Drunken Angel

     Tony sat on the wide ledge. Dangling his legs into the abyss, he took a drag from the strong tobacco cigarette. He enjoyed the way it scratched his throat, provoking a cough from lungs grown weary over the passing years. He hadn't smoked a real cigarette in years, so the smoke now left his mind pleasantly numb, which was already clouded by the tart taste of expensive whiskey.

With his left hand he held onto the candelabra fastened to the terrace railing, while with his right flicked the half-smoked butt into the deep. Carefully, almost tenderly, he pushed aside the nearly empty bottle, then slowly stood up embracing the candelabra, and took a deep breath of the fresh dawn air.

With closed eyes, he savored the distant rumble of the slowly awakening city. But suddenly he felt dizzy, and the high-altitude wind caught the midnight-black fabric of his unbuttoned jacket, and for a split second he felt his body lurch dangerously outward, and his weak hand slipping from the sweat-slicked metal, so felt himself about to plummet from the light of the rising sun down onto the gray concrete below.

Yet he didn't tip over; he narrowly escaped the fall, and the sudden relief made him laugh aloud.

*****

He knew he was of no value, indeed, that he was utterly and irrevocably worthless. His parents had instilled this in him from early childhood. His father took particular pleasure in humiliating him, while his mother, in her own narcissistic-martyr style, employed far subtler methods.

Later, for years, he had to listen to his teachers praise his two older brothers for excelling in every subject. Their parents would preen with pride at end-of-year ceremonies, while his three years senior twin-brothers completely ignored their accidental little brother.

The intense emotional symbiosis binding the twins together precluded any capacity for empathy toward others. They never formed a genuine attachment to anyone. Unlike him, they handled every situation with ease and won every competition. Knowing he stood no chance, Tony never even attempted to team up with them.

His status as an outcast was so glaringly obvious that even outsiders noticed it immediately. The first and last love of his life was Mila, a blonde from next door discarded by the twins; from who he believed, quite rightly, that she was with him solely to remain close to those two golden boys. She made this painfully clear at their wedding, when, shortly after the ceremony, Tony caught the threesome in the restaurant restroom.

From then on, he turned to the bottle more and more often and smoked incessantly, until one fine day he found himself unable to enter their shared apartment because his charming wife had the locks changed. Naturally, the family blamed him. He waited outside the gate until morning, wanting only to speak to her, to tell her how much he loved her and that he would do or endure anything for her sake. Instead, however, he flew into a rage and struck her, because by the time Mila stepped out of the house, he had rehearsed his grievances in his mind so many times that he was incapable of thinking rationally.

Of course, Mila filed a police report and immediately petitioned for divorce. Using Tony's money, she hired a top-notch lawyer who stripped him of everything he had earned up to that point. He also lost his job because of the police case. At first, he slept in cheap motels, then in homeless shelters, and finally on the streets, as drunks weren't tolerated anywhere.

He managed to get into this elegant hotel by luring the doorman into a nearby alley with all sorts of absurd promises, knocking him unconscious, and then, donning the man's uniform, sneaking in to the service elevator, and he rode it up to the eighty-fifth floor, where he knocked at a random door.

A handsome man in a suit opened the door, so Tony pushed his way in without a word, and after a brief scuffle, tied him up and gagged him. He headed straight for the minibar, then ordered a full bottle of whiskey over the phone, specifying only that it be the most expensive one.

He filled the bathtub to the brim with hot water scented with bath salts. Already in the steaming mist, he opened the bottle and taking deep swallows with smiled happily at the ceiling. He thought of nothing, simply enjoying the bliss of the moment, which reminded him of a life long past. Whistling, he shaved and slicked his wet hair back, just like his favorite actor in that terrible movie. How handsome he had been.

He ordered crab salad and wine, then returned to the whiskey. He went through the wardrobe, finding a pack of expensive cigarettes in the pocket of a black suit and its exotic aroma made his heart ache.

At first, he simply inhaled their scent with closed eyes. Slowly breathing in the bittersweet fragrance. He recalled the last time they had been in his pocket, when their aroma had permeated the fine fabric. That was why he had chosen this suit now, even though he had always hated black. It reminded him of mourning, not elegance. As if the wearer were heading to a funeral, or laid out on the bier himself, ready to be swallowed by the darkness of the earth.

The thought made him shudder, yet he quickly held the familiar tobacco to his nose again and, finally doing it in style, leisurely lit up.

The first drag hit him as hard as one of his older brothers did during in their childhood, when Tony wouldn't stand for him taking his new pencil case. Of course, he had lost that fight, too. The second drag already smoothed the corners of his mind like a fine friend, and the third one buzzed his brain like the routine of an old lover.

Feeling dizzy, so he stepped out onto the huge terrace, bathed in the rosy glow of dawn. Below, the sleeping city was only just preparing to awaken, and with closed eyes, he immersed himself in the shimmering image of a long-lost mirage, savoring the smoky draught and the fragrant tobacco until he felt his mind dissolve into the cloudless beauty of the pink sky.

*****

Some eyewitnesses claimed that he laughed out loud while falling, while others swore on their lives that it was not human being who plunged from the clouds, unfolding its huge, black-feathered wings as it fell and flying far away up into the dawn-bleeding clouds.

[Inspired by Ambrose Bierce: An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge – "All my writing, like a Möbius river turning in on itself, originates from here and flows back to this very place."  – A.S. Field]