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.
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