The speaker was talking hesitantly about OxyContin and the warm sensation that it gave him. Moth tried to pay attention. He thought that was a most commonplace description, and differed little whether the speaker was sharing something about morphine-based pharmaceuticals, home-brewed methamphetamine, or store-bought cheap gin. The plummeting, welcoming warmth that permeated head and body seemed to wrap up an addict’s soul. It had been true for him during his few years of addiction, and he suspected his uncle, during his decades, had felt the same.
Warmth, Moth thought. How crazy is it to live in Miami, where it is always hot, and need some other heat?
Moth tried to focus on the man talking. He was an engineer-a likeable guy, a middle-aged, slightly dumpy, bald-headed man of tolerances and stresses, employed by one of the larger construction firms in the city. The realist in Moth wondered just how many condo buildings and office skyscrapers might have been constructed down on Brickell Avenue by a man who cared more for the numbers of pills he could obtain each day than the numbers on architectural plans.
He turned to the door when he heard it open, but it was a woman-an assistant state attorney, probably a dozen years older than he was. Dark-haired, intense, she wore a trim blue business suit and carried a leather portfolio case instead of a designer pocketbook and even at the end of the workday, she looked carefully put together. She was a relative newcomer to Redeemer One. She had attended only a few meetings and said little on each occasion, so she remained largely a mystery to the regulars. Recently divorced. Major crimes. Drug of choice: cocaine. “Hello, I’m Susan and I’m an addict.” She mumbled her apologies to no one and everyone and slid quietly into a chair in the back.
When it was his turn to share, Moth stammered and declined.
The meeting ended without a sign of his uncle.
Moth walked out with the others. In the church parking lot he shared a few perfunctory hugs and exchanged some phone numbers, as was customary following a meeting. The engineer asked him where his uncle was, and Moth told him that Ed had planned to come, but must have gotten hung up with a patient emergency. The engineer, plus a heart surgeon and a philosophy professor who’d been listening in, had all nodded in the special way that recovering addicts have, as if acknowledging that the scenario Moth described was most likely true, but just maybe it wasn’t. Each told him to call if he needed to talk.
None of the people at the meeting were so rude as to point out that his earlier exercise on the track had resulted in a stale, ripe odor about him. Since he was the youngest regular at Redeemer One, they all cut Moth some slack, probably because he reminded them of themselves-just twenty years or more earlier. And everyone at the meeting was familiar with the foul scents of nausea, waste, and despair that accompanied their addictions, so they had developed tolerances for rank odors that went far beyond the norm.
Moth stood around, shuffling his feet. He watched the others disappear. It was still warm: a humid, thick blanket that made it seem like the evening had wrapped itself around him, cloaking him in tightening shadow. He could feel himself sweating again.
He was unsure when he made the decision to go to his uncle’s office. He just looked up and found himself on his bicycle, pedaling fiercely in that direction.
Cars sliced through the night around him. He had a single flashing red safety light attached to the rear wheel frame, though he doubted that it would do much good. Miami drivers have loose relationships with the rules of the roadway, and sometimes yielding to a person on a bicycle seemed either like a terrible loss of face or a task so difficult it was beyond anyone’s innate ability. He was accustomed to being cut off and nearly sideswiped every hundred yards and secretly enjoyed the ever-present, car-crushing danger.
His uncle’s office was in a small building ten blocks away from the high-end shops on Miracle Mile in Coral Gables, which was only a mile or two from the university campus. After the shopping district, the road became a four-lane too-fast boulevard, with frequent stoplights, east and west to frustrate the Mercedes-Benz and BMW drivers hurrying home after work. The road was divided by a wide center swath of stately palms and twisted banyan trees. The palms seemed puritan in their upright rigor, while the ancient mangroves were Gordian knots and devilishly misshapen, gnarled with age. Each direction seemed almost encased, tunnels formed by haphazard sweeping branches. Auto headlights carved out arcs of light through the spaces between the trunks.
Moth pedaled quickly, dodging cars, sometimes ignoring red lights if he thought he could zip safely through the intersection. More than one driver honked at him, sometimes for no reason other than the fact that he was there and using up space that they believed they both needed and deserved for their oversized SUV.
He was breathing hard, his pulse throbbing, when he arrived at the office building. Moth chained his bike to a tree in front. It was a dull, redbrick building, four squat stories with an old, slightly decrepit feel to it, especially in a city devoted to modern, young, and hip. There were wide windows in the back of the office that overlooked a few side streets and the rear parking lot and a single tall palm tree and not much else. It was, Moth had always thought, a very unprepossessing place for a man so successful in his practice.
He walked around the back and saw his uncle’s silver Porsche convertible parked in its designated slot.
Moth did not know what to think. Patient? Emergency?
He hesitated before going up to the small suite. He told himself that he could simply wait by the Porsche and sooner or later his uncle would emerge.
Something important must have come up. That appointment he said was going to make him late at Redeemer One. Something far more serious than a new prescription for Zoloft. Maybe mania. Hallucinations. Loss of control. Death threats. Hospital. Something. He wanted to believe the story he’d told a few minutes earlier to his fellow Redeemer One regulars.
Moth took the elevator up to the top floor. It creaked and jerked a bit on the fourth-floor landing. The building was silent. He guessed that none of the dozen other therapists in the building were working late. Few of them used secretaries-their clientele knew when to arrive and when to leave.
His uncle’s top-floor office had a small, barely comfortable waiting room with out-of-date magazines in a rack. In an adjacent larger room, Uncle Ed had space for a desk, a chair, and an analyst’s couch, which he used much less frequently than he had a dozen years earlier.
Moth quietly entered his uncle’s office and reached for the familiar small buzzer just by the door. There was a friendly handwritten sign taped above the buzzer for patients: Ring twice nice and loud to let me know you have arrived, and take a seat.
That was what Moth intended to do. But his finger hesitated over the ringer when he saw the door to his uncle’s office ajar.
He moved to the door.
“Uncle Ed?” he said out loud.
Then he pushed the door open.
This is what Moth managed:
He stopped himself from screaming.
He tried to touch the body, but the blood and greasy viscous brain matter from a gaping head wound splattered over the desk and staining his uncle’s white shirt and colorful tie made him pull his hand back. Nor did he touch the small semiautomatic pistol dropped to the floor next to the outstretched right hand. His uncle’s fingers seemed frozen into a claw.
He knew his uncle was dead, but he couldn’t say the word dead to himself.
He called 911. Shakily.
He listened to his high-pitched voice asking for help and giving his uncle’s office address, each word sounding like it was some stranger speaking.