A Needle In The Vein

The highway above groaned with morning traffic, and Greg woke to it the way most people wake to an alarm, grudgingly and with his whole body fighting the process. His tent was a single-person backpacking model with a broken zipper, held shut with a braid of zip ties he’d threaded through the pull tabs. The sleeping bag inside smelled like a wet dog that had died in a brewery, and he’d long since stopped noticing.

He lay there for a moment with his eyes open, cataloguing his body. Left knee aching from where he’d fallen on the concrete near the Morrison Bridge two nights back. Mouth tasting like an ashtray floor. The specific hollow of withdrawal sitting behind his sternum, not screaming yet, just clearing its throat. He had a little brown tar wrapped in foil in his jacket pocket and the knowledge of it was the first real thought he had every morning, a small warm fact to orient himself by.

He unbraided the zip ties and crawled out into the grey Portland morning.

The camp spread under the bridge in the way that homeless camps do, which is to say it had its own logic that made no sense from the outside. Four tents in various states of structural integrity arranged around a central clearing where someone had set a paint bucket on its side. It was filled with ash and the end of still smoldering embers. Tarps were strung between the bridge’s concrete pillars with paracord and bungee cables, and beneath one of them sat a collection of garbage that belonged to a man named Denny, who had not been right in the head for the better part of a decade. He organized his collection with the seriousness of a museum curator. Flattened cans sorted by color. A garbage bag full of other garbage bags. Fourteen single shoes. A car door that had taken him three days to drag from the lot off Burnside, which he’d leaned against one of the pillars and which he referred to, without irony, as the front door.

Denny was already awake. He was almost always already awake.

“Morning Greg,” he said, without looking up from whatever he was arranging. He was laying out bottlecaps in a row on a piece of cardboard, turning each one so the logo faced the same direction.

“Morning,” Greg said.

He found his coffee can near the remnants of last night’s fire, filled with water he’d collected from the drainage pipe at the edge of the underpass. He set it over a small fire he built from a stack of cardboard and a broken down wooden pallet he had found two days ago in a recycling bin. While the water heated he went through his jacket pockets and took inventory. The foil with the tar. Half a blister pack of something he’d been given last week and hadn’t identified yet. Forty cents in dimes. And a Ziploc bag of floor cigs, twenty-two of them, each one rolled tight and uneven from the shreds of tobacco he’d collected over three days of working through coffee shop ashtrays and the sidewalk gutter in front of the bar on Sixth.

He took one of the floor cigs for himself and lit it with a stick pulled from the fire, and it burned the way they always did: hot and fast and tasting faintly of lipstick and old filters. He smoked it down to his fingers, drank his coffee black, stood up straight, and began his day.

The dumpsters behind the strip of restaurants on the other side of the overpass were his first stop. He’d learned the rhythms of them over two years of working the same route: which ones the kitchen staff left propped open, which ones the managers locked, which ones had been recently emptied and were therefore useless. He worked with a shopping cart he’d taken from a Safeway parking lot and modified with a milk crate zip-tied to the front and a bungee net over the basket. In two hours he’d collected a cardboard box of aluminum cans, a length of copper wire stripped from something electrical that someone had thrown away.

He smoked another floor cig on the way back.

Back at camp, a woman named Trace was sitting outside her tent painting her nails with a bottle of polish the color of dried blood. She was forty-three but looked sixty, with the particular sunken quality around the eyes that came from years of meth. She’d been at the camp longer than anyone, which meant she operated with a low-grade territorial authority that nobody formally acknowledged but everyone respected.

“You got any of those cigarettes,” she said. It wasn’t quite a question.

“Two for a quarter,” Greg said.

She looked at him. “I got a bump.”

Greg considered the bump against his remaining tar and the arithmetic of the day ahead. He handed her two cigarettes and she passed him a folded piece of paper no bigger than a thumbnail. He tucked it into the blister pack pocket.

By noon he’d done two more dumpster runs and had the cart nearly full. He stopped at the scrap yard on Powell, which smelled like hot metal and oil and the particular industrial sadness of things that had been used up. The man behind the chain link weighed his haul and handed him eleven dollars and change. Greg pocketed it, walked to the Shell station, and bought a lighter because his had finally run dry.

He did the tar in the Shell bathroom. Just enough. He was careful with it, the way someone is careful with the last of something they know they can’t replace easily. He cooked it in the bottle cap he kept in his breast pocket, drew it up through a cotton pinched from a cigarette filter, and sat back against the wall of the stall with his eyes closed while the warmth unfolded through his chest like a slow fist unclenching. The ache behind his sternum dissolved. His knee stopped its commentary. For twelve minutes he sat in a gas station bathroom on the floor with his knees up.

Then he stood up, splashed water on his face at the sink, and walked back out into the afternoon.

On the way back to camp he worked three more ashtrays, a planter box outside a law office, and the thin gutter strip along the curb near the bus shelter where smokers congregated. He added to his bag methodically. He’d roll tonight after dark.

When he got back to camp, a man named Curtis was awake and loudly unhappy about something, which was Curtis’s general condition. He was standing in the middle of the clearing with his shirt off despite the cold, gesturing at Denny’s car door.

“It’s gotta go,” Curtis was saying. “I keep walking into it in the dark.”

Denny did not look up from his bottlecaps. “It’s the front door,” he said.

“It’s a car door leaned against a pole.”

“It’s the front door,” Denny said again, with perfect calm, as if explaining something to someone slow.

Greg set down his cart and sat on an overturned crate and began sorting cans. Curtis eventually ran out of steam and went back in his tent. Denny finished his bottlecaps and started over from the beginning, turning each one. Above them the highway drummed with the steady pulse of the city moving through its afternoon, and the Willamette River smell came in on the breeze, green and cold. Greg lit his third floor cig of the day and sorted aluminum until the light started going orange.

He rolled that night with his headlamp on his forehead, bent over the piece of cardboard he used as a workspace, fingers moving through the routine of it: split the butt, shake the shreds onto the pile, twist and roll, seal with a lick, set aside. He made thirty-one cigarettes by the time his eyes got heavy. He kept eight for himself and put the rest in the Ziploc.

He did a little of Trace’s bump before bed, just to level out, and lay in his sleeping bag with the highway singing above him and listened to Denny out in the dark, rearranging things, putting them in order only he understood.

The construction site was three blocks east of the Hawthorne Bridge, fenced off with orange plastic mesh that had been doing a poor job of discouraging entry since November. Greg had walked past it a dozen times without stopping, but this morning something made him slow down at the gap where the mesh had pulled free from its post. He looked in, and saw the pile.

Copper pipe. A serious amount of it, stacked behind one of the portable toilets in a way that suggested someone had meant to come back for it and hadn’t yet. Lengths of it ranging from a foot to nearly four feet, some fittings still attached.

He looked both ways with the practiced casualness of a man who had been doing this long enough to make it look like nothing, and pushed his cart through the gap.

It took him only five minutes to load what he could carry. He threaded back out through the fence and started east toward Powell, the cart riding low and grinding against every crack in the sidewalk with the extra weight. Twenty-two pounds, the man at the scrap yard told him, running the magnet over it out of habit even though he clearly knew what copper looked like. He counted out sixty dollars in tens and fives. Greg folded the money into his inner jacket pocket without counting it back, which was the kind of trust that came from doing business with the same man for two years.

Sixty dollars was a good day. Sixty dollars was a real day.

He stood on the sidewalk outside the scrap yard and did the arithmetic in his head. Tar first, because he was running low and the withdrawal from that came faster and meaner than the crystal. Thirty for tar, and maybe ten or twenty for crystal. That left him some change for food or incidentals or whatever the day decided to require.

He headed downtown.

Vic operated from a changing set of locations that he communicated through a system Greg had never fully decoded, but which seemed to involve which corner his cousin’s bike was locked to near the transit mall. Today the bike was on Yamhill, so Greg walked up Yamhill and found Vic in the alcove beside a shuttered tax preparation office, wearing a yellow rain jacket and eating chips from a small bag with focused energy like someone who hadn’t eaten since yesterday.

“Greg,” Vic said.

“Vic,” Greg said.

They did the part where they stood near each other for a moment and watched the street, which was just courtesy, before Greg told him what he needed. Vic nodded and started moving through his jacket pockets, and then paused.

“You wanna try something?” Vic asked.

“Depends,” Greg said.

Vic reached into the inner pocket of the yellow jacket and came out with a small glass vial, the kind that looked like it might have once held perfume or a laboratory sample. He held it out. The substance inside was black. Not dark brown, not dark purple, black, the way oil is black, and it moved when Vic tilted the vial with the slow reluctance of something much thicker than it should be. Like motor oil that had been sitting in an engine for fifty thousand miles. Greg could smell it from where he stood even through the rubber stopper: the heavy, biting smell of diesel and something else underneath it, something organic he couldn’t name.

“What is that?” Greg asked.

“Called ichor,” Vic said. “Ten a hit.”

Greg looked at the vial and then at Vic. “You’re out of your mind.”

“It’s good,” Vic said. “Real good.”

“Vic, that looks like something that came out of a machine. I’m not putting that in my body.”

“I already did,” Vic replied. “Few days ago. I’m just coming down now.” He paused. “Still kind of coming down.”

Greg looked at him more carefully. Vic did look like something was still moving through him. His eyes had a quality that wasn’t quite glassy and wasn’t quite sharp, something in between, like he was watching two things at once.

“What does it do?” Greg said.

Vic considered this for longer than Greg expected. “Makes everything else seem like practice,” he finally said.

Greg didn’t say anything for a moment. He looked at the vial again. The stuff inside seemed to resist the light in a way that didn’t make complete sense, sitting there in the glass like something that did not want to be looked at.

“I guess I’m interested,” Greg said. “Give me a hit. I’ll think about it. Maybe I’ll just sell it to Curtis.”

He left with twenty dollars of crystal in a folded piece of aluminum foil, thirty dollars of tar in its own foil fold, and the small black vial in his breast pocket where he usually kept his cooking bottle cap. He’d moved the bottle cap to his jeans and was aware of the vial against his chest with every step, heavier than something that size should be, or maybe he was imagining that.

He took the long way back, cutting through Old Town, and stopped at the dumpster behind the Vietnamese sandwich shop on Davis because the lid was cracked open and that was always worth checking. Inside, under a flattened cardboard box, he found a plastic bag with six banh mi wrapped in paper, close-dated but not yet gone, soft and still carrying some warmth from having been wrapped most of the day. He put them in the milk crate on the front of his cart and stood there for a moment feeling the specific satisfaction of found food, the sense that the city had offered something up without being asked.

Sixty dollars in copper. Food from nowhere. He was doing alright. The day had a different quality than most days, a looseness, like something had decided to go his way for once.

He was thinking about this when he noticed the man.

He was half a block back, on the same sidewalk, in a white suit. Not an off-white, not cream, white the way a dress shirt is white when it’s new. The man was tall and Greg couldn’t make out his face clearly at this distance.

Greg turned left at the next block without signaling it with his body, just turned, and pushed the cart around the corner and stopped and waited. He counted to fifteen and looked back around the corner.

The man was still coming.

Greg moved faster, cutting through the parking structure on Third, rattling the cart down the slope to the lower level and out through the exit on Second, then north half a block and east again through the alley behind the furniture store. He stopped behind a commercial dumpster and held still, breathing through his mouth, listening.

Trucks on Burnside. A siren somewhere north, moving away. Pigeons doing their pigeon business on the loading dock above.

Nothing else.

He waited three minutes, then came out and walked the rest of the way back to camp without looking behind him. By the time the bridge came into view he’d talked himself down. It was the crystal withdrawal playing tricks, the way it always did near the end of a supply, turning strangers into threats and shadows into people. The man had probably turned off somewhere. People wore white suits. That was a thing that happened.

He got back to camp, unloaded the sandwiches, held them up, and announced there was food. Trace came out of her tent, Denny materialized from wherever Denny went, and even Curtis emerged and took one without saying thank you, which was about what Greg expected.

He ate his own sandwich slowly, smoked a floor cig after, and sat with the good feeling of the day for a while before he let it go.

That night he cooked the tar in his tent with his headlamp on. He did it slow and careful, the warmth coming up through him like water rising. As he lay back, the highway above him became a river of white noise as the vial sat in his breast pocket against his chest. He told himself he’d look at it more seriously in the morning, in daylight, when he could think about it straight.

He was asleep before he finished the thought.

Greg woke with the particular sense that something was wrong before he could identify what it was. He lay still for a moment in the sleeping bag with his eyes open, running through the inventory by feel. Jacket on, which was normal, he slept in it. He reached into the breast pocket.

The vial was gone.

He sat up and checked the other pockets in rapid succession, the efficient search of someone who had been robbed enough times to know exactly where he kept everything and exactly when it was missing. The tar was in his jeans, untouched. The floor cigs were where he’d left them. But the foil fold with the crystal was gone along with the vial.

He unbraided the zip ties and came out of his tent.

Trace was sitting in her usual spot with a coffee she’d gotten from somewhere, holding it in both hands, watching him emerge with the expression of someone who had been waiting.

“Before you say anything…” she started.

“Where the hell is my dope?” Greg said.

“I didn’t take anything,” she said. “But I saw Curtis coming out of your tent around three in the morning. I was up. You know I don’t sleep.”

Greg looked at Curtis’s tent. The zipper was down three inches from the top, which meant he was in there, which meant the coward hadn’t even had the sense to be somewhere else when morning came.

He crossed the clearing in eight steps, grabbed the zipper tab, pulled it down hard, and the sound it made was appropriately aggressive.

Curtis was sitting cross-legged on his sleeping mat with the foil open on his knee, a glass pipe in his hand, already smoking, the chemical sweetness of the crystal coming out of the tent in a wave. He looked up at Greg with the bright uncomplicated eyes of someone who had recently remembered that everything was fine actually.

“Morning,” Curtis said.

“Give it back now asshole,” Greg said.

“Greg, man, I was just borrowing a couple hits, I’m going to pay you back, I swear on my mother I’m going to pay you back, you know I’m good for it.”

“You’re not good for anything and you know it. Give me the foil.”

Curtis handed over the foil with the expression of a man making a great sacrifice, and Greg looked at what was left, which was maybe three quarters of what he’d started with.

“There was something else,” Greg said. “Small vial. Black stuff in glass.”

Curtis’s expression shifted slightly. “That little perfume thing?”

“Where is it?”

Curtis reached into his sweatshirt pocket and produced the vial and held it out. Greg took it and looked at it. Still sealed, the black substance sitting at the bottom, undisturbed. At least the idiot hadn’t tried to open it in the dark.

“What is that stuff anyway?” Curtis said, looking at the vial with the focused interest of someone whose primary relationship with the world was through substances.

“Vic called it ichor. I’ll sell it to you for fifteen bucks.”

Curtis squinted. “What does it do?”

“Makes everything else seem like practice,” Greg said, which was the only description he had.

Curtis chewed on that. He looked at the vial again with the expression of a man running calculations. “I got two bags of cans from yesterday. Didn’t make it to the return yet.”

Greg thought about the weight of two full bags. Twenty dollars, give or take, depending on the ratio of glass. He nodded.

“How do I do it?” Curtis said, already reaching for the vial with the eagerness of someone who had never once in his life declined an unknown substance.

“Shoot it straight,” Greg said.

He handed the vial over and watched Curtis work. Curtis had his kit out in under a minute, the spoon, the lighter, and the syringe in the arrangement of long habit. He cracked the vial’s seal and tipped the black substance into the spoon. Greg watched it move, that same slow reluctant pour, thick and light-resistant, coiling into the bowl of the spoon like something alive. The diesel smell came up immediately.

Curtis drew it up through a cotton, held the syringe up, and looked at it. The black fluid sat in the barrel like ink.

“Huh,” Curtis said.

“Go on,” Greg said.

Curtis found his vein with the ease of long practice and pushed the plunger.

Greg watched closely, intrigued at what would happen next.

For about a second nothing happened. Curtis looked like he was about to say something. Then his eyes went up. Not partway, all the way, the irises disappearing under his lids, white showing completely, the way eyes look in old paintings of saints in the moment of their vision. His whole body went rigid, sitting upright on the sleeping mat with his hands flat on his knees, the syringe still in the crook of his arm. Everything stopped.

Three seconds. Four.

Then Curtis’s eyes came back down.

The whites were threaded through with black. Not red the way bloodshot eyes go red, black, fine branching lines running out from the irises in all directions like cracks in ice. The irises themselves were nearly gone, the pupils blown so wide there was almost nothing around them. Greg looked into Curtis’s face and it was like looking into two holes.

Curtis opened his mouth, pulled in a breath that sounded like a man surfacing from deep water, and screamed, full volume, from the bottom of his lungs.

“HOLY MOTHER OF GOD THIS SHIT IS AMAZING!”

He was breathing like he’d been running, chest heaving. His hands were clenching and unclenching on his knees in a steady rhythm, the tendons in his forearms jumping with each squeeze. His head was moving on his neck, snapping from one side to the other, taking in the tent wall, the sleeping mat, Greg’s face, the tent wall again, his own hands, as though everything he looked at was equally and overwhelmingly significant.

Then he was on his feet. Greg hadn’t quite tracked the movement, one moment sitting, the next standing, and then Curtis was past him and out of the tent, crossing the clearing at a breakneck pace. He hit the gap in the fence at the edge of the underpass and was gone into the morning, his footsteps loud on the concrete before fading.

Greg stood in the entrance of the empty tent for a moment.

He looked at the spoon on the sleeping mat. The residue in it was black and it had already begun to dry at the edges, cracking slightly. The diesel smell was fading.

He picked up the two bags of cans and carried them back to his side of the camp. He didn’t say anything to anybody.

He was at the bottle drop by nine, which was early enough to beat the line that formed by ten when the regulars came in with their week’s worth. The woman behind the counter knew him by face if not by name and ran his receipt through without much conversation, which was how Greg preferred it. He came out with nineteen dollars and forty cents.

Nineteen dollars. He thought about what Vic had said, about coming down still, about the days it had taken. He thought about Curtis running out of the underpass with his pupils like open drains.

A quarter hit. That was the sensible approach. A quarter hit to see what the approach felt like before committing to the full run. He’d done enough new substances over enough years to know that the smart move with an unknown was always to come in low and feel the floor before you put your weight on it.

He found the bike on Morrison, which meant Vic was working the east side today, and he tracked the system to its conclusion and found him near the Plaid Pantry on Belmont.

Greg was half a block out from Vic when he saw the white suit.

Same cut as before, same clean white, the same quality of wrongness in the middle of a Portland sidewalk in spring. Greg stopped walking, looked closely, and the first thing he noticed was that this man was shorter than the one from yesterday. Broader in the shoulder. Different man entirely, but dressed identically, the suit bright and unsoiled, standing on the corner across the street with his hands at his sides.

Greg watched him for a moment. The man was facing his direction, but at this distance Greg couldn’t read his expression or be sure he was actually being looked at. He stepped into the recessed doorway of a closed alterations shop and watched from there.

The man crossed the street.

Not hurrying. Not the pace of someone with somewhere to be. The measured even pace of someone covering ground deliberately. The direction was toward Greg. He stepped back out of the doorway, turned north, and walked with purpose, the first rule of not looking like you’re running from something.

He went north a block, then cut east through the parking lot behind the taqueria, through the gap in the chain link at the back, into the alley, and followed the alley south until it emptied onto a different street. He stood at the alley mouth, waited, and watched the sidewalk for two minutes.

Nothing white. Nothing that moved like that.

He gave it another minute, then looped back toward Belmont on a parallel street, coming at Vic from a different angle. Greg found him still by the Plaid Pantry, now eating something from a wrapper.

“Two of them now,” Greg said, by way of greeting.

Vic looked at him. “Two of what?”

“Men in white suits. One yesterday, one today. Different guys.”

Vic’s chewing slowed. Something moved behind his eyes. “Where?” he asked.

“Belmont. Following me, maybe. I lost him.”

Vic folded the wrapper carefully and put it in his jacket pocket. He said nothing for a moment. Then: “You want more ichor?”

“Yeah,” Greg said.

“I’m out,” Vic said. “Completely out. But I can take you to the guy I got it from.”

Greg looked at him. “Who is he?”

“Somebody,” Vic said, which was not an answer. “You want to go or not?”

Greg wanted to go. He also wanted to not go, and the two feelings sat next to each other in his chest with equal weight. He reached into his jacket, got his pipe and his foil, loaded a small hit of crystal, torched it standing there on the sidewalk, pulling the smoke in slow and holding it, feeling the world sharpen and brighten around the edges the way it did, the tiredness lifting off his shoulders like something physical.

He offered the pipe to Vic, who shook his head, which was unusual.

They walked north. Greg smoked as they went, small hits to keep the edge on, and watched the street for white suits.

“What does it actually feel like?” Greg said. “For real, not your vague practice description.”

Vic walked for half a block without answering. “Hard to describe,” he said finally.

“Try.”

Another half block. “You know how every drug you’ve ever done made you feel something?” Vic said. “Like the drug alters the way you see and feel things around you?”

“Sure,” Greg said.

“Ichor’s not like that,” Vic said. “It’s like reality itself changes instead of your perception of it.”

Greg pulled on the pipe and thought about that. “That’s not a description,” he said.

“No,” Vic agreed. “It’s not.”

He didn’t say anything else about it after that, and Greg didn’t push him.

They took a bus north for eight stops before they walked six blocks east into a neighborhood that had been failing for a long time and had settled into its failure with a kind of grey permanence. The houses here were mostly rentals, the yards mostly gravel and old wood, and between two of them sat a four story apartment building that had stopped pretending to be maintained sometime around the turn of the century. The brick was stained dark from water damage in long vertical streaks. Several windows on the upper floors were covered with cardboard or plastic sheeting. The front entrance had a door that stood slightly open on a hinge that no longer quite aligned with its frame, and above it, bolted to the brick, was a panel where the intercom buzzed had been, the speaker grille rusted through and the buttons missing, just the holes where they’d been.

There was no name on the building. No number that Greg could see.

Vic stopped on the sidewalk in front of it and looked up at the fourth floor windows, two of which had the cardboard and one of which had a light behind it, dim and yellowish, visible even in the morning.

“He’s up there,” Vic said.

“What’s his name?” Greg asked.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

The stairwell smelled like mildew, old cooking, and something else beneath those two things that Greg couldn’t identify and didn’t want to think about too carefully. The carpet on the stairs had been worn down to the backing in the center of each step, and the single bulb on the second floor landing was out, so they climbed the last two flights by the light coming through the stairwell window, which was filmed with grime and turned everything the color of old paper.

The fourth floor hallway had four doors. Three of them had the particular sealed quality of spaces that hadn’t been opened in a long time. Mail piled at the base of one, a dead plant tipped over in front of another. The door at the end of the hall had light coming under it and the faint sound of something Greg couldn’t resolve into music or speech, just a low frequency presence on the other side.

Vic knocked twice.

The man who opened the door was wearing a white suit.

He was perhaps fifty, with a face that was difficult to look at directly, not ugly, not remarkable, just somehow resistant to being fixed in the mind, like trying to remember a room you’d only glanced into.

His eyes were what Curtis’s had been. The veins threaded through with black, the pupils so dilated the irises were thin rings of color around two dark centers. He looked at Greg with those eyes, and Greg had the distinct and irrational sensation of being looked at from a very great distance.

The apartment behind him was immaculate. Greg could see that immediately, even from the doorway. Clean white walls, clean floors, furniture arranged with the deliberate simplicity of a place that had been considered carefully. A bookshelf with its books in order. A table with nothing on it. The contrast with the hallway behind them, with the building itself, was so complete it produced a kind of mild vertigo, like stepping through a door in a dream.

“Victor,” the man said, and then looked at Greg. “And a friend.”

“This is Greg,” Vic said.

“Greg,” the man said, as though tasting the name. “Come in.”

They went in. The apartment was warm and smelled clean as well as faintly of something herbal that Greg couldn’t name. The man closed the door behind them and gestured toward a long white couch against the wall, clean as everything else, where they sat. Greg perched at the edge of it out of habit.

“How much were you looking for today?” the man said, remaining standing, his hands folded in front of him.

“Three,” Vic said.

“Two,” Greg said.

The man nodded as though this confirmed something. “Sit comfortably,” he said. “There’s no rush.”

He looked at them both for a moment. “Would either of you like some tea?”

“No thanks,” Greg said.

Vic shook his head.

“I’ll make some for myself,” the man said, before he moved toward the kitchen.

Greg leaned toward Vic immediately.

Vic looked at him.

“The suit he’s wearing,” Greg said. “That’s the same suit. Same as the two guys I saw following me. Yesterday and today.”

Vic’s expression was not the one Greg expected, not surprise, not confusion.

“I know,” Vic said.

Greg waited for more. More didn’t come. He was still trying to formulate the next question when the man returned with a white cup and saucer and sat down in the chair across from them, crossing one leg over the other, perfectly at ease.

“My name is Fourteen, it’s nice to finally make your acquaintance,” the man said, looking at Greg.

Greg opened his mouth and closed it. “That’s a number,” he said.

“Of course,” Fourteen said pleasantly, and sipped his tea.

He set the cup on the saucer and held both in his lap and looked at them both with an expression of genuine warmth, the kind that Greg associated with people who were either very good or very dangerous, and sometimes both.

“I need to share something with you before we conclude our business,” Fourteen said. “If you’ll allow me.”

He did not wait to see if they’d allow him.

“The most extraordinary thing about the human condition,” he began, his voice settling into a register that was neither loud nor soft but somehow filled the room completely, “is not its capacity for violence, though that capacity is considerable, and not its appetite for pleasure, though that appetite is boundless. It is the capacity for selflessness. The willingness to place another’s suffering above one’s own comfort. To reach toward another person’s pain with an open hand. There is no other force in the natural world that operates this way. A river does not divert itself for the sake of the stone. But a man will.”

Greg shifted on the couch. He wanted to say something, to interrupt, to ask about the suits or the vials or the name, but Vic’s hand came down on his forearm, light but definite. Greg looked at Vic and Vic was watching Fourteen with an expression Greg had never seen on his face before. It was open and still, like a man hearing something he’d been waiting a long time to hear.

“Kindness is not weakness,” Fourteen continued, turning the teacup slightly in its saucer. “This is the lie that the frightened tell themselves. Kindness is the only form of courage that requires nothing in return. To be kind to someone who cannot repay you, who will not thank you, who may not even notice: this is the divine action. This is the closest that flesh comes to something larger than flesh. Every tradition that humanity has ever built around the sacred has at its center, if you clear away the ornament and the doctrine, this single instruction: see the other person. Actually see them. Extend yourself toward them without calculation.”

He paused and drank his tea.

“The world does not reward this,” he said, more quietly. “The world is not organized around this principle. But the world is wrong. And somewhere in each of you, beneath everything that has accumulated, you know that it is wrong. That knowledge is the most valuable thing you possess.”

He finished his tea and set the cup and saucer on the floor beside his chair with great care, and looked at them both.

Greg felt strange. Not high, he knew what high felt like in all its variations, but something adjacent to it, a heaviness behind the eyes. He wanted to attribute it to the crystal wearing thin but the feeling wasn’t chemical. It was something else that he didn’t have a category for.

“Now,” Fourteen continued, “Before we conclude, would you both extend your palms, please. Up, to the sky.”

Vic had his palms up before Greg had processed the request. Greg looked at Vic, then turned his own hands over slowly, holding them out, feeling faintly ridiculous.

“Praise be to the prophet,” Fourteen said.

“Praise be to the prophet,” Vic said, without hesitation.

The silence held Greg for a moment. Fourteen was looking at him with those enormous dark pupils, patient, not demanding.

“Praise be to the prophet,” Greg said.

Fourteen smiled.

He reached into his jacket and produced five glass vials, empty, the same size as the one he’d sold Vic before, and set them on the arm of his chair. Then he produced a syringe, standard gauge, and rolled up his left sleeve to reveal an arm that was unmarked; no bruising, no track marks, nothing that corresponded to drug use.

He pressed the needle to the inside of his elbow and pushed it in.

What came into the barrel was black.

Greg watched it fill. Fourteen’s expression did not change. There was no wince, no held breath. He drew the plunger back slowly, the vials filling one by one with the black fluid, that same diesel smell rising faintly into the clean air of the apartment.

Fourteen withdrew the needle cleanly and rolled his sleeve back down. He handed three vials to Vic and two to Greg. The transaction was complete; there had been no money involved and Greg realized he had not thought to ask about that at any point.

“Go well,” Fourteen said, rising.

They rose. They went to the door. Greg looked back once from the doorway and Fourteen was already seated again, picking up his teacup, turned slightly away.

The door closed behind them with a soft and final click.

They hit the street outside the building. Greg kept walking for half a block before he turned around.

“What the hell was that?” he said.

Vic had his hands in his jacket pockets and his face had the settled quality it had carried through the whole visit, that openness, that unfamiliar stillness. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“You know what I mean. The sermon. The name. The man drew that stuff out of his own arm, Vic. He put a needle in his arm and pulled out a vial of black liquid, handed it to us, and you’re standing there like we just had a normal transaction.”

“It was a normal transaction,” Vic said.

“It was not a normal transaction.” Greg held up the two vials. “I’m not putting this in my veins. Whatever this is, I’m not doing it.”

“You’re overthinking it,” Vic said. “You overthink everything when the crystal’s wearing down.”

“Don’t tell me what I’m doing.” Greg put the vials in his breast pocket and looked at Vic squarely. “Just tell me what’s going on. All of it. Who is he.”

Vic looked at the sidewalk, then at the building, then at Greg.

“He’s just a man,” Vic said. “He has a sermon he wants to deliver. You sit and listen, you hold your palms up at the end and say the thing, he gives you the ichor. That’s all it is.”

“That’s all it is?” Greg repeated.

“That’s all it is.”

Greg looked at him. “And you’ve been doing this, and don’t think it’s weird in any way?”

“Yeah, I’ve done it every day this week.”

“Every day?” Greg rubbed his face with both hands. “And you’ve actually been using the stuff?”

The pause that followed was brief but it had weight.

“Not exactly,” Vic said.

Greg lowered his hands. “What does not exactly mean.”

Vic looked somewhere past Greg’s shoulder. “I haven’t used it,” he said. “Any of it. I’ve been going every day, listening to the sermon, getting the vials, and selling them. Ten bucks a hit. It’s free product, Greg. You just have to sit through the sermon, say the words, and you walk out with free product you can flip for ten a unit.”

Greg stared at him. “So everything you told me about what it does…”

“Things I heard from people I sold it to,” Vic said. “Yeah.”

“And the coming down for days…”

“I was tired,” Vic said. “I don’t know. Seemed like a good selling point.”

Greg put his hands on top of his head and breathed out slowly.

“Let me get this straight. You’re going to a man named Fourteen every day, listening to a sermon about kindness, letting him stick a needle in his arm to draw out black fluid that you sell” Greg looked at him. “That doesn’t seem at all strange to you.”

Vic considered this with more genuine thought than Greg expected. “It did at first,” he said. “But the sermons are…” He paused. “Greg, he makes sense. When he talks, things make sense in a way they don’t usually make sense. I’ve been thinking about what he says all week. About selflessness and seeing people. I look forward to going. That’s the honest truth.”

“You’re crazy,” Greg said. Not meanly. Just as a statement of observed fact.

“Maybe,” Vic said. “But I’m also up about three hundred dollars this week.”

Greg looked at the vials in his mind’s eye, sitting in his breast pocket against his chest. He looked at Vic, who had the expression of a man who had made his peace with something and wasn’t interested in unmaking it.

“Whatever you say man. I’ll catch you later.”

Greg spent the rest of the day working.

He did the dumpsters on the east side in the early afternoon while the crystal still had some edge on it, finding two bags of cans behind a bar that had clearly done good business over the weekend, and a length of aluminum conduit in the alley behind an electrical contractor’s shop that he broke down and loaded into the cart. He found half a breakfast burrito in a takeout bag on top of a trash can that he ate without deliberation, cold and slightly dry, beans and egg and a little hot sauce that still had some presence. He found a grocery bag near the bus stop that had two apples and a container of hummus.

He thought about Fourteen’s apartment the whole time. The whiteness of it. The way the man’s arm had not reacted to the needle. The way Vic had sat on that couch with his palms up and said the words without any of the hesitation that Greg had felt.

He thought about the money each vial could fetch. Two vials in his pocket. He’d paid nothing. He’d sat through a sermon about kindness that had made him feel, against his will and his better judgment, something real in his chest for a few minutes.

He thought about going back tomorrow.

By late afternoon he had a full cart, tired arms, and the crystal was definitively gone now, the world losing its sharp edges and taking on the grey padded quality of the come-down, everything slightly too far away. He was going to need more soon. If he sold the ichor, he could get some more crystal.

Maybe that was the play. Just the sermons. Just the sales. Keep his veins out of it entirely and let other people’s curiosity fund his habit. It was not the worst business model he’d ever operated under.

He turned the cart toward the bridge as the sun started dropping behind the west hills, the light going gold and flat across the rooftops, Portland doing its best impression of a city that had its act together. The river smell came in strong. His knee was aching from the long day on concrete and he was going to want the tar tonight, just enough to sleep clean.

The underpass came into view ahead of him, the familiar geometry of the bridge’s underside, the orange mesh fence, the tarps.

Curtis was doing squats in the middle of the clearing when Greg pushed his cart under the bridge.

Not casual movement, not restlessness, actual squats, full depth, coming up fast and dropping back down in a rhythm that had no sign of slowing, his breath coming in hard regulated bursts through his nose. He was shirtless despite the evening chill and his torso was sheened with sweat. He looked up when Greg came in.

“Greg,” he said, still squatting, still coming up, still going down. “Greg, Greg, Greg.”

“Curtis,” Greg replied.

“I need more,” Curtis said. The words came out at a pace that was just slightly faster than normal speech, each one landing directly against the next with no air between them. “I need more ichor I’m coming down I can feel it coming down and I need more right now, Greg, I need it right now.”

“You’ve been gone since this morning,” Greg said.

“I know, I know, I ran, I ran for a long time, I don’t know where I went, I ended up by the river and I was there for a while and then I came back.” He stood upright and began rolling his shoulders in large circles, alternating, the joints popping. “Greg, listen to me. Listen. That drug. That is not like anything. That is not comparable to anything that exists.”

“What does it feel like?” Greg asked.

Curtis stopped rolling his shoulders and looked at Greg with those eyes, back to normal now, the black threading gone, just Curtis’s regular bloodshot and hollow eyes, and in them was a frustration with the limitations of language that Greg recognized because he’d seen it in Vic’s face when he’d asked the same question.

“You know how when you dream,” Curtis said, “sometimes you’re flying, and it feels real, it feels completely real, and then you wake up and you’re just a person in a sleeping bag again.” He was talking fast, the words precise but rapid-fire. “Ichor is like your soul goes to heaven. Actually goes. But your body’s still here on earth and your body has infinite energy, Greg, I mean infinite, I ran for hours and I could have kept going, I could run to Seattle, I could run to California, my body is a machine right now.” He tapped his temple with two fingers. “And your mind. Your mind opens up. The whole universe just opens up like a door and you can see into it and everything makes sense, everything connects, every single thing.”

“Sounds like a lot,” Greg said.

“I need more,” Curtis said, the conversational quality dropping out of his voice entirely, leaving something simpler and more urgent underneath. “Do you have more?”

“I have some,” Greg said, and before he could attach any qualifier to that, any mention of price or quantity or his plan for the vials, Curtis reached into the pocket of his jeans and came out with a folded mass of bills and held it out.

Greg looked at it. It was not a small amount of money.

“Take it,” Curtis said. “All of it. Give me everything you have.”

Greg took the bills and unfolded them. He counted, standing there in the clearing with the evening light coming grey and flat off the concrete above. Hundreds, fifties, a few twenties. Three thousand dollars, near enough.

He looked up at Curtis.

“Where did you get three thousand dollars?” Greg asked.

Curtis was doing something with his hands, opening and closing them, lacing and unlacing his fingers. “A guy gave it to me,” he said.

“A guy?”

“On the street. When I was running. He stopped me and asked if I wanted needed help so I said yes and he gave me the money.” Curtis stopped with his hands. “White suit. Strange dude. Really strange dude but he was offering so I took.”

Greg was flabbergasted. He thought the situation at hand was too wild to be true.

He took the vials out and handed them over.

Curtis had the first one open before Greg had fully extended his hand, his kit out of his pocket and assembled with a speed that was almost mechanical. The ichor went into the spoon, up through the cotton, into the syringe, and into his vein in a continuous motion that lasted under a minute. He did the second vial immediately after, same arm, same efficiency, before he sat back on his heels in the dirt of the clearing.

The irises disappeared. The eyes came back with the black threading and the blown pupils. Curtis pulled in that same drowning-man breath and was on his feet and moving before Greg could say anything, crossing the clearing at speed, hitting the gap in the fence, before he disappeared from sight.

Greg stood in the clearing with three thousand dollars in his hand.

Denny was watching from beside his car door with a bottlecap in each hand. Trace had come out of her tent and was leaning against one of the pillars with her arms crossed, watching the gap in the fence where Curtis had disappeared.

“What the hell was that?” Trace asked.

“Nothing,” Greg said plainly.

He went into his tent to put the money in the bottom of his sleeping bag under the mat. He came back out to sit by the cold fire pit and load his pipe.

The crystal had him by ten o’clock, the paranoia arriving on schedule, that particular rewiring of threat assessment that turned shadows into presences and presences into certainties. He knew it was the crystal. He knew the way the drug worked and what it did to the pattern-recognition system and how it could make a pile of garbage look like a crouching man. He knew all of this, yet it made no difference.

He kept seeing white in the shadows.

Denny moved around the camp in his nocturnal way, rearranging things, and every time Greg caught the movement in his peripheral vision his whole nervous system fired before his brain could identify it as Denny. By midnight his hands were shaking. He was carefully rationing the remainder of his meth, small touches of flame to the pipe, just enough to keep the edge, because without it the exhaustion would take him and he needed to be awake.

He needed to be awake because of the white suit at the perimeter that wasn’t there.

Trace went to bed around three. Denny settled eventually, sitting against his car door with his chin on his chest. Greg sat alone by the dead fire pit with his pipe.

The highway above him began to pick up traffic volume somewhere around five in the morning, the night trucks giving way to the early commuters, the sound shifting from intermittent percussion to a low continuous roar. The sky at the edge of the bridge’s shadow began to change, the black going dark blue and then the particular grey-blue of early spring morning in the Pacific Northwest, a colorless light that arrived without drama.

Birds started somewhere in the scrub along the riverbank, two or three of them, tentative.

Greg was still sitting by the fire pit with his pipe gone cold in his hand and his eyes moving around the perimeter of the camp when the sun came up.

No white suit. Nothing at the perimeter. Nothing watching.

Just the morning, arriving the way it always did, indifferent and reliable, and Greg sitting in the middle of it having not slept all night.

The first real thought he had was eggs.

Not the abstract idea of food but a specific and detailed craving: eggs and toast and coffee that came in a real cup with a saucer, hot and refillable, at a table where someone would bring it to him. He counted out two hundred from the roll, put the rest back under the mat, zipped his jacket over the breast pocket and walked north toward the part of the city where the breakfast places were, the ones with the handwritten menus in the window and the smell of bacon coming through the door.

He found a place on Northwest Everett. He ordered eggs over easy, sourdough toast, a side of sausage, and coffee, and sat with his hands around the cup when it came and felt the warmth move through his palms and tried to remember the last time he’d sat in a restaurant. He couldn’t place it.

He was working through the eggs when he saw the white suit.

The man was in a booth at the far end of the restaurant, two booths from the window, with a cup of coffee and a plate he wasn’t eating from. He was perhaps forty, clean-shaved, with the same quality the others had of being difficult to fix in the memory, and the same eyes, black-threaded and deep-pupiled, catching the restaurant light in a way that didn’t quite make sense.

Greg put down his fork.

He picked up his coffee cup and walked to the booth to stand beside it.

The man looked up.

“Sit down, Greg,” the man said, with the warmth of someone greeting a friend they’d been expecting.

“How do you know my name?” Greg asked.

“Sit down,” the man said again, pleasantly.

Greg sat down.

“I’m called Twenty-Two,” the man said, extending his hand across the table. Greg looked at it and then shook it. The hand was dry and very warm. “I’m glad you came over. I would have come to you eventually but this is more comfortable for everyone.”

“You people keep showing up everywhere I go,” Greg said.

Twenty-Two smiled and turned his coffee cup in its saucer. “The city is a garden,” he said. “A gardener moves through a garden not to disturb what grows but to understand it. We move through the city the same way.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Greg said.

“It means precisely what it needs to mean,” Twenty-Two said, without any defensiveness.

Greg looked at the untouched plate across from him, something with poached eggs and greens, going cold. He looked at Twenty-Two’s eyes. “Why are you following me specifically? Out of everyone in this city, why me?”

Twenty-Two considered this with the air of someone giving a simple question the weight it deserved. “A river does not choose which stones it passes over,” he said. “It passes over all of them. Some stones, however, are positioned at the bend. The water spends more time with those.”

“I’m a stone?” Greg asked.

“You’re at the bend,” Twenty-Two said.

“What does that mean for me practically?”

“It means the water knows you,” Twenty-Two said. “It means you are being known.”

Greg sat back against the booth and looked at the ceiling for a moment. The restaurant moved around them, plates going by, the coffee woman making her refill circuit, a table of construction workers near the door talking about a job in Beaverton. Ordinary morning. Ordinary city.

“You’re not going to give me a straight answer to anything, are you…” Greg noted.

“I’m giving you the straightest answers I have,” Twenty-Two replied.

Greg drank his coffee. Twenty-Two straightened the edge of his saucer with one finger, aligning it with the table’s edge.

“What does Fourteen want from me?” Greg asked. “He gave me product for free. Your people gave Curtis three thousand dollars for nothing in return. Nobody does that without wanting something back.”

Twenty-Two looked at him with those deep-drilled pupils and said: “The sun does not invoice the field for the harvest. What Fourteen offers, he offers because the offering is the point. The return is not a calculation he makes.”

“Everyone makes that calculation,” Greg said.

“Most do,” Twenty-Two agreed pleasantly. “Fourteen is not most.”

Greg slid out of the booth, stood up, put forty dollars on the table for his meal. He pulled his jacket straight and looked down at Twenty-Two, who was looking up at him with that expression of patient and permanent warmth.

“You’re all insane,” Greg remarked. “Every one of you numbered weirdos.”

“Safe travels, Greg,” Twenty-Two said.

Greg walked out into the spring morning, stood on the sidewalk, breathed the cold air and thought about his next plan of action.

He turned toward the transit mall and started walking.

The meth was gone by noon.

He’d been rationing it since morning, small touches of the pipe, barely enough to keep the fog from settling. Somewhere on the bus ride back from Northwest Everett he’d tipped the last of it into the bowl, held the flame under the glass, and pulled in what amounted to almost nothing, a ghost hit, the residue of residue. He held it for as long as he could, let it out, and waited for the lift. All he got was a pale approximation of one that lasted twenty minutes before the exhaustion from the sleepless night began pressing down on him from all sides like something physical.

He did not want to go back to Vic.

He got back to camp to find Trace sitting in her spot with a paperback that was missing its cover, reading with the focused economy of someone who’d learned to carry whole afternoons inside a book. She looked up when he came through the fence gap.

“You look terrible,” she said.

“I need a connection,” Greg said. “Crystal. I’m not going to my usual guy.”

Trace looked at him for a moment over the top of the coverless book. “How much you working with?”

“I need a good stock for a while. Lets say a hundred for now.”

She closed the book, set it on her knee, and appeared to run through some internal index. “There’s a guy,” she said. “I’ve used him twice. He’s alright. Sketchy spot but the product was fine.”

“That’s all I need,” Greg said.

She led him out of the camp and east, away from the river, into the grid of streets behind the industrial stretch where the blocks got longer and the foot traffic thinned to almost nothing. They walked for fifteen minutes with Trace setting a pace that was faster than her usual and Greg matching it, his hands in his pockets, the afternoon light flat and grey now with cloud cover moving in off the coast.

The alley was between a storage facility and the back of a building that had housed several businesses in succession and currently housed none, its rear loading dock empty and padlocked. The alley itself was narrow, running half a block before ending at a chain link fence, and it had the particular atmosphere of a place that discouraged lingering, damp concrete and old bins and the compressed shadow of two tall walls cutting out most of the sky.

The dealer was at the midpoint, a lean man in a canvas jacket sitting on an overturned crate with his hood up despite the mild temperature. He looked up when they came in, his eyes moving from Trace to Greg, doing a quick circuit of assessment.

“He’s good,” Trace said. “He’s with me.”

“Whoa,” the dealer said.

“What?” Greg asked.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” The dealer was stepping back, his hands coming up and out, the transaction dissolved instantly. “No. No, I don’t know what this is but I don’t want any part of it.”

“What are you talking about?” Greg asked.

“You brought a cop,” the dealer said. “You brought a cop into my spot.”

“I didn’t bring anyone,” Greg said. “It’s just us.”

“Then who the hell is that,” the dealer said, and pointed.

Greg turned around.

At the mouth of the alley, where it opened onto the street, a man in a white suit stood. Facing Greg.

The exhaustion left Greg’s body completely, replaced by something that had been building since yesterday morning.

He turned fully toward the mouth of the alley and took one step before the man in the white suit turned and walked out of view, onto the sidewalk.

Greg started moving.

By the time he hit the alley mouth he was running.

Greg’s boots hit the sidewalk hard. He kept his eyes on the white suit moving half a block ahead of him, not running, still walking, that same measured pace that somehow kept the distance between them constant no matter how fast Greg moved. He pushed harder, his knee firing with every impact on the concrete, the sleep deprivation and the crashed meth hitting him in waves that he ran through by sheer forward momentum.

The man turned left on Davis without looking back.

Greg turned left on Davis.

He turned right on Sixth. He crossed Morrison against the light. A car laid on its horn, but Greg went around its hood without breaking stride. The white suit stayed ahead of him by the same half block, same distance, same pace, and Greg had the nauseating sense of chasing something that was allowing itself to be chased.

They went north, then east, then north again through blocks that got quieter and more industrial, the lunch crowd thinning out, the buildings getting lower and further apart, more parking lots, chain link, and less foot traffic. Greg’s breathing was ragged and his knee was a sustained complaint, yet he ran anyway.

The man in the white suit turned into a lot.

Greg slowed as he reached the lot’s entrance and looked in. A commercial building, two stories, brick, the windows on the ground floor boarded with plywood that had been there long enough to grey and warp at the edges. A sign above the main entrance had been partially removed, leaving only the bolt holes and a ghost of lettering. The front door was steel, painted red once, and it stood slightly open.

The white suit was gone. Inside.

Greg stood at the entrance of the lot with his hands on his knees and breathed for thirty seconds. Then he straightened up, crossed the lot, and went through the red door.

Inside was the specific darkness of a building that had been closed long enough for the eyes to need a moment, the only light coming through the gaps in the plywood boarding, thin blades of afternoon grey cutting across a concrete floor covered in the sediment of vacancy: old paper, broken glass, the collapsed remains of shelving units along one wall. The smell was damp brick and rust.

He stood still and let his eyes adjust.

The ground floor was a single open space, gutted down to the concrete and the brick. No white suit. No movement. At the far end a stairwell went down, not up, below grade, and from it came a faint light, warmer than the grey coming through the boards, yellowish, and a sound.

Someone moving. Someone breathing.

Greg crossed the floor carefully, stepping over the debris, and went down the stairs.

The basement was low-ceilinged and dark except for a camping lantern on the floor near the far wall, the cheap kind that threw more shadow than light. In the circle of its reach, crouched on the concrete with his back against the wall and his hands pressed against both sides of his head, was Curtis.

He was shaking. The same rhythmic muscle clenching Greg had seen before but without the manic energy behind it, without the wild eyes and the need to run. This was the same motion with all the joy stripped out, the body doing it without the mind’s participation, compulsive and continuous, his forearms jumping, his jaw working.

Greg approached slowly, the way you approach an animal that’s been hurt.

“Curtis?”

Curtis’s head came up. His eyes were his own again, the regular bloodshot eyes, but hollowed out in a way that went past tired, past strung out, past anything Greg had a word for.

“I need more,” Curtis said. The words were slow now, nothing like the rapid-fire morning voice. Each one placed carefully, like he was lifting something heavy. “I need more ichor, Greg.”

“I don’t have any,” Greg said.

Curtis’s hands pressed harder against the sides of his head. He made a sound that was not quite a word.

“I don’t have any on me,” Greg said. “Curtis. You can get more. You can go to the guy, Fourteen, on the north side. He gives it out for free, you just have to sit through a sermon.”

Curtis lowered his hands from his head and looked at Greg. The look stopped Greg from saying anything else.

“Why did you kill me?” Curtis asked.

Greg went still. “Nobody killed you. You’re right here.”

“You knew,” Curtis said. “You knew what it would do. You knew and you sold it to me anyway. You looked me in the eye and you handed it over.”

“I didn’t know what it would do,” Greg said. “I still don’t. I’d just gotten it myself, Curtis, I hadn’t even tried it.”

“You let me go first,” Curtis said. “To see what happened. You watched, you saw, then you sold me more. You looked me in the eye this morning, you took my three thousand dollars, you handed me two vials, and you watched me run away.”

Greg opened his mouth.

“You damned me,” Curtis said. “You knew and you damned me anyway.”

“Curtis, listen to me. You can get more ichor. You go north, I’ll tell you exactly where the building is, you sit through one sermon and he gives it to you free. You can have as much as you want.”

Curtis looked at him for a long moment. The lantern light moved slightly in some draft from the stairwell and the shadows on his face shifted.

“That’s not good enough,” Curtis said.

“It’s what I’ve got,” Greg said. “It’s the only option.”

“No,” Curtis said. “No, I need you to do it for real. I need you to actually kill me. Not this slow way. The real way.” He said it with a flat sincerity. “I’m already gone, Greg. You already did the damage. Finish it.”

“I’m not going to do that,” Greg said.

“You owe me,” Curtis said.

“I’m not going to do that.”

Curtis stood up.

The movement was fast in a way that didn’t correspond to how he’d looked thirty seconds ago, crouched, shaking, and hollowed out. He came off the floor in a single motion. Greg took a step back automatically.

“Curtis…” Greg said.

Curtis moved.

He crossed the distance between them before Greg’s body had finished processing that he was moving, his hands finding Greg’s jacket. Greg went backward, hitting the brick wall hard enough to drive the air out of him and make his vision flicker. He got his forearms up and pushed, but Curtis was immovable.

Greg swung, his fist connecting with Curtis’s shoulder, but Curtis turned with it like the impact was nothing, like Greg had thrown something soft at him. Curtis’s return was much more impactful. Greg went down.

The concrete met his hip and his elbow. He scrambled up, got to his knees, but Curtis’s hand closed on the back of his jacket collar and lifted. Greg felt his feet leave the ground briefly before he came down again, his cheek against the cold concrete, the lantern light somewhere to his left throwing the shadow of Curtis enormous against the basement wall.

Greg tried to get up and couldn’t. He lifted his head from the floor and looked toward the stairwell.

The man in the white suit came down the last three steps and into the basement with the same quality they all had, that sense of time operating differently inside them, and stopped at the edge of the lantern’s reach. Greg could not tell if this was the same man from the alley mouth or one of the others. It didn’t matter. The suit was the same. The eyes were the same.

Curtis turned and saw him.

The transformation was immediate and total. The thing that had been holding Greg’s collar and lifting him off the concrete let go. Greg looked up. Curtis was across the room. Not attacking. Collapsing. He went down at the man’s feet with his palms out, his forehead nearly touching the concrete.

“Please,” Curtis was saying. “Please, please, please.”

The man in the white suit looked down at Curtis with the expression they all had, that patient and permanent warmth, as though this behavior from Curtis was expected. He reached into his jacket. Greg thought for a moment he was reaching for a vial before the light caught the blade.

The man drew it across the inside of his own wrist in a single clean motion. No hesitation. No reaction to the pain.

What ran from the cut was black.

It came down his wrist and over the back of his hand. He lowered his arm, holding his wrist down over Curtis’s upturned face, and Curtis reached up and took the man’s hand in both of his and pressed his mouth to the cut.

Greg got to his feet.

He stood against the wall with his back to the brick and watched Curtis drink from the man’s wrist the way an animal drinks from a stream, urgent and continuous, his throat working, his hands tight around the man’s forearm. The black ran over his lips and down his chin, the smell of diesel filling the low basement space.

The man in the white suit looked up from Curtis to look at Greg.

“You should put him out of his misery,” the man said. “He’s suffering considerably.”

“He was fine this morning,” Greg said.

“He was not fine this morning,” the man said. “He was experiencing the last interval before the suffering began. They’re easily confused from the outside.”

“Who are you?” Greg said.

“You can call me whatever number seems right to you,” the man said pleasantly. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that this man is in a type of pain that will not resolve on its own. You bear some responsibility for his condition.”

“I’m not killing anyone,” Greg said.

The man withdrew his wrist from Curtis’s hands. Curtis made a sound of protest but then subsided, sitting back on his heels; the ichor already doing its work. Greg could see it, the pupils beginning their expansion, the black threading moving back into the whites of his eyes, the body’s energy system ratcheting upward like a furnace being stoked.

The man in the white suit reached into his jacket again, but this time he produced a gun. Standard frame, dark metal, nothing Greg could identify specifically but the shape was unambiguous. He held it loosely at his side and looked at Greg with those enormous pupils.

“I’ll give it to him,” the man said, nodding toward Curtis, “or I’ll give it to you. Those are the options I’m offering. One of you will hold this before I leave this room.”

Greg looked at the gun and then at Curtis, who was rising from his knees, the shaking becoming the clenching, the clenching becoming spasms. His eyes were almost fully gone, the irises thin rings around the black.

“You need to die,” Curtis said, his voice gaining the rapid-fire quality back, accelerating, “you need to die Greg. You damned me, you did this to me, you sold me out for twenty dollars and you need to die.”

“Curtis,” Greg said.

“Die,” Curtis said. “Die, die, die…” each repetition faster than the last.

“I’m not going to kill you and I’m not going to let him kill me,” Greg said to the man in the white suit, his voice coming out steadier than he felt.

“Those are not the options I offered,” the man replied.

Greg ran.

He went for the stairwell, the only exit, the only direction that existed, and behind him he heard Curtis’s footsteps start and then accelerate. As he exited the stairwell, the sound of Curtis’s footsteps told Greg he was not far behind.

The shot sounded enormous in the empty building, a flat crack that bounced off the brick walls and the concrete floor, coming back from every direction at once, and the impact hit Greg between the shoulder blades like a meteor. His legs stopped working, the signal chain between his brain and his body getting interrupted by something catastrophic. He went down hard, chin clipping the concrete.

He laid face down, dying.

He somehow got his arms under him and rolled over onto his back.

Curtis was in the center of the room.

He could not be still. The gun was in his right hand, he was trying to point it at Greg, but his arm wouldn’t cooperate, the ichor seeming to drive his muscles in all directions simultaneously, his elbow bending and straightening, his wrist rotating, the gun swinging in arcs that passed over Greg. His feet were moving beneath him in a continuous rapid shuffle, his whole body a system that had been pushed past the point where it could direct itself.

Greg’s lungs were doing something wrong. Each breath came in with less than the breath before it, a slow diminishing, and there was a taste at the back of his throat that he recognized from the one time he’d been badly beaten, iron and salt.

Curtis screamed.

Not the ecstatic scream from the morning. This was pain, pure and structural. Greg watched what was happening to Curtis’s body and understood why. The knee of his left leg bent sideways, the direction knees do not bend, and kept going past the point where the joint could accommodate it. The sound it made was audible from where Greg lay on the floor. Curtis’s right shoulder rotated backward in its socket, the arm swinging behind him at an angle that belonged to no natural movement.

His muscles were too strong for his own body.

They were contracting with a force that the tendons and ligaments and the architecture of bone and cartilage had not been designed to withstand, and the design was failing. Greg could see it progressing in real time, the body dismantling itself from the inside, each contraction tearing something that had held the previous second.

Curtis’s face was the worst of it.

The expressions moved across it in rapid succession, each one pulling the underlying muscles to their limit before the next one took over, and the skin, which had been doing the work of containing a face for forty years, began to lose its stance on his head. It started at the corners of his mouth and moved outward, thin splits opening in the skin along the lines of maximum tension. Curtis was screaming continuously now, the sound barely interrupted by breath, as his face rearranged itself over and over beneath a surface that was coming apart.

He dropped the gun.

It hit the concrete and skidded. It was six feet from Greg.

Greg rolled onto his stomach and began to move toward it. The process was not dignified, it was not fast, and every movement of his upper body changed the pressure in his chest cavity in ways that produced consequences he was trying not to think about. He pulled himself across the concrete with his forearms, his legs doing almost nothing, dragging himself the six remaining feet.

He was barely able to reach it.

Curtis was on the floor but the floor did not stop him. He was a continuous motion, the body that could not be still even now, even coming apart, the muscles contracting in waves that moved through him like something trying to get out, his limbs bending in their wrong directions, the skin split across his chest and arms and face, the expressions still cycling across what remained of his features.

Greg raised the gun.

His hands were shaking and his vision was doing something at the edges, a darkening that came and went with each diminished breath.

He fired.

The shot went wide, sparked off the concrete to Curtis’s left.

He fired again. Curtis’s right arm jumped and bent further back.

Again. The concrete by Curtis’s head.

Again. Curtis’s midsection, which changed the character of his movement but did not stop it.

Again. His leg.

Again. The floor.

The seventh shot took Curtis in the head and the motion stopped.

Greg let his arm down.

The silence in the building was very large.

Then footsteps. Measured on the concrete, coming from the stairwell. Greg raised the gun again and pointed it at the man in the white suit who walked into the room.

Greg pulled the trigger.

The gun clicked.

He pulled it again. Click. Again. Click.

The man in the white suit walked toward him without altering his pace. Greg kept pulling the trigger because there was nothing else his hands knew how to do. The clicking continued, each one smaller and more final than the last, until the man was standing over him.

The man looked down at him.

“What a shame,” he said, his voice low and genuinely sad.

He raised his foot and brought it down on Greg’s head.

–

The camp looked the same.

Vic came through the gap in the fence. Trace looked up at him the way she looked up at everyone.

“Haven’t seen you in a while,” she said.

“I’m looking for Greg,” Vic said.

Trace looked at him for a moment. “Haven’t seen him or Curtis in days,” she said. “Curtis took off one morning screaming. Greg went running after some dude in a white suit when I was trying to help him get some crystal.” She paused. “Not unusual for Curtis. Unusual for Greg.”

Vic nodded slowly.

“You want a hit?” Trace asked, offering him her pipe.

“No,” Vic said. “I don’t do that anymore.”

Trace looked at him with the particular expression reserved for people who say things that don’t compute. Vic crossed the clearing to Greg’s tent and crouched at the entrance to unbraid the zip ties.

Vic quickly found Greg’s money. He counted it without expression. A little under twenty eight hundred dollars, what remained after Greg’s breakfast. He folded it and put it in his jacket’s inner pocket.

“You stealing from Greg?” Trace asked. Not an accusation. An observation.

“He won’t need it,” Vic said.

He left the camp and took the bus north.

The building looked the same as it always did, the water-stained brick, the boarded lower windows, the door standing open at its permanent angle. Vic went through the door, up the stairwell without slowing, to the fourth floor hallway and the door at the end with the light beneath it.

He knocked twice. The door opened.

The apartment was fuller than Vic had seen it. Seven men in white suits occupied the clean space, some standing and some seated, and they were talking among themselves. They looked at Vic when he entered with the same expression they all shared, that patient warmth and welcoming smile, before returning to their conversations.

Fourteen was standing at the window, looking out at the north Portland rooflines with his hands folded behind his back. He turned when Vic came in.

Vic took the roll of bills from his inner pocket and held it out.

“This was Greg’s,” Vic said.

“Yes,” Fourteen said while taking the money.

“He won’t be coming back, will he?” Vic asked.

“No,” Fourteen said. “He won’t.” He held the money for a moment before he set it on the table beside. “You’ve done well, Victor. This is the prophet’s work, what you do.”

Fourteen moved to the bookshelf, and from behind a row of books produced a briefcase, plain and dark, which he set on the table beside Greg’s money and opened. Inside, packed in rows in fitted foam, were vials. Dozens of them, each one filled with ichor, each one catching the apartment’s warm light and giving nothing back.

He closed the case and held it out to Vic.

Vic took it.

Fourteen looked at him with those deep and patient eyes, the irises thin rings around the dark, and put one hand briefly on Vic’s shoulder.

“Go now, Victor, and spread the word of salvation.”

Credit: Grant Howard

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