Cigarettes Under The Fig Tree
“The quieter I stay online, the saner I feel. Do you know what I mean?”
Detective Menendez shrugged. “And?”
Detective Nguyen shrugged back. “And nothing.” A gentle slap fight of shrugs. “Just wanted to share.”
It was the theme of the moment: sharing. It was a shared cigarette break beneath a fairly large fig tree in Ojai, California. Curious wasps circling around slowly ripening fruit. The two of them were supposed to be discussing The Case. The Big One. The Urgent One. The one that sat at the intersection of power and the way a perhaps significant portion of the current culture at large seemed to be forever falling down a flight of stairs, a reverse Sisyphus of illiteracy, selfishness, broad based confusion, indifference, and more. Wine bottles of hate uncorking themselves, insisting that wine never tasted better than when there were pieces of cork floating in the liquid itself.
“You know,” Nguyen said, blowing smoke upward, watching it make its way through the leaves, the way it bumped into insects and seemed to push them gently towards dreamland. “I was wondering why we weren’t talking about —”
Menendez cut her off. “Whether or not the Liberty can go back-to-back? I don’t know. What do you think?”
“No. Come on. I think —”
“We should call it a day and just find some cinema doing re-runs of David Lynch’s work?”
Nguyen threw her hands outward and made a face in what was understood to be a ‘What the hell?’ gesture. Menendez shrugged and put up a hand of her own. The implicit proposed game was jettisoned.
“Sorry. I’m sorry.”
They retreated into silence, cigarettes, figs, wasps and golden sunlight once more.