smoke day
25 Jul 2025 - Alex
For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night.
- Joan Didion, “Los Angeles Notebook”
June 6, 2023
We are visited today by a plume from up north. Warm and hollow, the light of a sallow sun casts the city in an unearthly glow. I taste the fire, taste the trees.
Quebec’s boreal forest is burning. Significant areas of Alberta and Nova Scotia are also burning. Certain U.S. states are burning as well, though for the most part they are the states that usually burn, and they are burning to a lesser extent than in the average year. By the end of the summer an apocalyptic fire will devastate the Hawaiian town of Lāhainā, but on this day in New York, it only looks as if the world is ending.
The tones—brown, yellow, orange; warm gray, dull ash—resist description. On a smoke day the sky is the color of an empty laugh. Sunshine takes on the uncanny pallor of a cheap sunset lamp. With the sun dimmed eclipselike, a robin’s evening song rings out in midafternoon.
A water droplet lands on my head and I look up: no rainclouds, no air conditioners. By the time I come inside, the drops are all spattering over the sidewalk. It is rain on the ground, but the sky was wrong. All wrong. No clouds, just smoke.
An ad for a travel booking website on a screen above the downtown entrance at the Eighth St./NYU subway station: “You were made to transcend time and space.”
Through all this I am writing, always writing, in a pocket notebook that I will fill in four days. When the nib of my ballpoint pen rubs against the paper it feels like scratching an itch.
#
Brendan cautions me as I exit my apartment building. “Someone passed out on 14th Street,” he warns. I should stay out for as little time as possible, he says, and run the air conditioner all night.
I was taking classes that summer. The girl to my right is shopping for Governors Ball tickets. The girl on my left is looking at Microsoft Office subscription plans while typing in both her Notes app and Google Docs. After class I talk with Alicia about how classrooms have changed with certain shifts in perceived social obligations around the pandemic. We are both perplexed by how people can show up to summer classes and simply decline to participate. We are the two most active students in that class but during the lecture she was doodling and I was writing this.
Nevertheless we learned that the ozone layer hole created by chlorofluorocarbon chain reactions in the polar stratosphere was, unlike most every other environmental harm, resolved by a largely successful international agreement, in part because one threat it presented—skin cancer—would have, for once, disproportionately affected pale-skinned people in the Global North: Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand.
Several acquaintances had been tweeting earlier today about the smoke. One noted air quality index readings of 158 in New York; 104 in Pittsburgh. “anyone else feel rly bad bc of this?” another wrote. I can’t decide if my head hurts or if I’m just thinking about it hurting.
I don a white N95, the kind I had worn on smoke days in high school in California, with two elastic yellow straps that secure it around my head. Inside my mask, my throat dries; outside it, my eyes sting. I perceive a faint tingling on my exposed arms as my certainty in my ability to distinguish between sensations real and imagined diminishes.
The air tastes like home. Like the days when we went out wearing masks for the first time. Aerosolized botanic and domestic matter, carried south across the Bay to where I lived.
“People who live with fires think a great deal about what will happen ‘when,’ as the phrase goes in the instruction leaflets, ‘the fire comes,’” Joan Didion writes in “Fire Season.” “People mumble as leaves crumble, fire ashes tumble,” her daughter Quintana writes in a fourth-grade poem.
A friend on Instagram, writing over a photo of the smoke day sun: “There’s something otherworldly afoot.”
A brisk breeze down the street sweeps me back to my apartment.
#
On the way to a bar called Purgatory that evening I am grasped by a sight outside the windows of the L train: suspended in the sunset, the Canadian smoke suffuses the cemetery in unearthly absolute glow.
After a few drinks we wander out back, up a gravel driveway, onto the train tracks. Having found a lighter on the patio but, being a nonsmoker, having no cigarettes to ignite, I tear a piece of paper from the notebook and light it aflame on the rail.
Ash puts their lit Marlboro Golds in my mouth for me to not inhale, Fault In Our Stars-style. Later on the back porch of their ground-floor apartment, however, I require little persuading: barely a sip of cigarette, but I draw in a breath. I puff out. Smoke emerges surreal from somewhere below my eyes. Enters my field of unbelieving vision. A strange small rush fades into the blur of late-night half-drunken delirium.
On the L train home with Trace I read Nevada and they read Let Me Tell You What I Mean.
June 7, 2023
“There’s a place that’s even worse. There’s a place called Hell,” the street preacher in Washington Square Park testified beneath hostile skies, his words amplified by a speaker attached to his waist. “Bubbling burning flesh,” the doomsayer’s fanny pack echoed. “Psychological torment.”
I had woken from restless sleep late that morning to sickly peach light splayed across my walls. A series of Citizen notifications on my phone: Someone had been struck and killed by a bus not far from my apartment.
More people have masks on outside today. The preacher wore two. The smell suffuses mine, seeping into my nostrils, my lungs. My thoughts slow; connections falter. In the park a Chimney Swift flutters overhead, snipping a labored arc through the haze. Sparrows jostle for discarded chips on the rim of a trash can. An unseen man’s cough rings out over empty streets.
I hear it said that breathing a day of outdoor air in these conditions is equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes. I find—a pleasant surprise—that the previous night (the first time tasting the moistened paper of a shared cigarette, the acrid glow following the breath, ) had not killed me. I am somewhat amused to realize that that had been what I was expecting.
Another Citizen notification: “Hazardous AQI in NYC / Recent Air Quality Index readings have currently risen above 400, a level deemed unsafe. Everyone should stay indoors, if possible.”
That day we all walk around embodying consequences. Going down the street I take into my body bits of trees. Testimonies to casualty dispersed and, elsewhere, physically reintegrated.
I register a slight nausea.
Late that afternoon I walked to the scene of the accident. I stand in front of an empty bus pulled over on Broadway. A few idle cops. It probably wasn’t the same bus but there was a stain on the pavement in front of it. Two plainclothes pull up in a silver sedan with flickering lights and chat with the uniformed officers standing by the sidewalk. After a few minutes someone drives the bus away.
June 8, 2023
A lot of things are normal again today—the sort of statement that, in being made, acknowledges the unstated need to dispute a sense that things do not feel normal.
A siren rises up as I step outside. Cloud formations are faintly visible today, evidence of lifted haze. “Two milligrams of what? Huh. OK. Is it prescribed?” asks a man on the phone walking down Third Avenue.
As a teenager, Joan Didion would type out Hemingway stories to try and figure out how his writing worked. The smoke has been clearing but I still can’t make sense of how a city changes in the shadow of fire so I get out a yellow legal pad to write out “Los Angeles Notebook.”
I briefly consider taking up smoking, at least when I’m drunk. That night of the first smoke day Trace and Ash, cajoling me into having a taste, had joked about how drunk cigs don’t count. A lot of people say that drunk cigs don’t count but they’re all joking. I think that everything counts and I’m not joking.
#
That night on the G train platform I realize with a pang that, without knowing that I had been doing it, I had been navigating to Classon Avenue. E., who had been the only reason for me to take the G train, had lived off Classon Avenue. E. had smoked Marlboro Golds and had been the only reason I had ever bought cigarettes.
Within a couple days I will have purchased a pack of Marlboro Golds. I don’t mean to start smoking but maybe I’ll be able to give them to girls at bars. After all, I already have the not-quite-empty lighters I found discarded at Purgatory. I’ll be able to say that I don’t smoke but I carry these around anyway. I won’t know exactly why but I will secretly, shamefully hope that others will think I am mysterious or troubled or selfless. I will insist (futilely) that my eccentricity is not affected. What is genuine, though, is that the mechanisms that guide my actions are unknown to me.
I stop and check my phone to remind myself of the name and G stop of the girl I am actually headed to see. On the train I run into two acquaintances who are on the way back from Kellogg’s after Metropolitan. They see that I’m reading Nevada and I admit that I got my copy at the Strand. We laugh about it all.
