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you chest-and-ankles over the gurney blanket, then wheels you down the hall. He leans in, like he wants to smell you, so close you know if you inhale you’re going to test positive for something. Maybe THC, maybe chlamydia. He kind of smile-whispers: “ The first word in boundaries is bound! ” His voice is half hard-core speedfreak, half twink Widmark, psycho-giggly Tommy Udo pushing an old wheelchair lady down the stairs. (Most people only have one half. Once you realize that, life is not necessarily easier, but it’s explainable.) They put fluorescent lights in the elevator to make you epileptic, then cure you with expensive stimulants .
    DAY FOUR. You see the albino. He had some kind of paint-thinner-methedrine incident in his mother’s carnival. Grabbing men and women’s palms on the midway, reading them and weeping: You don’t fucking want to know! You can’t remember if he’s the one who hung himself or became regional vice president of Nabisco South America.
    Once you start trying to control your feelings, you have already lost control . Shame is like a rush in the wrong direction. Are you saying you’ve never wanted to obliterate the history of your own mind? There was a rumor: the guy who really burned down the L.A. downtown library on April 29, 1986 was a peckerhead tweaker trying to fry Jews and Mexicans out of his brainpan. But that was then.
    This is now: You climb Everest, then you do laundry for the rest of your life. (The first time you go to a laundromat, without speed, you hate that the spinning laundry is boring … It used to explain the universe. That’s how you knew you were really off speed. You had no fucking clue about the universe, except that it made you self-conscious. Speed and laundromats. Because sometimes you just have to do something. And washing clothes is always the right thing to …)
    Describe “the burden of nonstop awareness.” Why? Just go look at the lights at Rite-Aid at four in the morning, when it’s just you and the eighty-year-old security man watching a hunched-up guy with shades and a leg brace screw the top off his Robitussin DM, guzzle half a bottle like it’s Thunderbird, then smack his lips and take off his sunglasses. Eyes that peeled back don’t come without a lot of speed-work. You recognize each other like Masons. The pharmacist, whose nametag says Bairj Donabedian, stares at you and picks up a telephone. When did life get this good ?
    ALL FUCKED OUT AND STILL AWAKE . Why is everything you remember bad? Now it comes back to you. What was her name? The ex-lawyer who dragged her little boy to the motel. Gave the kid an already-colored-in Yogi Bear coloring book? Even after the boy’d gone through half the book, he still had this hopeful look on his face before he turned every page. You were all in this motel room with a dozen other versions of you. All white guys. All waiting. But you couldn’t help notice this kid. Every time he turned a page on that coloring book, he had his crayon in the air, ready to go. And every time, he was just shattered when he saw that it was already colored on. Have you ever seen a five-year-old age ?
    You were just there to cop. But you saw anyway. Each filled-in Yogi and Boo-Boo killed the kid a little more … Watching this, even your cells hated themselves … (Just because you give somebody something for the first time doesn’t make you responsible if what you give them destroys their entire life. Does it?) Carmine—that was her name. Why do you do this to yourself? Carmine gave the child to the grinning simp in the cowboy hat. And what did you do? (You could have said something. You didn’t. If you were staring straight at a pedophile—and there had to be at least a chance —if you were , you had other priorities. But still …) There’s right behavior. And behavior that’s right on methamphetamine. You did your job! You took