Four Milligrams of Phenomenology
53
the cigarette became part of fingers, the fingers part of cigarette. Megan had her
longer hand.
Megan also talked about what she did with the smoke she expelled if
she happened to be flirting with someone while she smoked with lengthy
elegance. ‘If I’m interested,’ she said, ‘I like to blow my smoke up around the
side of his face, like a caress.’ She stroked the side of my face in an upward
motion, to show me what she meant. She indicated with her fingers that the
smoke trailed up beyond the face and whispered away. I asked her if it worked.
‘They get the message,’ she replied. ‘How about if you want them to leave you
alone?’ I asked, intrigued. ‘Then I blow it straight in their face, into their eyes,’
she said, grinning maliciously. ‘It’s like giving someone a smelly slap in the
face, without getting charged with assault.’ ‘Does anyone do it to you?’ I asked.
‘Yep. You can tell, if a man lets the smoke just slide out of his mouth, as
opposed to blowing it out while he’s perving on you or flirting with you, you
can be pretty sure he wants to slide something else into you as well.’46
Megan’s descriptions here are rather synasthetic. Megan can ‘slap’ and
‘caress’ a face; the latter will perhaps lead to more caresses. These are practices
of touch; Megan’s language indicates that her smoky work at the bar is a kind of
touching. Here, touch is synasthetically crossed with vision, and with smell, as
well as with taste and hearing. The smoky slaps and caresses Megan gives to
unsuspecting men are felt as a touch of breath to face as much as they are
visually tracked as they arrive, as much as they are smelled and tasted as they hit
the organs of taste and smell, as much as they are heard; delivering a smoky slap
involves a quick exhalation of breath, and delivering a caress involves a long,
drawn out whisper. Megan delivers multisensual perceivable slaps and caresses.
These are not simply precursors to touch; they are visual, olfactory, audible, and
touch sense-able, all at once. Divisions between singular sensual ways and
means of interacting with the world are also dissolved in Megan’s practice of
smoking.
The examples I have included in this section on intercorporeality and
dissolvability show that inhalation may make for pleasure more than pain.
Extensions of smoke into the air may indeed lead to pain, and not to Flavor
Country, as is the case with Megan’s slap, and with Laura’s inability to maintain
a conversation owing to her exhalation practice, that led to conversational
inability and to hurt feelings. The destination of Rejection Island is