They’re prepping him for surgery now. IVs inserted in matchstick veins, secured with tape, fluids dripping at a hypnotic rate. “You’re going to feel a prick,” the nurse with the big boobs alerts him as she aims yet another needle at him like a dart. I am a prick, he thinks; he’s too tired to say it, tired and weak. But he’ll feel better afterwards, right? That’s what they told him. As long as you stop smoking. They found the pack of Marlboros tucked under his johnny shirt and confiscated it. “I can always buy more.” He longs for the days when he could smoke in restaurants and bars and stadiums and just about everywhere, looking so cool, blowing perfect rings. Before he was relegated to shrouded doorways, then 100 feet away from the door, then practically out in the fucking street. The exhaust from buses is worse, for Christ’s sake! He and his squad in the boys’ room in high school, exchanging puffs, checking the corridors for teachers that might catch them and report them to the principal. They flushed the butts down the toilet fast when they heard footsteps and cranked the windows wide open even in January. He was raised in a house of smoke, cigarettes dangling from his parents’ lips practically from the time they were diapering him. They’d flick ashes off his bassinet and douse the butts with running water, then light another. His uncles even rolled their own. Candy cigarettes in every Halloween bag and Christmas stocking. He posed with them clenched in the gap between his teeth. You look so grown up, the adults squealed. And now he was a grownup and about to lose a lung and wasn’t letting on about that carton that he had had smuggled to him and hid under his mattress. He drifts off to drugged sleep coughing and smelling antiseptic.