Free Smoke in the Room by Emily Maguire

clock beside the bed. When he began to smell sour he washed and changed his clothes. His beard grew in and his stomach turned to flab while his legs and arms became thin.
    Sky News
told him that outside of his dim, cool room bushfires raged and men stabbed each other through the guts. Adam became convinced that the land itself was murderous. Its thick, ashy air swallowed whole towns and incited men to violence. Its parched earth starved sheep and ruined farmers and smothered the dead with layers of dust. If he opened his window he heard screams, sirens, screeching brakes. He dug his travel documents out of the bottom of Eugenie’s backpack and discovered that his visa had expired weeks ago and, if he stayed in this hotel room, his cash would be gone in a fortnight.
    In the first week of January, he went searching the hung-over, streamer and beer bottle strewn city for cheaper accommodation. He told himself that moving into the Broadway flat was the first step in getting his life back together, but now walking those same streets, he saw he had only sunk further into the pit that had opened beneath him when Eugenie died.
    Looking up out of it for the first time in months, he saw the light had changed overhead. It wasn’t grey now; it was white. It hurt to focus on anything. He kept his eyes half-shut and moved from bright spot to bright spot without relief. Every office block had been constructed out of reflective glass and sparkling granite. He felt he hadstumbled onto the set of a sci-fi movie. He looked for shade or shadows but saw only light reflecting light. Women wearing yellow, citrus orange and white, white, white swarmed around him. Men in dark suits fired lethal rays as they flipped open their silver phones.
    Adam tried to imagine Eugenie walking these streets. He saw her skin crack and peel, her pale hair sparking and burning like straw.
    He squeezed his eyes closed but the white light assaulted him in sharp tiny bursts. He opened them again and spotted the entrance to Town Hall station. He lurched towards the darkness, bumping against hot skin and angry voices until he was on the escalator. Asian teenagers clustered on the steps below him and he blinked into their black hair until his vision cleared.
    Underground, Sydney was cool and dim. He had expected to see trains and tracks but instead there were hole-in-the-wall stores selling fresh juice or coffee, offering boot repair or suit cleaning. He followed the teenagers for several minutes through the subterranean maze, past newsstands, ice-cream stalls, coffee counters, a rare coin collector, a pharmacy, a florist. They stopped at an internet café and Adam followed them, then stood dazed in the doorway. His mother didn’t know about Eugenie. Breaking the news in an email would be cruel, but so too would be her reaction. The pain would still be his.
    He left the café and re-entered the maze, choosing direction instinctively, taking an escalator to a sub-level of this underground metropolis, buying a Coke at McDonald’s, listening to the thrum of invisible trains, the murmur of traffic, wondering how he had been in Sydneyso long without knowing about this other city thriving below.
    Returning to the flat and the girl seemed impossible. Stepping back out onto that bright, loud Sydney street was unthinkable. Sitting in the middle of a cavernous food-court sipping flat, watery Coke was manageable. He wondered if Eugenie had ever been here, ever sat in this space, at this pen-knife scarred table. The thought he would ask her occurred simultaneously with the thought that he wouldn’t.
    Since she died his brain had been performing this neat trick of delivering up concurrent contradictory thoughts. Like it knew he couldn’t keep going unless he believed she was coming back but that he wouldn’t find a way to keep going if he didn’t admit she wasn’t. He guessed most sane people thought that way about their own deaths: you will never