Gatac

  10 hours 43 minutes. Ky’s shivering fingers seized the beat-up watch dangling from the belt loop of her jeans.1Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one who ever did this with a regur wristwatch. I know, I know, shoulda gotten a nurse watch with a karabiner. The stopwatch was running on it like it always did, counting up milliseconds and seconds and minutes. It had ticked over ten times already. Well, she had seen it tick over ten times. So, if anything, 10 hours 43 minutes was optimistic. Of course those 21 grams of metal and pstic also kept time the civilized way, the 9 to 52Does anyone still actually have a job that goes from 9 AM to 5 PM? Let me know! way, but it wouldn’t help to check that. Ky had no 9 to 5 life to worry about, so the clock might just as well have been the time on Mars instead. The stopwatch, though, that mattered. That was the motherfucker. She sucked another breath through the gaps between her teeth and watched it move.

  10 hours 44 minutes since Ky had shot up.

  Her eyes flicked back up, tried to focus on the brownstone across the backyard from her little hiding spot. She tried to focus on it. She tried to keep it together for five fucking minutes. She had to pee, pretty bad. That was weird, since her mouth was dry and she wasn’t sure when she had st had a drink. Not the burger pce. She couldn’t go to the burger pce again anyway. Jeanne had lost it with her the day before and had screamed at her to get the hell out. Ky remembered tearing up over it. Jeanne was a friend and having a warm pce to sit for an hour or two, which wasn’t nothing to Ky. But she had pushed it, had imagined kindness in the face of a stranger and gone over and asked for a dolr with her little voice. Disturbing paying customers. Jeanne couldn’t have that. And yeah, Ky had cried and tried to say she was sorry, not because she was sorry, though she was, but because she had risked a warm pce for a dolr, risked Jeanne for a fucking dolr. They should’ve been worth more. And the crying! That was making a scene and Jeanne couldn’t have that. What the hell was she supposed to do but kick Ky out and comp the meal out of her own paycheck?

  Next week, Ky thought. Go back next week, maybe in the afternoon after the lunch rush when there’d be nobody there, just to stand outside and wait for Jeanne to come off an early shift and apologize again, without the crying. Wait for it to blow over. Try to look good by then, well, better, try to smile and not beg for anything, just make it sound like she was turning things around. And Jeanne — wait for Jeanne to feel sorry, to worry about her. Jeanne would worry and be relieved and then, maybe, she would take another chance on Ky. Jeanne would. Just had to wait for it.

  Waiting. Ky wanted to cry again. What fucking good was next week to her now?

  10 hours 46 minutes. Ky wanted to go, to run back to Jeanne and apologize and get back her seat at the burger pce where she could be like everyone else for an hour, inside and warm. But it was just one of many things she wanted and the clock was relentless. There definitely was no turning it back. Ky looked at it again. She’d gone back and forth on keeping the watch versus selling it. It wasn’t worth much to start with on account of the grime and scratches on it, and even less at a pawn shop, but five bucks, maybe? Five warm meals off the dolr menu3Wendy’s wouldn’t actually introduce its 99 cent Super Value Menu until 1989 and it would take a few more years for prices to rise to the point where advertising single fast food items as being priced at a dolr would be a signpost for cheap food, so the use of ‘dolr menu’ here is anachronistic. But you get what I mean. at some pce. Five bucks was good to have, for food. Ten, she’d be tempted to buy another bag of D instead. Ky needed the watch, though, not because it tortured her or because it brought her luck or even because it was the only thing she still owned that her mother had touched. She needed it to bme. The hunger, that was animal, crude, weak. The stopwatch was precise, scientific, you just couldn’t argue with it. The stopwatch measured from the warmth to the cold, it measured the hours when she was miserable, but also implied an end to those hours. You stop a stopwatch, eventually. Ky looked at the brownstone again, at the dark windows. It didn’t matter whether it was the right time. It was now and Ky needed to feel better now.

  She didn’t creep across the backyard, no. She wasn’t that far gone. She still had pride enough to stand up and walk, half of a brick in her quivering hand. She stood tall. Burgrs skulked. And she would never become a burgr. Just like she’d never run away with a friend’s stash after watching them shoot up and pass out, or never eat literal fucking garbage from a literal fucking trash can, or never turn her head away and try to moan while some creeper with a good job and a good car stuck his hands under her shirt for a couple of dolrs. No. She would never.

  Except, well, there she was, becoming a burgr. She weighed the half-brick for a moment and stopped at the stairs leading down to the half-basement of the brownstone before her. She would never be desperate enough to steal from this pce. Wouldn’t she?

  She had started out with so many ‘I will never’-s, once upon a time, when she was just a little girl in an big mess. But when you’re thirteen and about to be locked away in some shithole ‘group home’ until you reach age of majority ‘for your own good’ — what the fuck did that even mean? — and all you ever knew about life you had learned from a very dead addict, you don’t take a chance on the system working out for you. You grab what you can carry and run. Ky had to admit to herself that the one thing she would actually never do — go back and turn herself in and accept whatever they were going to do to her ‘for her own good’ — was maybe not the worst thing that could happen to her. Sure, it had seemed like the worst thing in the world, all the strict rules and bare rooms and other fucked-up feral kids, back when she still had clean clothes and friends and no fucking idea what living on the street meant. Back when freedom sounded real good.4Freedom always sounds good. Until some smartass like me asks what you mean by freedom. Freedom to do what? Freedom from what? How far does it go?Side note, this is why I’m down on ‘free speech’. Not the principle per se, though I have serious problems with many implementations of it, but I’m especially tired of explicit invocation of it. ‘Not illegal to say’ is a pretty damn low hurdle to clear and if your message has no other merits to recommend it above that, why the fuck should anyone listen to you? But so many ‘I will never’-s ter, she wasn’t so sure of things anymore. Instead of sure, she was cold and sad and hurt in ways she didn’t have the words to describe. The best she could manage was running out the clock on her miserable little excuse for a life.

  Above all, she was hungry.

  She hurled the half-brick through the basement window and immediately whipped around to see if anyone came running. The skies didn’t part for lightning to strike her down. No blue-and-reds fshed from around the corner and no arm went off. She stood before the broken window and the basement clinic it belonged to and the half-brick lying in the waiting room, waiting for Ky to climb in. Ky stepped down the stairs, came close to the broken window, close enough that warm air from inside wafted over her face. She teared up, and after all the other crying that day those tears stung in her puffed-up eyes, running down the sides of her nose like a melting gcier trying to dig a new river into the ndscape. Feeling the warmth made it easier to take off her jacket and wrap it around her hand. First she tried to — what was she trying to do, punch the gss shards away from the frame? That didn’t work so well. Focus. Ky flexed her hand and tried to still it enough to grab the rge shards through the yer of jacket. When she had gotten the biggest ones out of the way, she brushed her jacket over the window frame, trying to sweep the little shards to the floor and out of her way. That done, she unwrapped the jacket and put it down on the frame. A month before, when she still had friends, Dustin had told her a thick jacket on barbed wire was enough to let you climb over the top of a fence, but getting the jacket back without ripping it to shreds was a whole different problem. Hakim had said he would’ve used a carpet, because people threw away a lot of carpets and rugs and thick towels, and you didn’t need a carpet to keep warm in the night.

  That made sense. But Ky had no carpet to use, so the jacket would have to do.

  She mounted the frame horse-saddle — not that she’d ever ridden a horse, but that’s what you call it and she’d seen plenty of cowboys on TV do it — and slipped through into the clinic, trying not to let gss from the top fall and slip under the colr of her shirt. Still silence. Maybe the hard part was over? Both feet on the ground, she gently lifted the jacket from the window and shook it, producing a shower of little shards. On this side, it felt like the warmth grabbed her quickly, so quickly she now felt the cold air outside pulling at her, trying to drag her back. Fuck that. Ky picked up the half-brick from the floor and wandered into the clinic proper, past the sparse steel chairs and the first threshold. She hadn’t even gotten as far as the waiting room before, because this was not a pce that would have her as a customer. But she knew the lockup was somewhere back here, and wouldn’t you know it, the first room on the right in the little hallway was locked, not a regur door lock like on a house door, but one of those spit-shiny metal knobs with the lock inside. Ky tried to swallow — her throat was dry, but so was her mouth — and raised her hand, then brought the half-brick down on the doorknob. Well, maybe it was the flight through the window, maybe it was that brick versus metal was never going to be a winning pn, but whatever it was, it cracked the brick into four big pieces, one of which barely missed her right foot when it fell to the ground.

  The doorknob was hanging half-cocked from the door, and the wood around the lock pte looked strained. But the door remained closed.

  This would have been a perfect Ky moment to start crying, but she was coming up on 11 hours and had broken into this damn pce already and this fucking door was not going to stop her. She stepped back and kicked it, doing more to push herself off-bance than to bust the door, but she simply tried again and again and again and again and motherfucker, fucking open! Backing up once more, she instead put her right shoulder forward and simply ran at the door, throwing her weight against it. The door groaned and Ky cried. Again. Shoulder against wood sent a burst of pain all the way through her back, but the wood was splintering. Again. One more time. She took a breath between sobs. Again.

  There’s nothing unbreakable in this world. Doesn’t matter how hard it is, you come at it enough times, it’s gonna give, and everything else is details. Put another way: Bam went the door and Kyle went through it.

  It was a small room, more like a closet, and Ky almost flew head-first into the drug cabinet at its far end. She flinched just in time. Her already throbbing arm took the front corner edge of the cabinet on the meat, which spun Ky off her feet. She nded with her back against the remains of the door, tucked head barely escaping another knock. The pain from her arm shot up from a four to a seven5A ‘fun’ side effect of chronic opiate abuse is not just habituation (so you need more and more to achieve the same effect), but also actually intensified sensation of pain when sober. Add in biases against ‘drug-seeking’ behavior and it just becomes that much harder to effectively treat pain in addicts., like there had always been a thin yer of gss under her skin that had shattered in pce and now carved her from the inside with every little shiver. She hacked up some stomach acid from the depths of her cramped-up belly. Her first attempt to right herself ended up with her on her knees, bent over with her forehead touching the cool floor, wheezing for air. After a few breaths, she straightened her back and looked up at the drug cabinet. It was a good drug cabinet, solid steel construction with recessed hinges, recessed lock, recessed everything. Not a single gap wide enough to even wedge the tip of a crowbar into. She didn’t have a crowbar, anyway. She had nothing. She had fucking nothing. The cabinet wouldn’t open for her, not in a million fucking years.

  Ky heard footsteps. Somebody was running toward her. Of course. There it was. There were the consequences. She would have ughed if she remembered how, so instead she just fell onto her side and closed her eyes. Her pn was shot, her mind was empty and only instinct remained. So she pyed dead. She had never heard a pump-action shotgun being racked, not in real life, but she recognized the sound just the same. When she opened her eyes a million years ter, she was staring down the barrel of that shotgun, as wielded by a bck man wearing a bck sweater. Ky nigh-instantly burst into tears.

  “Hands!” the man barked at her. “Show me your fucking hands!”“Sor—sorry,” Ky said, raising her left hand and willing her right one to move, too. “Sorry.”“Higher!” the man shouted. Ky squeezed her eyes shut again and shook her head from side to side again.“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Sorry.”“Now what the fuck do you think you’re doing in here?” the man said, stepping down the voice to a growl.“Sorry!” Ky said, louder now. “I’m so sorry. I just —”“You just what?” the man said.“…I just want something,” Ky finished. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”“Fuck you!” the man shouted, and Ky felt her head pull against her chest while she tried to get her hands higher. “You didn’t ‘mean to’ do what, huh? You tripped and fell in here, is that it? Is that what you’re fucking telling me?”

  Ky just sobbed.

  “You come to my pce,” the man said, straining for control. “You put go through my window, you bust down my door, and you’re fucking sorry?”“I’m sorry,” Ky repeated. “I’m so sorry.”“Fuck you,” the man said. “You got any idea what the fuck everything you just broke cost me?”“I…I’m sorry,” Ky said. “I didn’t…didn’t mean to…didn’t mean to break in, I just…I just want.” She waited for him to speak up, but he didn’t, so she kept talking. “I just want some D.”“Fuck you,” the man said. “Look at me.”“I’m sorry —”“I said look at me.”

  Ky opened her eyes and raised her head, best as she could. She could barely make out any details through the tears, but the man seemed to have rexed his stance just a little bit.

  “How much you got on you?” he asked.“…nothing,” Ky lied.“Don’t fuck with me, girl,” the man said. “I’m aiming a shotgun at your head. This is not the time to fuck with me. You got that?”Ky nodded.“So, how much money do you have with you right the fuck now?” the man asked.“Thirty dolrs,” Ky said. That came quickly and easily to her because unlike pretty much everything else, how much money she had was vitally important for her to remember. She cried some more. Should have said ten. He would have believed ten, she was sure. Maybe she would have still had some money left to —“You don’t look like you got thirty brain cells,” the man said. “Let’s get it straight. You know who I am, don’t you?”“The hookup,” Ky said.“Keep going,” the man said. “My name.”“Do — Dolr,” Ky said.“Wow, that’s actually almost correct,” the man said. “But get it right: it’s Dr. Dolr, M D, so if I even begin to think you’re holding out on me, I’m gonna go looking and I am gonna find it. One st time: how much you got?”“Thirty dolrs,” Ky repeated. “I got thirty, I…I swear, I got thirty, I got…that’s all!”“Put it on the ground,” Dolr said, his shotgun clicking once. “You best get ghost and stay the fuck away from my shit.” He scoffed. “I see you again, you’re gonna catch a twelve gauge tattoo, that’s the only thing that’s free around here. Feel me?”“Okay,” Ky said. “Okay!”

  She slowly lowered her right arm and stuck her hand under the waistband of her torn pants. Interior pocket, hard to lift from without her noticing. Hakim had sewn it for her from another ruined pair of jeans over a couple of beers and ughs, back when her situation wasn’t entirely fucked up. She pulled the bills — mostly singles, two fives — from the tight pocket and threw them on the floor. Then she snapped up her hand again and looked down, trying not to shiver too much.

  “Please,” she said.“That ain’t even twenty,” Dolr said. “You said thirty and that ain’t it. You still think I’m pying?”“No…no!” Wasn’t it thirty? Ky looked at it, blinked without managing to clear the tears away. But she saw that he was right. It wasn’t thirty. Was supposed to be thirty. She had it all counted out in her head. Thirty. Those were…seventeen? Seventeen bucks. “It’s all,” she said. “I got…” she began, thought better of it, then said it anyway. “I got some smokes —”“Smile at me,” Dolr said.“What?”“I said smile at me,” Dolr said. “If you can do that and remember to breathe at the same time.”

  Ky raised her head. After a moment’s hesitation, and never quite looking him in the eyes, she opened her mouth.

  “Jesus Christ,” Dolr said, whipping his head away.Ky closed her mouth again. Looked down again. Tried not to cry when she saw all her money on the floor.“Fuck…” Dolr said. “Fuck, you’re disgusting.”“I’m sorry,” Ky said. The quiet between them was long enough for her to start turning away.“Fuck me,” Dolr mumbled. She froze in pce. He raised his voice again. “It ain’t fucking right, you know?”

  Ky knew it wasn’t right. She nodded.

  “There’s gotta be a hundred thousand people in this city that are just as fucked up as you are,” Dolr said. “And they didn’t break my shit. They ain’t done nothing to me. Hell, when they come here, they pay me to make ‘em happy. They wait in line. They say please and fucking thank you. That puts them all, all hundred fucked up thousand, ahead of you in the list of people I should give a shit about.”“I’m sorry,” Ky said.“Jesus, just…stop saying that,” Dolr said. “Stop fucking saying that. The only ‘sorry’ that counts is paper and you got nothing.” She could hear him tapping a thumb against the shotgun. “Serves me right rolling out the red carpet, though. You believe I try to make this shit look nice and inviting, not like those other shitholes slinging dope? Guess I had it coming one of you would try to bust in.”Ky said nothing.“You want that shit bad, right?” Dolr asked.Ky nodded, slowly.“You and everyone else,” Dolr said. “My fucking problem is that everyone else ain’t here. You are.” He looked her over again. “When was the st time you took a shower?”“…I was down at the beach,” Ky said.“When,” Dolr said.“Summer,” Ky said.“Well, I got one,” Dolr said. “And my common sense is out to fucking lunch, so I’m letting you use it. One-time offer.”“…what do you want for it?” Ky asked.“I want you to stop smelling like blood and piss,” Dolr said. “Hell, you do that, I’ll sell you some shit. I’m even gonna forget how you got in here. I need to renovate one way or another, and it ain’t like a couple of bucks is gonna pay for anything you broke, anyway.”

  Ky forgot how to say “thank you”.

  “If you clean yourself up first,” Dolr added. “Use soap, wash your hair, brush your goddamn teeth.”“Okay,” Ky said.

  She understood what he was saying without saying it. He wanted her to look nice.

  It hurt and Ky cried. Story of her fucking life.

  Dolr hadn’t told her anything she didn’t already know. She tried to be angry about it. Tried to imagine telling him that she knew, she fucking knew. Of course she was disgusting, she hadn’t showered in…too long. Of course she didn’t start and end every day by brushing her teeth and flossing, of course she knew how fucked up her teeth were because the pain wouldn’t leave unless she chased it out. Of course she knew how she looked before she took a gaze in the mirror of Dolr’s bathroom. She wasn’t crying because it was so fucking nice of him to let her inside, because she was grateful or angry or whatever, but because it hurt. Everything hurt, from her teeth to her arm to her skin when she tried to peel off her clothes with shaking hands.

  Ky allowed herself one luxury between food and heroin. She went to a undromat once a week, or two weeks, if money was really tight. Well, whenever she had enough to spare, however often that was. She went when a pce was empty, which was usually when it was darkest in the night, and sought out pces that had chairs in the back, away from the windows. She would bring an old cotton bathrobe with her, to sit in while waiting. The bathrobe smelled like — well, it smelled like things you keep wrapped in a pstic shopping bag and hidden away in the corner of a rooftop6A lot of surviving when you’re unhoused comes down to finding the second- or third-worst ways of doing something. Sleeping on a rooftop isn’t anyone’s idea of a good time, but it’s off the street, which makes it much easier to hide from property owners, cops, thieves or other complications., and sometimes Ky dabbed some of the undry powder on the colr so it didn’t smell so bad. Sometimes they had a restroom they hadn’t locked, too. Ky did her best to wash herself with hand soap, then.

  But it had been a while. Ky only had to look at the angry red skin under the shoulder straps of her bra to know it had been too long.

  The shower in Dolr’s bathroom was a cabin on top of a tub, with pstic doors that swung out to open. Each frame held a big sheet of pstic, textured with water droplet molding as a privacy screen. That didn’t reassure Ky. Only a bathroom door that locked from the inside would have. But there she was, naked and shivering and so close to maybe turning this day around if only she could look nice enough for him. She stepped into the shower cabin and briefly reflected on looking nice. Looking nice had been her first instinct after watching some of the older girls working for money. But she hadn’t worked, yet, though not for ck of desperation — she had just realized that nobody wanted her. Whatever you did, you had to do it for the customer. You had to be the product they wanted to spend their money on. She was too young and small even for her age, for starters, and the only way to fix that was to survive at least four more years and eat well enough to actually grow up. And even if she managed that, at best she might be able to look ‘nice’ with a push-up bra and 50 bucks of makeup. And if you were ‘nice’ but just ‘nice’, well, there were always other girls who knew better how to be nice, who were bigger and fuller and had pearly-white smiles. She still remembered one of them who gave her a tip, a tip that wasn’t nice but kind, a genuine attempt to help Ky out.

  Honey, you’re a victim.

  Ky turned on the water in the shower. It was cold and she let the pain wash over her. The hardest part came after she was clean, after she could run a finger through her hair and have it squeak, after she stepped out of the shower smelling vaguely of mint. It was putting the dirty clothes back on. Walking, sitting around, even sleeping in them wasn’t so bad, and neither was pulling them out of the dryer at the undromat, where for all their wear and tear they were clean and warm and smelled like chemistry. But to step back into them like this, that wasn’t easy. And to top it all off, she felt her stomach growl — no lunch. And without money, no dinner or breakfast or — she stopped herself. Deep breaths.

  She looked at the sink. Pstic-wrapped stack of cardboard cups, pstic-wrapped stack of toothbrushes, a tube of toothpaste. A bathroom for strangers, maybe others like her. Before she could look away, she felt her tongue run through her dry mouth, sucked air through the gaps between her teeth, felt one in the back wiggle. What if — no, she very much did not even want to think about it. But she had to do something, had to be less disgusting, so she took one of the cups, filled it halfway with tap water, then squeezed toothpaste into the cup and swirled it around in her hand until the paste began to dissolve. Then she took a few sips into her mouth and pushed the toothpaste water around. It almost made her gag, but she spewed it into the sink and dumped the rest of the cup after it. Refill, rinse. Refill, rinse, let the water run to clean up the sink. Refill…drink. Ky drank the tap water, five cups of it, until she felt sick.

  Brush your goddamn teeth, Dolr had said. So she had to.

  It wasn’t easy to tear open the pstic around one of the toothbrushes with one and a half hands, both shaking. She did it, and got toothpaste on it, and stuck the brush end of the implement between her lips, gently lifting the inside of her left cheek off her teeth as she tried to create maneuvering room inside. That alone hurt more than she wanted to admit. The meat was angry, an infmmation that woke up when she poked it, and right there the only thing that kept Ky on track was giving up here meant losing everything. Her left hand seized the edge of the sink and grasped it tightly. Brush against teeth and gum, almost letting them soak, she started the work proper. Minuscule movements, barely covering three or four teeth in the back, but it woke them up, too. Ky held back the tears as she advanced, poked and prodded everything angry in there. The minty taste mixed quickly with blood and a worse taste she couldn’t identify, and Ky doubled over the sink to spit everything out. She had to close her eyes and keep spitting and try to somehow breathe neither through her nose or her mouth. She managed to put down the toothbrush on the rear of the sink, then fumbled for the cardboard cup, refilling it from the tap. Rinse out her mouth, again. Again.

  Deep breaths. Ky opened her eyes and took the toothbrush again, rinsed that off, too, until the water running over it ran clear. Then, like someone calmly thumbing back the hammer on a revolver after shooting themselves in the foot once, she applied a new dab of toothpaste to the brush and stuck it in again, because she had to. This wasn’t some fucking bullet point of a checklist. This was a battle, and if Ky had gotten good at something, it was pushing through the disgusting parts of her life to get to the prize at the end of the day. Let it hurt. Let it make her gag. Let it bleed and ooze and whatever the fuck else fucked-up teeth did. She brushed it all, brushed it hard, brushed it until it was all stinging and bleeding and telling her yeah, this is still a part of you, this is still alive, this is still fighting back. And after God knows how many rinses and cups of water, what she spat into the sink was clear, and the smell of mint overpowered everything else.

  Victory.

  She dumped the cup and toothbrush into a little trash can under the sink, then ran her hand through her damp hair and tried to brush it into some sembnce of direction. Tried to remember the st time Mom had given her a haircut. Tried not to fucking cry again while she finished dressing. Then, she walked out of the little bathroom into the hallway of Dolr’s clinic. She heard the ctter of gss shards against one another, and followed that into the waiting room up front, where she found Dolr sweeping the broken gss into one pile on the floor. He had already taped up the window with a dark gray trash bag. It was a new broom, too. Ky tried to look nice, tried to look sorry, but from the look on Dolr’s face, she wasn’t doing a very good job of it.

  “You done?” he asked her.“Yes,” Ky said, no longer having the luxury of giving a shit about how tender and miserable her mouth was. “Thank you very much.”

  He leaned the new broom against the wall and walked over to her. He came to a stop just in front of her, but Ky held her ground. He gave her a top-to-bottom look, then raised his right hand and seized her by the chin, gently pulling it down. She hadn’t let anybody touch her, ever, but…she just had to get through this, so she did. He let go of her jaw and nodded to her. She couldn’t help but smile. Done deal.

  “You got a pce to sleep?” he asked her.“Staying with friends,” Ky lied. “We’re meeting tonight. I wanted…something to share. And a buyer, too. You know,” she tried to ugh, “for the rest of…your stash.” Shit, had to bring up her intentions again, remind him of the robbery. But he’d forgiven her for that, right? He would. And good move, tell him there’s some pre-arranged meeting. Tell him it’s not just her clique, too, but a stranger, an adult, someone who’s gonna ask questions if she doesn’t show with the goods.

  Never let them know nobody will come looking for you.

  “Thank you,” Ky repeated. “I’m…I know you said to stop saying I’m sorry, but I…I shouldn’t have tried this. I know I shouldn’t have.”“Yeah, whatever,” Dolr said, turning away from her. “All this for some shit.”“Yes,” Ky said.“You went through a lot to get it,” Dolr said, strolling over to the door leading to the back of the clinic. “But I got one more question for you.” He turned his head to look over his shoulder again. “Why do you want it?”

  Ky’s jaw clenched and she pressed her tongue against the roof of her mouth, so hard it felt like it was gonna burst. You asshole, she thought. You motherfucking asshole.

  “I need it,” she managed to say. “I did what you wanted.”“Yeah,” Dolr said, and the way he said it, it almost sounded like ‘sorry’. “Deal’s a deal. Come on. I got a bed for you.”

  Ky followed him, because she had to. She didn’t like the vibe she was getting, but she didn’t have much choice, either. She’d gotten used to digging down and surviving off the nuggets of gold she found on the way. There was no point in turning away now. And so she followed him not just down the hallway, but into a room that had a hospital bed and a nightstand and little else.

  “Lie down,” he told her before he walked out again, and she did, because she had to. It wasn’t a particurly amazing bed, but it was a bed, clean and warm and springy. Having an actual pillow was nice, too. Kinda small, though. Maybe there would be a bigger one ter. He returned again, with one of those steel tablets all doctors seemed to have, and on it was a syringe — other stuff, too, but Ky’s eyes fixed on the syringe and wouldn’t let go.“Where do you usually shoot up?” Dolr asked her, then set down the tablet on the nightstand. She noticed he was wearing rubber gloves.

  Ky’s answer was to look at her right arm and straighten it while he fixed a strap around her bicep and tightened it down. She made a fist, started tapping for a vein and —

  “Got it,” Ky said, keeping a finger on it to show to him.“Pretty good technique,” Dolr said. He held up a set of tongs with a wet swab. “Let’s clean it up first.”“I washed my hands,” Ky said.“Sure,” Dolr said, but he still swabbed the inside of her arm, stinging her nose with more of that sharp hospital smell. Then, he sprayed the site with mist from a little pstic bottle; it was cold and tingled. “Careful, this is good shit,” he said, handing the syringe off to her. “Purest number four7Would it surprise you to hear that there’s a rating system for different grades of heroin purity? Unprocessed / bck tar is number one, dark brown is number two, light brown / brown rock is number three, pure white (actually a salt, usually heroin hydrochloride) is number four. This apparently dates back to DEA nguage introduced during the Vietnam War era. on the market. Go easy.”“Sure,” Ky echoed.

  Then she stuck the needle in, didn’t even notice anymore how Dolr helped her keep it steady. The anticipation was almost as good as the high, a promise that had never been broken yet. Ky leaned back, dropped her head deep into the pillow and closed her eyes. Then she slowly pushed the plunger on the syringe.

  The high did not embrace her. Ky felt warm, though, and a tingle ran from her numb fingers all the way up into her head. She tapped her right thumb against her hand and felt it three months ter, which was about the time she started floating up into thin air as the bed and the room and the world sped away from her. Then the air thickened, darkened, flowed through all the tiny space between her atoms. She forgot how to breathe, forgot why she had ever needed to. The smallest gesture of her limbs propelled her through the dark. She twisted her head, trying to catch a glimpse of herself as she swam past, but she only saw the brilliant wake her movements left in the depths, spirals of vivid colors without names. The bck around her was almost silent. Her hands parted its fabric while her legs kicked her upward — every way was up here. In the distance, she heard the echoes of a song, pyed with the finely tuned rumbling of trains riding through a vast desert. It scared the living daylights out of her.

  After two more years in the dark, she woke up.

  Ky knew something was wrong before she opened her eyes, because it felt like her head had exploded and now wanted to explode again and maybe was considering making a career out of it. She tugged at her arms, but felt coldness around her wrists that wouldn’t yield. The song of the dark was gone, though she could still hear a hint of its melody.

  “Who’s singing?” she asked. “Stop singing!”

  The answer was a few more deep notes, followed by a stomping that had her turn her head toward a rge shape looming over her. Within a heartbeat, bright light flooded her eyes. It disappeared before she could flinch away from it.

  “I don’t like this,” she said.“So you keep telling me,” Dolr said.

  Dolr. Ky squinted at the shape over her, and it wasn’t her vision clearing up. She had been seeing things just fine for a while now. It just took her until now to realize she was looking at him.

  “Here we go again,” he said, with a frown on his face. She didn’t like his face. “Are you awake now? I’m talking to you. Do you understand what I’m saying? Nod if you understand.”“What,” Ky said. Feeling was coming back to her limbs. Whatever was holding her at her wrists still refused to let go, and when she tried to twist to the side, she felt her ankles and her waist fixed in pce as well. She invested the energy to raise her head.

  She was still lying in the bed. Looking down over herself, she found herself dressed in a drab gown. There was a pstic tube sticking out of her right arm, looking like it should hurt but not hurting. Not yet? A wide strap of rough fabric ran over the mattress under her, and to that strap, two padded loops had been added, one around each of her wrists. Another, rger loop seemed locked around her waist, and a strap at the foot of the bed for her legs —

  She almost managed to headbutt Dolr when she started up, faster and stronger than her thin body had any right to be, and somehow she both thrashed and screamed for entirely too long before her vision dimmed at the sides from the effort. She dropped back into the bed and stopped screaming just long enough to catch her breath, then started straining against the bonds best as she could.

  “Yep, that won’t work,” Dolr said, standing at arm’s length next to the bed.“Let me go,” Ky said between breaths. “Let me go. Get me…get me out of this! You fucking…get me out of this! Let me go, you fucking…you fucking asshole! You got your fucking money!”Dolr said nothing.“Let me go!” Ky said. “Lemme go or I’ll scream!”“You already tried that,” Dolr said. “You’ve been waking up like this for an hour or so, doing and saying all kinds of shit. I’m just waiting for you to get here for real.”“Fuck you!”“Uh huh,” Dolr said and turned away.“You motherfucker!” Ky screamed. “Let me go, you fucking sicko!”“Nope,” Dolr said. He retrieved a new syringe from the nightstand, one with a pstic cap still on it.Ky’s eyes widened at the sight. “No,” she squeaked. “No. No!”“What, you didn’t like the first time?” Dolr said.“No,” Ky said. “No. Please. No.”“Are you listening?” Dolr said, turning back to her. He held the syringe in his hands, as if to stab her with it. “Because this is the part where you should be listening.”“No no no,” Ky said, her voice pitching up as she forgot how to breathe. “No, please. No. Please.”“This,” Dolr said, loud enough to make her fall quiet, “this is Ketamine. Special K. Like the shot I gave you earlier. Some people like the high. You don’t seem to. That’s fine. Different strokes for different folks. Also, I don’t give a shit if you like it. This is not for you to like. This is for you to behave yourself.”

  Ky said nothing; her throat was clenched too tight to say anything. She just teared up.

  “The first thing you need to understand,” Dolr said, “is that any time you start thinking that fucking with me is a good idea, you’re getting a shot of K. And not the nice way. I can put one of these into your thigh, right in the muscle. That’s gonna sting like a motherfucker, but you’ll be out in a minute. And there ain’t a damn thing you can do about it. The sooner you learn this, the better.”“Please,” Ky mewled. What else could she do? “Please, Dr. Dolr,” she begged. “Please.”“The second thing you need to understand,” Dolr said, “is that starting today, you’re off the dope. It’s gonna get bad, I know that much. I’ll be here to manage it, I’ll taper you off with methadone and I’ll make sure you’re stable, but I can’t beat this for you.”“No,” Ky said.“The third thing you need to understand,” Dolr said, “is that your disease is gonna fight dirty, so I’m gonna fight dirty. Whatever you think you gotta do, whatever the disease makes you do, I won’t hold it against you, but there’s not gonna be any pity.”“Let me go,” Ky said. “Please. Let me go.”“Oh, you’re gonna walk out of here,” Dolr said. “But not today. You know what today is?”

  Ky squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head.

  “Today,” Dolr said, “today’s day one.”