The last time he had so much as spoken to his daughter she told him that he should have nothing to do with either of them. Today is a special day-it is his granddaughter’s birthday. The mind trick works: blood floods into the syringe and, ripping the handkerchief off of his arm with his teeth, he unloads the hit into his bloodstream. He concentrates hard and wills the blood to find its way around his ailing system and into the diversion created by the needle. He ties the handkerchief around his upper arm and rolls his shirt sleeve up. Even under the eyestrain-blue glow he can see them mapped out like one of those charts in a doctor’s waiting room. He knows his veins as intimately as someone who spends a lifetime in New York or London would know the underground transit lines. Strictly for amateurs and kids shooting up their first hit of Robitussin DM, he thinks, sneering to himself, as he slips the loaded syringe from his dirty overcoat pocket. The Doctor sits in a toilet stall in a shopping mall under a short-circuiting blue light meant to stop him shooting up, which is practically useless against a junkie who had put in so many years perfecting his art.
