He suddenly seized the syringe tightly, and he brought it back over his head and then whipped his arm down violently, and the syringe left his hand. It spun across the room dizzily and then collided with the plaster, bouncing off and onto the floor, miraculously still in one piece.
“Is that what you want?” he shouted. “All right, all right?”
Helen reached out for his arm, but he shook her off and lunged across the room, bringing his foot back and kicking out at the syringe. He missed the syringe, and he lost his footing and went down to the floor, landing on his back. There was shock and surprise on his face, and then his features curled into a menacing leer as he scrambled to his feet.
“Where is it?” he screamed. “Where is the mother-lover?”
“Andy, don’t—”
“Where is it? Where is it?”
He whirled, as if searching for an elusive rat, his eyes scanning the floor. He seemed no longer to be Andy. He seemed like a strange and maniacal stranger who had come down from a mountain cave. He spotted the syringe, and his lip curled, and he raced for it and stamped at it, grazing the glass cylinder so that the syringe snapped out from under his foot, still intact, the needle glistening. He reversed his field, and he kicked out at the syringe again, missing again, kicking again and missing yet another time, out of breath now, chasing the elusive, dancing, rolling glass cylinder with its pointed needle. And then he slumped against the wall, his head bent, and he mumbled, “I can’t break it, I can’t break it. Helen, I can’t catch up with it, I can’t... I’m sick, Helen, I’m sick as hell, Helen, I’m sick, I’m sick, Helen, please help me, Helen, I’m sick...”
She took him into the bathroom, and she stayed in there with him, and Bud could hear the soothing sound of her voice beneath the ugly sounds Andy was making. He sat outside in the living room, wondering again how he’d ever got into something like this, dismayed because he’d learned that Andy had gone back to the drug again, after all his talk, after all that. God, wouldn’t he ever learn, was he a coward at heart?
He listened to the sounds coming from his bathroom, and he thought of his other tests, and he thought of Andy in that bathroom, and Helen, two strangers, two people he thought he’d never see again as long as he lived, and here they were in his apartment, disrupting his life, turning his life into a shambles. Doesn’t my life count at all, is Andy the only important one around here, is Andy the only one who matters? What about me? Goddamnit, what about me?
He saw the glint of the needle lying on the floor, and he went to it and picked up the syringe, rotating it slowly in his hands. The needle was short and slender, a narrow polished arrow. He studied the pointed tip and then the graduated markings on the glass cylinder. The hypodermic seemed to own a life of its own. It sat on the palm of his hand and it seemed like an evil, throbbing thing to him, a malevolent thing which had reached out and engulfed Andy in a black, foul-smelling cloud. It was graceful and sleek, but beneath its polished good looks lay the intricate machinery of the devil, and he was tempted for a moment to do just what Andy had tried to do and failed at. He wanted to bring back his arm and throw the syringe at the wall, watch it splinter into a thousand flying fragments. He wanted to stab the needle at the plaster, stab it until the plaster chipped from the wall, until the needle was twisted and bent and useless, until all the evil life had left the syringe, until it was nothing but a broken heap of glass and steel.
“Don’t blame the syringe,” Helen said, and he looked up, surprised to see her back in the room. From the bathroom, he heard the sound of the water tap, and he knew that Andy was washing up again.
“They should never have invented syringes,” Bud said, still obsessed with the idea of it as a sentient, evil thing.
“Some junkies use eye droppers,” Helen said, “either with or without a needle. It’s more difficult without the needle, and not very pretty to watch because you have to tear the skin with a safety pin or a razor blade first and then insert the glass tip of the dropper into the vein. But you don’t need a syringe, Bud. Where there’s a will there’s a way — and there’s always a will when you’re a horsehead.”
“I suppose,” Bud said weakly. “What do you want to do with this?”
“I’ll take it,” she said. “I don’t think it should stay in this apartment, do you?”
“No.” He handed her the syringe, and she took it and went to her purse. He watched her as she unsnapped the purse and dropped the syringe into its depths.
She turned, and he felt embarrassed watching her, and so he averted his eyes. Helen sat in the butterfly chair and sighed, as if she were very very tired.
“He’ll need watching, Bud.”
“Yes.” Bud paused. “I can’t say this is very convenient for me right now.”
“It’s a little inconvenient for all of us,” Helen said, and her voice grew suddenly sharp. “I’m sure Carol doesn’t like the idea of running over here, and I don’t particularly relish it either. Drug addicts are not convenient. Hardly anything in life is.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Bud said. “I was just wondering if... Well, if anything would come of it.”
“We won’t know until it’s over, will we?”
“No, I guess we won’t.”
“You can only fix horse races. Life — oh, what the hell — I’ve stopped trying to figure it out.”
“Do you think he’ll break it?”
“Maybe. I hope so.”
“Isn’t it a bad sign? That he went back to it so soon?”
“It’s not good, but it doesn’t mean a hell of a lot. He seems impressed by what he’s done, though. He seems to know that he took a big step backward this morning. Maybe that’ll help.”
“Is it very hard to break?”
Helen looked at him curiously, and then she smiled maternally. “Yes, Bud, it’s very hard to break,” she said quietly.
Bud nodded.
“You never break it,” she added.
“You broke it.”
“Did I?”
“Well, didn’t you? You don’t use drugs any more.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Well, then... you broke it.”
“Yes, I broke it.” She was silent for several moments.
“How do people get started on it, anyway?” Bud asked. “Jesus, you’d think they’d have more sense.”
“You can’t believe any drug addict when he talks about how his habit began,” Helen said. “I’ve talked to dozens of them, and most of them lie. They’ll tell you they got started on opiates because they were sick once, and a doctor prescribed morphine or one of the other opium alkaloids, and they built a tolerance and a habit and, pity the poor souls, they are now addicts. But most junkies are on heroin, and heroin is never used therapeutically, so what are you to believe?”
“Well, then how do they get started?”
“How?” Helen smiled. “We’re sick.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Yes, believe me. And drug addiction is only one symptom of a... well, a basic personality defect. We’re like alcoholics, except their poison is liquid.”
“It sounds hard to believe.”
“Figure it out for yourself. What does the drug mean to a junkie? Just the kick? Just the boot? A whole lot more than that, don’t you see? It’s—” She shrugged — “I hate to throw psychology at you, but it’s an escape mechanism. You take the drug, and you wipe out all the little failures and disappointments that keep sneaking up on you. You take the drug, and your ambitions stop being dreams — they become accomplishments. It’s a way of escaping responsibility.” She paused and eyed Bud levelly. “There are worse ways of escaping responsibility.”