They hunched beside the dumpsters where the thick snow gathered in gray puddles. Sneaking a cigarette reminded Carter of junior high school, when he and his buddies smoked outside the pool door between classes. Oscar, picking up on his nervous glances, cupped his cigarette in his hand between drags and said, “Dude. It’s cool.”
The admission paperwork called for a patient’s drug history—they still had to justify his stay there. Carter figured this was a good time to start it.
Oscar surprised him by talking fairly openly about the drugs he had used, how often he had used them, where, and in what situations. Usually at the first interview, kids minimized the amount they used, thinking they still had a chance to avoid treatment. Other times, they exaggerated their past, boasting with junkie pride about gigantic quantities of drugs they had consumed. But Oscar spoke of his use neither in swaggering terms nor in understatements. He spoke in a realistic tone that let Carter know he had thought about drugs and was aware of how they had turned on him.
“When’s the first time you got high?”
“High or drunk?”
“Either.”
“Kindergarten.”
He had snuck sips of adults’ drinks and discovered the magic in them. In third grade, he got stoned for the first time on some pot he stole out of his mother’s purse.
“That was better than drinking.”
“Didn’t make you sick?”
He dragged on his cigarette then said without letting out the smoke, “Felt better.”
In fifth grade, he began running crack for the older kids, but never touched the stuff himself because he saw what it had done to them. In sixth grade, he discovered acid and began a love affair with it. “Everything makes sense when I trip.”
The most he ever took was seventeen hits at a Grateful Dead concert two summers ago. He held up his right hand. “They told me I cut off my finger to experience what it would be like to be Jerry Garcia.”
Carter shuddered.
“I didn’t feel a thing—not even in the emergency room the next day.”
Not long afterward, he tried ecstasy and thought it was the ideal drug. “X, when it works…” His eyes glittered. “Nothing better.”
“What do you mean?”
“You want to screw everybody.”
“What about afterward—the aches, the depression?”
“I’ve had worse hangovers.”
“And when it doesn’t work?”
“You want to fuck people over.” He sucked on his third cigarette. “But I never lost a fight on X.”
When ice came around, he liked that the high came quicker and more intense than with ecstasy.
“What else?”
“‘Shrooms, coke, ‘ludes—whatever was around.”
About the only drug he had not taken was heroin. “I don’t like needles, dude, but if it was that or nothing, I’d probably try it.”
Carter leaned against the hospital’s brick wall, out of the snow’s way, but he could not escape its chill. Oscar finished his cigarette, snubbed it out against the wall, and placed it back in his pack. Talking seemed to have calmed him. His shoulders had softened some. When they got back upstairs in Carter’s office—again hurrying by Judy before she could ask questions about Oscar’s jacket and Carter’s sweater being wet (she inhaled deeply and suspiciously at their passing)—Oscar seemed almost willing to be there. He complied with the urine test and did not fight the obligatory strip search. He protested only with a silent grimace when Carter flushed the joint he found in Oscar’s cigarette pack down the toilet. But it was too much for him when Carter told him the nurses would store his cigarettes.
“Thought you said this wasn’t a fucking jail.”
“I know it’s a pain, but around here smoking is considered a privilege.”
“Seems more a punishment to take away my cigs.”
“The nurses will give them to you at scheduled smoking breaks.”
“That sucks.”
But he did surrender his pack.
Carter still had one more detail to arrange with Judy before he could turn Oscar over to her and finish the admission paperwork.
“I know we had talked about doing it differently, but I want to put Oscar with Rodney and move Archie to Chip’s room.”
Judy, perched behind the raised counter that marked the nurses’ station, peered at Carter over her half-rimmed glasses with a look of pained annoyance that she might have directed toward a small boy at the beach who would not stop throwing sand in his sister’s hair. Mid-forties, her age showed more in a general impression of poor health than in any particular feature. She had a small face, dotted by two beady eyes and lined by thin lips. A weak jaw gave her the appearance of an overbite, though her teeth lined up orderly. At the base of her neck grew a mushroom-shaped wart, the size of a fingernail, with a cauliflower texture. When Carter’s eyes fell upon it, which was often—they seemed to be drawn to it—the wart repulsed him.
“My orders were to put the new admit in room 612 with Chip.”
It was such a simple request; Carter hadn’t expected a conflict. It further annoyed him that she insisted on referring to Oscar as “the new admit” when he stood right before her.
“I’m not here to give you orders—”
“Sounds to me like you’re trying.”
Sister Mary Xavier had routinely signed the order for Oscar to take the open bed in 612, probably without thinking about it. If Carter explained the situation to her, she would have taken his side, but he didn’t want to make that much out of it. The problem was Judy considered a written instruction akin to a commandment.
“I’m merely suggesting that, for therapeutic reasons,” this he underscored with raised eyebrows, “we place Oscar with someone who is further along in the program.”
“I suppose you also consider smoking therapeutic?”
“Smoking?” Oscar said. Until that point, he had observed the quibble with a silent, mocking smirk as though watching two parents argue over a point of complete indifference to him. “Who’s smoking?”
Judy, startled, as though she had forgotten he was there, turned her look of annoyance on him while she said, “Nothing is as simple as you seem to think when you make your ‘therapeutic suggestions,’ Carter. Besides, Clarence is occupied at the moment.”
As though that settled the matter, she returned to the entry she had been making in the chart opened before her. The cauliflower wart on her neck leered back at Carter. He wanted to pluck it off.
Just then, Buddha ambled out of the kitchen and lumbered toward the nurses’ station slurping a strawberry shake from a plastic water bottle marked SlimFast, completely undisturbed by any pressing obligations. “Hey, Carter. Whaddya say?”
Judy sneered at him.
Unaffected by her look, Buddha, the recreational therapist, turned to Oscar and stuck out a meaty paw. “You must be the new kid on the block. Whaddya say?”
Oscar ignored the hand extended to him, ran his eyes up and down—and around—Buddha, then scowled at the beefy, open face smiling down on him.
Buddha withdrew his hand as calmly and as happily as if Oscar had pumped it with the joy of seeing an old friend and tugged a long slurp from his shake. His soft round body rested atop two enormous thighs the size of hundred-pound flour sacks that slumped together at the knees. When Buddha