The Four-Day Run

The meth run went four days. No sleep. You hear of longer runs. A week, two weeks. But…stay awake two weeks? People believe what they hear themselves saying, I guess. These days, no more meth. I meditate instead. Before work, even. Sometimes I’ll close my eyes. There are lapses that can’t be accounted for. It must be something else, the lapses. Not meditation. Maybe it shines light on the truth. Like, when the person doing the telling believes what isn’t true. It’s not lying…not really. Hardly anyone knows what the truth might be, when it comes to certain stories. Someone once told me, dreams are just as real as life, only they don’t last as long.

Anyway, back to the four-day run.

It came after the first jail stretch. No drugs up in County. Not for me. You had to have jail skills, to get the drugs. The other guys up in County were smoking weed, sniffing coke, chopping up codeine pills and snorting them. Mainlining heroin, for all I knew. Banging benzos, dropping Mollys. There are ways it all gets inside. But just because you’re inside, and it’s inside, doesn’t mean you get any. You had to have the jail skills. So I found other ways to pass the time.

I wrote a letter. To Nadia. Sent it to where she worked. Put down as the return address:

Inmate Number Such-and-Such, County Jail, San Francisco, California

I convinced myself Nadia would see that return address and find her emotions stirred. Now there was one prophecy ended up fulfilled, all right.

Maybe you pondered the future up in County. Sitting at one of the long metal tables that were bolted to the floor and ran the length of the jailhouse wing. The tables were solid as a submarine’s hull. Maybe you watched television, or got in a card game. Until it came time to work, if you had a job. I worked in the kitchen. Plenty to eat. Gained thirty pounds, average of eight ounces a day. It wasn’t difficult. Not with so much food. Not with what the meth had done before.

I tried to start reading again. Once in a while a Sheriff’s Deputy rolled around a cart with stacks of paperbacks. We were allowed to borrow two at once. Get caught with more than two, there may be consequences. There may very well be. We had yard privileges, a couple hours a week. Softball games in the dirt diamond, North Wing against South Wing. Some dudes could really bat a ball. Once, a batter lost his grip and the bat spun out of his hands. A guy off to the side ducked at the last possible instant.

You could get a barbering. Not with scissors, of course. The Deputies kept electric clippers in a locked cabinet, still in the original packaging. The packaging was a flimsy cardboard box with a clear plastic window. Maybe you paid for your haircut with a commissary item. I didn’t get any haircuts, although my hair had grown long, even before I went in. I was saving myself for Nadia.

Every so often, one of your friends came due for release. You stayed awake talking the night before. Made plans, exchanged information: where you might be found, where you might be headed. You sat talking at the metal tables which were bolted to the floor and realized you’d never see your friend again. Or he might be back in time for the next softball game.

Eventually, my own court date arrived. I woke 4 a.m., showered and dressed in my bright-orange jail clothes. Ate breakfast and got loaded onto the corrections bus, along with the rest of us who had hearings that day. Shackled to a man coming down with the flu. He tried to hide it, worried the Deputies would see he was sick and forbid him any more work in the kitchen. Could’ve been he had some business enterprise running out of the kitchen. Or maybe he just wanted more to eat. The corrections bus rumbled along the freeway. On the other side of the reinforced glass and steel mesh the streets were slick with rain. They glistened like tar pools—close enough to get sucked into, fossilized. At the courthouse the Deputies marched us to a holding cell off the courtroom. We began to wait.

An old-timer recalled the days when smoking was allowed in the holding cells. Another inmate folded his legal documents into some sort of origami. A bird or a turtle. He planned to make it a present to his court-appointed PD. He thought it might motivate his PD to fight harder for him. The man coming down with the flu got more sure he would lose his kitchen job. The old-timer told him not to worry. Soon enough my turn came.

My parents were in the courtroom. There in the spectator section as I came escorted from the holding cell, wearing handcuffs. The last time my parents had flown out to see me, I was wearing a cap and gown. The judge dropped her gavel and my paid-for attorney started in.

The prosecutor put forth counter-arguments. Some evidence against me was made up. That much was certain. But nobody had reason to make anything up, except for what reasons I’d given them. The invented evidence was simply another form of actual evidence. The judge dropped her gavel.

Years later I got my convictions expunged and registered to vote and received a summons in the mail for jury duty. We assembled before the same judge, in the same courtroom—I took the seat my dad had occupied, the day of my hearing. Remembering him the way I’d known him then. Someone handed out forms; we could list our various excuses for being unable to serve as jurors. On the back of my form I wrote a note to the judge.

I thanked her. Explained the path upon which she’d set me had twisted and doubled back and sometimes disappeared. That I lost things onto which I would’ve rather held on to…same as it goes for all of us, probably. However, Your Honor, I arrived at a point where service to society is possible. Only not as a juror, please. As per the reverse of this form.

With my parents watching from the spectator section, the judge dropped her gavel and settled matters. If I’d had a PD instead of the paid-for attorney, I might’ve been handed twenty-two months and a felony rap. But the paid-for attorney earned his keep. Misdemeanors and time served. The judge says you’re sentenced to time served, but there’s still some time left. You have to get processed. So it wasn’t until evening that I hit the streets.

They gave my belongings back. Not the meth, of course. Or the gun. There was half a pack of cigarettes in the pocket of my Ben Davis shirt. Smoking wasn’t allowed up in County. Release presented a good opportunity to quit. It presented other opportunities, too.

My parents had put money on my books. Fifty dollars a week, the maximum allowed. I never spent it; didn’t need any more food than what was available from the kitchen. The thirty pounds’ worth. I’d promised myself to get in shape if I got out. Well, I was out. They gave me a check for the money on my books. I cashed it at the bank across the street from the jail.

The paid-for attorney had said to meet my parents at their hotel. First I wanted to call Nadia. But by the time I found a pay phone and dialed information it was too late for her to still be at work.

So I had the half-pack of cigarettes and the money my parents put on my books. It had rained and the rain had stopped. I walked to Blondie’s Pizza, on Powell near Market. Got a slice and watched the tourists standing in line to ride the cable cars. Smoked a couple cigarettes. Got another slice. Repeated Nadia’s number until I had it memorized.

We liberated Lon C. the next day. My parents hadn’t wanted to pay for the kennel. But after we talked a while at their hotel, I guess they were glad they had. They’d covered the rent on my apartment, too. And the paid-for attorney. I was, let’s see, twenty-three years old at the time. A real prodigy. Setting the world on fire, that was me. Well, at least I could say Lon C. remained alive, and that he and I were back together.

I’d thought about him in jail, even more than Nadia. He appeared well. Put on weight, had a flea bath. Resembled a wolf, twice as much as before. People always asked: Is that a wolf? A coyote? No. Just Lon C. He’d had no chew toys or a blanket in the kennel. I’d complained about being behind bars, but Loncey just bounded into the back of the folks’ rental car. Like nothing much of it had mattered. What would he have said, even if he could’ve said anything? His nature was to exist in the present. My mom drove us onto the freeway. Lon C. laid his lupine head in my lap as I considered calling Nadia.

The call suddenly didn’t feel so important. Not with me and Loncey freed from our cages. Misdemeanors and time served. I saw in the rearview mirror my hair, grown into a tangle of curls. It got silent in the car, until my dad turned around in the front passenger’s seat.

“Do you suppose he even remembers any of what happened?”

He reached back and scratched the dog’s ears. His fingers were close to mine. It grew silent again.

“Probably not,” my dad said, taking his hand back.

A freeway sign indicated an exit approaching. Anyone reading would be exactly a mile from their chance. It was a potential exit, from the perspective of the reader. Foliage covered part of the sign; you had to read quickly. We were in a lane that splits into two and someone has to decide.

“You know what let’s do?” my dad returned to scratching Loncey’s ears, a strange look on his face. “Let’s take a little hike. Up Mount Davidson.”

“Mount Davidson,” my mom said. “Remember you did that once?”

“Today’s a perfect day for it.” Dad’s expression brightened.

“You three go ahead.” My mother steered towards the off-ramp. “I’ll get coffee and read. You can have a nice chat.” She smiled in the rear-view mirror. But it was a tight smile.

“How many calories do you burn, hiking Mount Davidson?” I asked.

Years later I read Tom Sizemore’s book. About how he becomes a top Hollywood actor and gets addicted to meth. Loses everything and winds up in jail. Then quits drugs. But before any of it, he is cast in Born on the Fourth of July. A movie about a soldier who fought in Vietnam. The soldier was an actual person. He’d written his own book.

The movie’s Vietnam scenes were shot in the Philippines. Tom Sizemore and the rest of the cast and crew stay at a hotel the former Philippines dictator built for his daughter’s wedding. All around the hotel, people live in homes built with feces. Animal and human. Sizemore’s character is quadriplegic. A scene calls for him to race down a hill in his wheelchair and crash at the bottom. So Tom Sizemore, he invents a way to make it realistic.

He has someone tie his hands so he’s unable to break his fall. Like the character he’s playing. He practices on his own, before the cameras roll. Tom Sizemore, by himself, pushing his wheelchair to the top of the hill. Rolling down. Picking up speed. Crashing. He practices again and again. Up and back down, over and over. Pushing, rolling, crashing. Not able to break his fall. Knowing in his heart that’s the way to nail his scene.

Atop Mount Davidson there’s a giant cross. Made of cement, several stories high. Once, a group tried to have it torn down. A big controversy ensued, now forgotten. 

My dad and Lon C. and I hiked to the base of the cross. Below us, the City stretched from the ocean to the sheltered bay. Off in the near distance two guys stood around. They had their backs to us and it was clear what they were there for.

“Pops,” I said. “Popsie. Those guys look familiar.”

The sky reflected in my father’s glasses. The sky was blue although some stray clouds floated around too. The clouds were gray and ragged and stood out from their background. I watched the reflection as the words came from my mouth.

“I’m gonna head over…to say hi.”

“Go ahead,” he said, turning away.

It would’ve been fine to have changed my mind. It would’ve been a simple thing to have done. But you look back and realize: sometimes it’s no less real than an opportunity presenting itself. Loncey and I walked closer. One of the guys had patches all over his jeans jacket. Heavy-metal bands. The other guy wore a hat pulled down over his eyes. They monitored our approach.

“Just got out the joint,” I said, when we got within earshot. I showed them my jail-issued bracelet. “Yesterday. That’s my dad, over there.”

The one with the patches half-turned. Like he wanted to keep an eye on me and Loncey, too. Now that I stood next to him there was almost no jacket any more. Only patches.

“Do you think I might, you know…” I let my sentence trail off and made the gesture, universally recognized, understood.

The one with his hat pulled low handed me a brass pipe and a plastic lighter.

“Thanks,” I said.

Below us, a million homes. Families living in them. It couldn’t have occurred to me to think about Tom Sizemore. To picture him at the top of his hill in the Philippines, sitting in his wheelchair with his hands tied. I couldn’t have imagined him gazing out at those dwellings built with feces. What went through Tom Sizemore’s mind at the top of his hill? I couldn’t have wondered, not that day on Mount Davidson. Not from having read his book. He was years from even having written it.

A church stood off in the distance. It was on the college campus, where my parents sent me to school. I gripped the pipe and lighter. Lon C. started pawing the earth. He began digging. Slow at first. Then he really got going. Dirt flew like mortar rounds blasted the mountaintop. The two guys wore amazed expressions. Here was a dog who knew how to dig. 

Back at our old home, there’d been a yard. Loncey would scamper outside and in minutes be within a snout’s length of the planet’s molten core. No bulldozer ever built, pound-for-pound could out-dig him. There’s many memories of that remarkable mutt; his wild style of digging is one that really sticks.

The two guys seemed nervous. It’d been a while, I guess. Me standing there, clutching their pipe and lighter, not saying much. Me, some stranger just out of lockup. They couldn’t have known it was for misdemeanors and time served. For all they knew, I’d done my time for acting upon messages beamed from giant religious icons. Instructions to commit double murder and feed the corpses to my wolf-dog. Bury any remains in a huge hole. The one with the patches spoke up.

“Nice up here.” He seemed to be forcing out the words as he stabbed at the ground with the toe of his sneaker. “With the sun out, and all.”

This guy wasn’t letting up about the weather. Neither of the two looked like he got more than ten minutes’ sunlight a week. The brass pipe was warm from my holding it. The lighter felt smooth. I pressed into the plastic with my thumbnail. Dad stood off in the distance. I could see him. Loncey rooted around in his hole. He moved more earth. The guy with the patches squinted at me.

“You gonna smoke that?” He sounded a little on edge. “It’s decent weed. Not great, or anything.” He didn’t want to raise any expectations. “I mean, don’t rush…we gotta head back down, is all.

“It gets cold,” he said. “You don’t see it coming.”

I thumbed the lighter’s wheel and made it spark. Put the pipe to my lips and turned my back to my dad. It was decent weed. Not great, or anything. That guy with the patches knew what he was talking about.

My father stayed far ahead of Lon C. and me, hiking down the mountain. Glancing back now and then, making sure we still followed. Going up, he’d talked the entire while. Told a story about a woman he’d met after he’d met my mom but before they got married. 

They ran around, he and his gal. The hours spent with her made it feel as though little else mattered. It led to serious trouble. So he started hitting the books. Put his education to good use, he said, looking at me when he said it. Married my mother, had me and my brother. He caught himself when he began to reflect upon how well everything turned out. It was okay. I knew what he’d meant.

He’d warmed to his tale as it unfolded. I could tell we were supposed to engage in conversation. But holding up my end would’ve been like scoring drugs in jail. Instead, I thought about my hair. The thirty pounds. Down the mountain, Dad didn’t utter a word. I stopped every so often to let Loncey poke around the underbrush or have after a scent. I remembered another story my dad once told me, back when I was a kid.

An archer—in the story—launches an arrow at a tree. It flies straight and true until it gets half-way to the target. Then half-way again. And again. It never hits the tree. It never can hit the tree. It always has to get half-way first. No matter how tiny the distance between any two points, it can always be cut in half. Nothing can ever arrive at any destination. I thought about the story of the archer until we reached the base of the mountain.

We walked to the coffee shop where Mom read her newspaper. Canines weren’t allowed inside. Lon C. and I stood on the sidewalk as my parents had their discussion. Mom put down her newspaper when dad started making gestures. I rubbed Loncey’s head, felt the hard ridge of bone along his skull. Like something prehistoric. His type of head hadn’t changed, not for thousands of years.

I saw my reflection in the window glass. Everything reflected. The thirty pounds. Across the street a barber shop had one of those old-fashioned poles. Spinning around, the blue-and-red streams coming from somewhere, going somewhere. All in motion and spinning in place. I thought about Nadia.

My dad yelled. He shouted at me.

“Stop! Come back!” He called my name. He shouted Lon C.’s name, for some reason. I heard my father yelling and calling my name as I ran. Loncey ran, too. He ran much faster. Ahead on his leash, pulling me. I ran and got pulled and my dad called for us to stop. To please just stop.

My father stopped following us and we slowed to a walk. The street names were in alphabetical order. For Lon C. and I they went in reverse. We crossed Taraval, Santiago, Rivera. Kept going past Pacheco, Ortega, Moraga. Into the park, bordered on the other side by Cabrillo. Then came Balboa, Anza. Who knows what happened to the missing letters. We walked until we got to Quentin’s place.

He lived in a garage. Us San Francisco meth people, always hanging out in garages. Quentin stayed for free…his relative owned the house, maybe. He was in the process of converting part of the garage into a studio. The process had been ongoing, ever since I’d known him. The garage door was open. The studio was on the far end, away from the street, away from any Eyes.

You saw how he went about it. Quentin worked in the trades, knew his construction. He’d made a skeleton from two-by-fours and put up drywall. King and jack studs formed a doorframe. Transferring the header load to the bottom plate. Load transference, very important. Quentin had explained it. He was always explaining it. He was always taking off the door and installing one he’d found discarded at a construction site. I knocked, no answer came. But I got the feeling someone was in there, behind the studs and drywall.

“What do you want?” Quentin finally answered. He was a big guy, heavy. Filled the doorframe. He wore a thick white-and-black flannel shirt and a red wool hat.

“They cut me loose,” I said. “Yesterday.” Lon C. stood next to me. His tongue hung out. We had walked a long way.

“What do you want?” He repeated. He scanned the street. The width of his shoulders formed a bridge between the sides of the doorframe.

“I was…rolling on through.” I heard the longing in my voice using those codewords. “Got what I owe you, too,” I added, after a moment.

“Okay," he muttered, “Come in, I guess.” He turned and the entrance was clear. “I guess it’s good you’re okay. Bring the dog. I don’t want him messing up anything out here.”

A ragged couch and crumbling television furnished the studio. Otherwise it was like a garage. I found a razor blade and sliced the bottom off an empty two-liter soda bottle. Went out to the hose and rinsed it and filled it with water and set it down for Loncey. Quentin took a glass pipe from his shirt pocket and put it on top of the television. He pressed the nozzle of a butane can into a jet torch lighter. He glanced at me and looked down when our eyes met.

“I might have to move,” he said. “They’re thinking of selling the place.” The butane hissed as he manipulated it. “Been on a job,” he said. “Out by your old house. The new people made all kinds of changes.”

Loncey whined and scratched at the floor. But there was no way he would be able to dig. The floors were cement.

“The apartment’s okay, too.”

“Yeah. Sure it is.”

He gave me the lighter. The fresh butane made it cold, like a frost had settled in. He gave me the pipe, too.

I’d been figuring to save those those first few hits for when I got back to the apartment. And I didn’t like to smoke where the smoke might get to Lon C. But I’d been in custody, and had come to visit Quentin. If he didn’t see me getting high, he might get the wrong idea. So I went ahead and started in.

I sank into the sofa in the studio being carved from a garage and smoked from the glass pipe. Quentin went to one of the hiding places built into the two-by-four framing and drywall. I watched as he made me what I’d come for.

He set a digital scale on top of the television. Put an empty baggie on the scale. The readout flashed a number. He pressed a button and the readout blinked back to zero. He brought out a bigger baggie from a different hiding place. Spooned shards from the bigger baggie into the one on the scale. The numbers went up. I took more hits from the glass pipe.

We were talking like only meth people can. The words flowing out and in. Nothing said couldn’t sound how it was supposed to. With the meth, there can be that kind of talking. It never comes any other way. None that I’ve ever found. It never comes any other way where the past is gone with so much interest in what you have to discuss. When the ideas bounce back and forth as if they are parts of nature. Seedlings shooting forth. Arrows flying towards trees.

“Got another gig coming up,” Quentin said. “Painting. Exterior.” He glanced sideways at me. “You wanna work?”

“Sure. I mean, why not?”

“We start in a couple days. We have to scrape first.”

“I sold all my tools.”

“You sold your paint scrapers?”

I nodded and took another hit from the pipe, blowing the smoke away from Loncey.

“Who buys used paint scrapers?” Quentin wondered, shaking his head. “Don’t worry. I got what we need. You can borrow what I got.”

“Ladders?”

He sealed the baggie and tossed it to me. “I don’t have ladders.”
“We need ladders.” I slid the baggie into my pocket.

“You still know where to get those?” He touched his shoulder and moved his arm around, as if the socket bothered him.

I pictured myself getting up in the mornings. Arriving early to the job site with a cup of coffee. A thermos cup, so the coffee would stay warm until the first break. Smoking a cigarette and climbing a ladder. The sun shining, a paint scraper in my hand and a bigger scraper in a tool belt around my waist. I imagined myself spending the mornings removing the dry, dead paint, getting ready for the new.

“Will the house be a different color? You know, when it’s finished.”

Quentin lit a cigarette. “Maybe. It might be yellow.”

“Or green?”

“It could be green,” he said. “It could.”

I took a cigarette from the pack he offered. “It would be cool to live in a green house.”

“Yeah. Easy for your friends to find you.”

“You just tell your friends what color house to find.”

He passed me the glass pipe and torch lighter.

“How many windows?”

“I don’t know. I made a drawing.” He began to search in a pile of papers, but got distracted organizing screwdriver bits. I rubbed Loncey’s muzzle and checked his water. I put the cigarette behind my ear and ran my fingers through my hair. Felt how long and coarse and tangled it had grown.

“What did you have that day, a gun?” Quentin said. He finished with his screwdriver bits. “Lucky the cops got to you when they did. You were scary.” He studied me. “How come you needed a gun?”

“People were looking for me.” I rolled the pipe between my fingers and peered down the barrel. The rim formed a perfect circle. “I thought they were.”

“You should’ve sold the gun, not your paint scrapers. Now you got nothing.”

Lon C. stretched on the cement floor. His four legs extended straight out, as if he were pushing something away.

Quentin shook his head. “I might have to move,” he said. “They’re thinking about selling the place.”

Loncey thumped his tail and shook a little so the tags on his collar jingled. Quentin rubbed his shoulder.I  ran my hand through my hair and took out my money and counted off bills and set them on top of the television, next to the digital scale. I thought I could feel someone staring as I went out the garage door open to the street.

You got those deals where they consolidate your debts. Float you a loan to pay them all. Now just the one loan to worry about. Meth addiction? Same basic principle. Never mind your other problems…one problem now. How to stay sourced. Sourced with shards. Getting shards amounts to everything, getting shards amounts to nothing. A fine and simple means to approach one’s life, at least on the surface.

We needed dog food. That wasn’t optional. There were the lesser necessities…cigarettes, a glass pipe and a jet torch lighter. A can of butane. We stopped at places where canines could go inside. I kept touching the baggie in my pocket, making sure it was still there. We used up almost all the money. I would use what was left.

The streets passed in their proper alphabetical order as we crossed them. No people were out looking for us when we arrived at the apartment. Night had fallen and I climbed through the window and opened the door to let in Loncey. He sniffed around; he hadn’t been there since the arrest. I found his dish and ripped open the bag of dog food. He got excited, leaping about until his meal got set before him. I let him eat and found the items in the cabinet under the sink, right where I’d left them.

There’s a process for purifying your meth with rubbing alcohol. Lie a dollar bill flat, put some shards on it and another dollar on top. Like a corpse in a coffin. Press down with a credit card on the top bill. Crush your shards into a fine white powder, use the card to scrape the powder into the glass pipe. The dollar makes a sort of funnel. Add a few drops of rubbing alcohol. It evaporates and takes the impurities with it. I held the pipe up to the light as the clear liquid mixture re-crystalized in the glass globe. It formed like a new universe. I took what I’d created into my own space.

A blower in the bathroom sucked everything out. So the smoke wouldn’t get to Loncey. Only to me. The torch lighter made a whooshing sound when I pressed the button. A blue finger of flame shot out. I could point the finger anywhere I wanted. I held the blue flame to the glass pipe. The smoke tasted cool and pure. As I sat in the bathroom and smoked, it all rushed in, it all rushed out. The thirty pounds began melting away. Ideas about Nadia floated around. Thoughts of placing that phone call. The meth left in the pipe turned a caramel brown. I went to lie on my bed and wait for the Filmstrips. 

The Filmstrips started after people started talking to me when they weren’t there. Showing behind my eyelids and on the walls and ceiling. Getting better as the run progressed. As more people talked to me from behind the walls. The nights with no sleep made it so I heard and saw these things; the meth made it so there were nights with no sleep. I lay on my bed and waited. Loncey lay next to me.

The Filmstrips showed surfaces of distant planets. Space’s furthest reaches, teeming with alien life. On the planets the life wasn’t alien. Beings lived in orange mountain cities made from metallic clay. Two magnetic moons spun around a blood-red sun. The mountain cities shifted like dunes as the moons whirled across the night sky. They sprang up and died off and re-formed, those cites. Too much to see all at once.

Lon C. licked my face and settled next to me on the bed. The bed was a piece of foam on the floor, had once been some kind of fold-up couch. Held together by frayed fabric, chunks missing. Not much else in the apartment: A doggie dish and chew-toys, a broken fridge, my Ben Davis shirts and Carhartt pants piled in a corner. We were lying on the bed when the knock sounded on the door.

“Hello?” My dad called my name. Gruff at first, like when we’d been running from him. Then softer. Lon C. whined. I held him so he wouldn’t bark.

My dad used to sit on the edge of my bed when I was little, with a book or his guitar, reading or singing songs. I fell asleep believing that when dreams came, the stories he read and songs he sang would be those dreams I dreamed. After a while he wasn’t knocking on the apartment door. I went back to the people who weren’t there, the Filmstrips of the alien worlds teeming with life.

A glow shone through the apartment’s one window. Dawn had arrived. The first morning of a run finds the mind different than did the first night. I took Lon C. for a walk. Nobody would be out looking for us, not so early. Cars motored along Nineteenth Avenue. Taking people to their jobs, one supposed. Loncey stopped and sniffed at the familiar flowers and shrubs growing in the sun. He eyeballed the occasional squirrel or bird. He wouldn’t be able to catch one, even were he let off his leash. We spent a couple hours in the sun after the dawn had broken. It was fine and safe to be outside walking in the morning.

Back at the apartment, more knocks on the door. The parents’ voices. Then, someone at the window. No way to see in. That was impossible. The knocks and voices were gone. I got the pipe and went in the bathroom and turned on the blower and smoked. Nadia began talking to me when she wasn’t there. 

“Can’t you believe in just this much?” Her disembodied voice said and faded into the hum of the blower.

We went for another walk, Loncey and I. It was a risk, yes. People were out looking for us. I felt sure they were. Nadia would be at work. The MUNI island near the shopping mall had a pay phone. I fed a few coins into the slot and dialed the number I’d memorized.

“Nadia’s with a client,” said the person on the other end. “She can’t talk. Did you want to make an appointment?”

A streetcar let off passengers at the island. People going shopping at the maze of stores across Nineteenth Avenue. Other passengers stayed on board. College students, perhaps, headed to classes. A campus was the next stop down the line.

The person on the phone grew insistent. “Hel-lo? Are you still there?”

“I guess I’m looking to come in. For Nadia.”

“So you do want to make the appointment.”

The streetcar disappeared along the tracks.

“It’s…let’s make the appointment,” I said at last.

I heard a sigh, then came a pause. The person on the other end, flipping through a scheduling book or scrolling in a computer screen. Then: “Tomorrow morning.”

“You don’t have anything now?”

Another sigh. “No. Nothing.”

“Oh…I see.”

“We’re confirming, then?”

“Yes,” I said. “We’re confirming. 

“Tomorrow. In the morning. Tomorrow morning,” I said.

Later came knocks on the apartment door. I held Loncey so he wouldn’t bark. The knocks stopped and darkness fell and I decided we would walk around the college campus.

It wasn’t the one from which I’d graduated. A different campus, one to which we’d never been before. We were in a quad area with trees silhouetted against the night sky. Some of the trunks appeared to have arrows sticking out of them; when we got closer they were only branches. Then, from the darkness, a campus police car materialized. It rolled toward us, slowing to a crawl as it neared.

I felt a tug on the leash. As if we were preparing to run. But the officer waved. It’s okay to be where the police are driving, when a dog is involved. A dog’s gotta walk, right? No reason someone can’t be out at any hour. No reason at all, so long as a dog is involved. People wouldn’t be out looking for us, not with those police around.

Back at the apartment it got late. There are always a couple hours where it gets very late. I smoked from my glass pipe and things began to get difficult. I found the pair of scissors in the kitchen drawer. I went into the bathroom and stared in the mirror as Nadia talked to me. She talked to me when she wasn’t there. She told me what to do. She could see it all.

At first Nadia was with me. And the scissors were fine, as well. The mirror too. It all worked. Then it didn’t. I couldn’t see or hear or do anything I needed to. Nadia still talked to me when she wasn’t there. And she could see. She could always see. But nothing worked any more. It was the latest part of the night.

The note rustled as it slid under the apartment door the next morning. No knocks this time. The note said the choices weren’t easy. For my parents to fly back home, to stop paying the bills. No more food, or kennels, or rent for the apartment. It said they loved me. I believed what the note said. I got ready to see Nadia.

Lon C. came along. It was okay; no one would be looking for us. Nadia’s workplace looked the same. The same brick wall had been there eighteen months ago when I rode my old motorcycle onto the sidewalk and saw Nadia for the first time. Loncey hadn’t come…he couldn’t ride on the motorcycle, of course. Back at our old house there’d been a door for him to get to the yard. Dig his holes. I filled in the holes later. We had a shovel and a rake and a trowel. Seeds for new grass. A watering hose.

Nadia had been leaning on the brick wall when I pulled up on my motorcycle. Smoking a cigarette. I didn’t smoke, not then. She watched as I took off my helmet. Assessing my hair, perhaps. But there was more. Sometimes there is more.

Nadia wasn’t outside when I walked up with Lon C. We went inside to the waiting area. I saw her across the floor, and I could tell she recognized me.

“Hello.” She tried to sound cheerful. She saw Lon C. 

“Wow,” she said. “Is that a wolf?”

Nadia went off somewhere. A glass table stood in the waiting area. The table was sturdy, though you could see through it to the floor. There was a magazine with a picture of an athlete on the cover. The athlete had announced retirement after a long career. At some point a scandal had erupted. The athlete made apologies and her career continued, better than before. Now it was over. I examined the magazine cover and thought about things.

Back at the apartment there was enough meth to last a little longer. And enough dog food. That was all, all of it. No money to pay for Nadia’s haircut. The athlete stared at me from the cover of the magazine as someone said my name.

Nadia pointed to an empty chair in front of an oval mirror. Loncey came, too. I sat down and Loncey lay on the floor as she draped a black cover over me.

“I tried to fix it myself.” I looked at her in the mirror.

“It could use some help,” she agreed.

I saw myself in the oval. The cover flowed to the floor near where Lon C. lay. It formed a black triangle with its point at my neck. Only my head showed at the top of the triangle. For a moment I thought Nadia would lean over and kiss me. That there would be the soft press of the flesh of her lips and then it would happen. Instead, she ran her hand through my hair. Through the mess I’d made.

I thought about the archer. How, even if he mis-fires his arrow—if his missile sails towards a destination far off its mark—it still has to get half-way. I began to believe in waking from a dream lasting not as long as real life. Nadia stopped running her hand through my hair. She held her hand against my head. I could feel the warmth and strength in her hand as she held it there.