Work Text:
After he quits, Meyer starts smoking in his dreams. A sixty-year, five-pack-a-day habit has a way of sticking with you.
They’re good ones, mostly.
In one, he’s sitting on a stoop on Delancey Street. It’s summer, maybe 1916 or ‘17, and it’s not quite a memory but it might as well be. Charlie’s sat beside him and they’re blowing smoke rings, competing to see who can make the biggest one or send it out the furthest. Sometimes he’ll blow a small one through one of Charlie’s, like a basketball through a hoop. Sometimes they’ll overlap in the air, before dissolving into indistinct wisps.
In another, he’s stood on a balcony. Sometimes it’s marble, sometimes gilded filigree. Beyond is a black void, but when he breathes out, the smoke fills the empty space and shapes begin to emerge. A city skyline. Sometimes it’s Manhattan, sometimes Havana, sometimes Jerusalem, sometimes a mix of all three. He builds skyscrapers with his breath. Hotels. Casinos. Temples.
But then there’s the one where he’s taking a drag, holding it in, and goes to let it out but finds he can’t. It sits inside him, coiling in his chest. He takes another, and he can’t let that one out either. He keeps going, breathing in and in and in and never out, and there’s a cigarette for every nickel he’s won and lost, and there’s one for his mother, his father, his sisters, for Anna and the children, one for Rothstein, a whole pack for Benny, and two packs for Charlie, and his body’s filling up with smoke and it’s burning holes in his lungs, his stomach, his heart.
Then he wakes up gasping for air, and while Teddy fetches him another pillow, he wonders if one more smoke would do him that much harm.