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.”
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