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?”
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