An old, slightly tan-skinned trash picker offers a lighter to young office staff in blue short-sleeve mechanics shirts. He sits in front of a small convenience store by the side of the road with the highway above them. His red scooter is parked on his right side, a couple of feet away. It was late around 10.00 pm., and the rain poured down nonstop.
"Thanks, would you like a cig?"
"No, I already quit years ago, but I don't mind a little flog one in a while."
The older man replied with a grim smile in the corner of his mouth. He drags his stuffed crate full of recycled trash to one side, then slowly bends his knee to sit down by the man's left side. They sit silently under the neon lights of the convenience store for some time before a young man starts speaking.
"Bad week, huh?"
"Not exactly good, but not worse. What about you?"
"Well, I am kind of being pulled to the fence at the moment, so "at the fence situation" is what I would say about this week, maybe."
He had just been told earlier this week that he had been promoted to a larger branch downtown, which happened to be the same place he had worked as an entry-level staff member. He was relocated to the current local branch in a suburban region because his performance did not meet the team manager's expectations, and most colleagues didn't favor him because he tended to make simple mistakes, or "weird" was what they would call him. He also faced his mother's medical bills and mortgage during that hardship period, but he managed to clear out most of them several months later.
"I don't know if it's the right decision to go back to that place. It still feels odd somehow to face multiple shell masks."
He holds a filter end in his hand and blows out a flow of white smoke through his narrow, shaped mouth.
He looks up to see a streetlight on the highway, a string of rain passing by it as if it were a threat unfolding from a roll of threats.
"Did they give you the reason why they wanted you there?"
The older man asked while scratching his face.
"They said that I was one of the few people who were capable of working with brilliant people under immense pressure to regulate the soul in those power-hungry engines for sports cars. To my surprise, it is one of the higher authorities that pushes the idea of having people with the same heritage as the front line for the company.
He signs, then smokes the last bit before throwing it to the ground.
"Somehow, they offer to pay upfront with my boss for all compensation to move me back. My hand already tides loosely."
The night fell into silence, the sound of raindrops growing louder than their breath. The man's eye became blank again as he twitched the cigar box around in his left hand. He pulls out another cig and lights it.
"How excited?."
The older man mumbled out as he took the lighter back from the young man.
"If I were 50 years younger and being put into your shoes now, I would have already packed my bags and left for that money."
He burst out laughing as the young man turned to face the older man by his side, smiling with yellow teeth, showing off.
"What is it about to laugh like that?"
"Nothing, don't get me on the short side of the stick. I was once a man with burning passion and a craving for success, just like you. It would have been ridiculous to turn down such an opportunity to glory in life."
The older man took out his half-ripped wallet and showed a picture of himself at a similar age to the young man. A young man's eyes sparkled as he caught a glimpse of the elder trach picker's backstory.
"That's cool, you got a nice apartment and a lot of friends. Is that the downtown apartment?"
"Yeah, the best on that road. I was working as an early incubator to launch the innovative recycling tech company. My friend and I were so excited with all the money in front of us. We were young and wild, sometimes we deliver, but mostly mess up. I handle lots of stuff behind the screen while my friends were sorting out money."
The older man paused to inhale the smoke from the young man's cig. He takes the filter out of his mouth to catch a break with the cold breezes in the air.
"It's such an irony when you're too ambitious, you often fall hard, right?" a young man asks.
"Not hard, more of hitting rock bottom. We defrauded investors and fabricated documents to get our product on the market before others. It involved multiple parties, but I just got unlucky to be backstabbed by one of the co-founders. From then on, what I can remember after that was 20 years behind a rotten metal bar and an unfinished cycle of monthly debt from not one, not two, but everyone's greed, you can name it my modeling wife, the demanding mother-in-law, alcoholic best friends, and my dead-bed son."
He laughed out loud with a slight sneezing sound. The young man was shocked by how he foretold the story as if it were a joke that had never existed.
"Where are they now?"
"They all left; none lived past retirement age or survived a bullet. My son signed the DNR paper before he turned into a vegetable after I was released. I put him in the church's chimney last year. It was around the same time I found out I had a lung tumor."
The young man froze for a moment, almost dropping the cigarette from his mouth.
"I'm sorry for your loss."
"Don't be so sorry, there's no such thing to be sorry, it's all of my own doing, and it could not be denied."
Both of them stop for a moment to look over the other side of the street, following the sound of a couple in a big argument on another side of the street. One of them decided to get in the taxi and left the other behind.
"People still chasing money these days, huh?"
An old trash picker speaks up as he watches the screen unfold before him.
"Not everyone, I would say. I am happy with where I am now until early this week. I just had a gut to ask this lovely waitress at the cafe on a date, and I don't feel comfortable getting back in that concrete forest again."
Young man rubs his left eye, then scratches his head in frustration. He never realized how he had arrived at this point in life, where he became an object to be pushed around indefinitely, right when he found peace.
"Can I ask you something? From amateur pilot to Icarus"
"Go ahead, I am all ears." The older man replied as he packed everything and prepared to leave.
"What matters most in life? A dignity of morality or the gloriousness in life?"
The elder trash picker stood for a moment before turning around to face him.
It was a silent moment that lasted longer than any part of their conversation.
The older man stretched out his back and answered the young man's question.
"If dignity is edible, then the stock market would be deserted, police officers would get laid off, and there would be no more news of food-hunger or war. Everyone lives in harmony. People get what they desire, but human desire is endless, and we take more than what we give. It's a survival instinct. We did everything to reach that point in life, despite the sacrifices one is willing to take, even if it means taking another life."
He walked close to the young man and patted his shoulder.
"You still have time, and you know yourself better than that. Maybe you already answered that question a moment ago. Everybody has a choice; it just depends on how they use it to make the best of their life, whether it costs emotional detachment."
He smiles back at the young man, then walks over to pick up the cart.
A young man looks into the distance, trying to catch the words of an ill, older man.
Somehow, he had figured something out long before that day, but he had still not broken through to his self at that point.
Young man, get up and prepare to return to his scooter. Turn to the older man to bid farewell, but the ill man speaks up first.
"You might want to slow down on those cigs; you will die before you even have kids with that sweetheart of yours."
The young man giggles and takes the older man's world into his mind. The old trash picker walks out with his crate into the distance, and the sound of plastic bottles rolling around in a crate slowly fades.
The young man felt as if he had lifted a mountain off his chest. He takes out his phone and texts his boss about a meeting on his promotion, then calls the waitress about his arrival tonight.
He hops on the scooter and drives off in the opposite direction, leaving behind his doubts.
