The only part of the building the architects had not designed was the place where the men were allowed to smoke.
It sat behind the loading bay on the north face, where the tower’s glass gave out and turned into painted concrete. A bucket of sand. A drainpipe with rust running down from the joint. Someone had left a folding stool out there years ago and nobody had taken it away.
Haoyu got there first and stood under the overhang with his phone face-down in his shirt pocket, where it buzzed against his ribs every few minutes.
Yuchen came out after him and held the pack toward him with both hands, the way a man offers a business card to someone he wants something from.
Chunghwa. The red, the gold gate, the columns.
“Where did these come from?” Haoyu said.
“My uncle. He gave my father four cartons for the holiday, and my father quit in 2019.” Yuchen thumbed one up for himself. “My mother told me to bring them to work. Share with your colleagues. Make a good impression.”
“On who?”
“She didn’t specify.”
He had the lighter out and held it across first, cupping the flame although there was no wind. Haoyu leaned into it.
The first pull was good the way expensive things are good. It was smoother; the smoothness was the product.
“That’s a real cigarette,” Haoyu said.
“Sixty-five a pack.”
“For sixty-five it should carry me back upstairs.”
Past the barrier the plaza opened into the park, and the park was full. Rain had come through in the night and taken the haze with it, so Wutong stood green and close over the far edge of the city. A woman in a white dress was being photographed against the skyline while a man crouched beside her holding a reflector. Somewhere behind the trees a kid had a kite up. The cicadas were going in the ficus like a machine nobody could switch off.
“You can see the mountain,” Yuchen said.
“Thirty-five.”
“Thirty-five what?”
“Saturdays. This year. Counting this one.”
Yuchen smoked and looked at the kite. The release was at the end of the month, and after the release there would be the next release, and the next.
“My father calls Sunday morning to ask whether I’ve been promoted,” he said. “He has one son. One son, one salary to bring up at dinner, just mine.”
Haoyu’s mother sent photographs of an apartment in Longgang. Sixty-eight square meters, north-facing, and the price underneath, and no message with it. Just the number, twice a week. He was the whole retirement plan of four grandparents and the arithmetic of it was not a thing you could say out loud in a stairwell.
“Think about it like this.” Yuchen knocked ash against the lip of the bucket. “The apartment isn’t ours. The car isn’t ours. The hours aren’t ours. This,” he turned the cigarette so the ember stood up between them, “is sixty-five kuai and it’s mine, it takes eleven minutes, and nobody on the thirty-first floor can spend it for me.”
Then Haoyu said the thing he had never once said upstairs, which was that he did not particularly enjoy smoking. He enjoyed the eleven minutes. He enjoyed that the eleven minutes came with a reason attached, one nobody would make him justify, because a man standing outside doing nothing is a problem and a man standing outside with a cigarette is a man on a break.
The phone went off against his ribs. He pressed it flat through the shirt and left it there.
Yuchen looked at the pack in his hand for a while.
“Look how they did this.” He turned it around and held it up between both hands, the same way he had held it out. Along the bottom third ran a band of plain type, black on white, set in the same clean face as the brand. Smoking is harmful to your health. Nothing else on it. Above the band the gold gate sat on its red field with nothing touching it.
“In America they print a lung. An actual lung, out of an actual body, in color, and they put it in your hand.”
“I’ve seen it.”
“You can’t give a man a photograph of a lung at New Year,” Yuchen said.
Haoyu looked at the band of type, which told him the truth and asked nothing of him.
“We’re more civilized than that,” he said.
They put them out in the sand, one and then the other, and went back in through the loading bay door.