Free Books, Giveaways, and More!

The Man Who Murdered Himself

Cable Nash paused outside the glass frontage of the Tyrell Building to finish his cigarette. He was old enough to remember when smoking was still allowed inside public buildings, although he had been too young to smoke. Whenever Wendy started nagging him to quit, what about the cancer, think about her and the kids if he didn’t care about himself, he’d remind her of all the movies he’d sat through with his dad, watching the film through a fog of cigarette smoke caught in the projector beam, wondering if the kids sat in the non-smoking section of the cinema could see any better, or had the smoking side’s pollution filled the whole auditorium, and their lungs, too?

After a while, Wendy quit asking Nash to give up on the cigarettes. She could see it was annoying him, and when Nash got annoyed, that’s when the other guy would show up. And that other guy was one nasty, fucked up son of a bitch.

Besides, Wendy never understood what he was talking about, never got the point. Nash’s mother and father had both been chain smokers, back in the days when a person had the right to light up anywhere they wanted. And young Cable Nash had been their constant companion, an only child, subject not only to their second hand cigarette smoke, but their incessant arguing, and violence too.

Good old Mom and Pop, they were the real problem, not the cigarettes. They’d both been dead many years, but the damage they had done in Cable Nash’s childhood lived on.

That was what Dr Egelman had told him, on his first visit to the clinic.

“They gave you cancer, son,” he had said, pointing a long finger at him from behind his desk, a shock of white hair falling over his forehead. “And I’m not talking about the kind of cancer that you’ll get from smoking all those cigarettes, either.”