His eyes were frosted, winter glass on an opaque see-surface. They showed things that were not. He tried closing them, then opening them again.
It was the revolving angry red eye of a police growler.
“No!”
Then two men, burly and coats smelling of rain that had dried on them and perspiration that had not, lifted him — “Drunken bastard, book him and throw him inna tank with the other winos” — and tossed him into the back of a showroom-new smelling car.
He remembered answering a name. It was his name, so he did not worry about it. (I hurt …here. )
Here. Everywhere.
Then the hard, unyielding, hard cold, hard surface of a trough. A cell trough, and the ripe, fetid smell that was on him, and that had come from someone else before he had known this cell. There was wetness in the trough. He looked across and there was another man in the cell.
Walter Caulder’s God was a madman. Walter Caulder’s God had grown diseased and become warped. Yet Walter Caulder’s God made miracles; insane, unplanned miracles coming at the wrong times, brought about for all the wrong reasons; gibbering miracles, neurotic miracles, damned miracles.
The other man in the cell was a junkie.
He was withdrawing a bent spoon, a pack of matches, and a safety pin from the inside lining of his pants cuff. As Caulder watched, eyes burning and mouth swollen, the man opposite withdrew several small paper packets from a slit cut on the inside of his shirt collar flap.
He was about to bake down a shot: he was ready for a fix.
Enid, where are you?Walter Caulder bleated in the lost valley of his mind. Faraway echoes reverberated the same cry; no answer, only the same cry.
Aloud he said: “Hey … h-hey, l-listen … ”
The man turned his Irish face toward Walter Caulder and freckles danced before the psychiatrist’s eyes. The wide, brown eyes of the Irishman blinked at him rapidly.
“I n-need a f-f-fix,” he mouthed, his face stretched taut and painful under the bandages. “Please help me … I don’t … I’ll die if you d-d-don’t — ”
The Irishman’s smile was a peculiar thing. He held it a moment longer than was necessary, and then said: “Okay, man, don’t sweat. I got some extra Horse for you. I’ll putcha up in the saddle … I get out inna morning. I don’t need the extra boom.”
So it was, less than ten minutes later, a ragged, jagged fissure ripped in the soft flesh of his inner arm — a rip made by a dirty safety pin — that Walter Caulder got his fix that night.
A long fix.
A good fix.
A satisfying fix.
As he lay back down in the urine-smeared trough, hands folded across his chest, his mind and senses eased for the first time that day, in many days, Walter Caulder had a singular thought.
As his senses raced out to infinity, as his mind began to experience the multicolored gems of color and sound that only “high” could bring, Walter Caulder sank into his swoon, and thought:
Physician, heal thyself.
But that was just silly.