaches back to my carton, the soft-packs.

“No,” I say.

“Box?” There’s a shade of panic in his voice, the order of things thrown.

“No,” I say.

“What do you want?”

“I forgot,” I say.

“No one forgets,” says Gupta. “You didn’t forget. Our brains carry blueprints for a thousand years. There is no such thing as forgetting. You just can’t find it right now.”

“So, in a thousand years someone will remember what I wanted just now?” I picture a man like me, a man of my build, my coloring, my gait, stitched, gathered, helix’d with my codes. He sits in his commuter pod and whistles through space, maybe en route to Jupiter to sell some ads. A vision of Katrine, stepping out of the bath tub, explodes with the terror of endless sameness in his mind.

“Exactly,” says Gupta, pounds his fist on a great glossy ass.

I’m almost out the door when I remember.

“I know what I want,” I say. “I want something new. Something light. Less tar.”

Gupta slides the gleaming thing across the counter. There’s a new world there inside the package, new words ringed around the paper, new speckles on the tip. Life, people, happiness, a jaunty, easeful kind of breathing. I’ve seen print ads for this brand, admired them, or more than admired them. I have communed with them. They have spoken to me from billboards, from the backs of scented magazines — no cowboys, no mountaineers, just a handsome couple poised at the end of a plush settee. Maybe they’re Katrine and me, hosting a party, the heave of voices, the crush and chatter, friends in the living room, on the threshold, in the vestibule, the two of us puffing there so elegant, our free hands laced together on the cushions, our free hands squeezing, pulsing words of oath: I Love You, I Love You, Let’s Make it Work, I Love You So Much, Let’s Not Ever Ever Quit.