The habit doesn't bite. Mona is not one of the junkies I see from time to time in the cafe, hollow-eyed and shivering, haggling with the big man. For a drug addict, Mona is sitting pretty.
But there are times when I look at her, at this very, beautiful and very wealthy woman who happens to be my wife and who also happens to be an addict. I look at her and I remember the woman she used to be, the free and independent one. I remember the first night on the beach, and I remember other nights and other places, and I know that something is gone forever. She is not so much alive now. The face is the same and the body is the same but something has changed. The eyes, maybe. Or the deep darkness behind them.
The bird in your cage is not the same bird as the wild thing you caught in the forest. There is a difference.
So many things could happen. Some fine day the big man could disappear forever from the café. She'd be a deep-sea diver with her air-hose cut, and we'd burrow through Vegas turning over flat stones to find a connection, and I would have the rare privilege of watching Mona die inside. By inches.
Or a raid, and cold turkey behind bars, banging her head against walls and screaming sandpaper curses at the guards. Or an overdose because some idiot somewhere in the long powdery chain forgot to cut the heroin when it was his turn. An overdose, with her veins blue and her eyes bulging and death there before she gots the needle out of her arm.
So many things —
I think she's happy now. Once she got used to being addicted — how do you get used to addiction? A good question — once she got used to it, she began to enjoy it. Strange but true. When you have an itch you enjoy scratching it. Now she looks forward to her shots, takes pleasure in them. A certain amount of reality is lost, of course. But she seems to think that what she gets in its place more than compensates for reality. She may be right The real world is often vastly overrated.
Strange.
"You should try it," she'll say now and then. "I wish I could tell you what it's like. It's really something. Like a bomb going off, you dig?"
She retreats into hip talk when she gets high.
"You should make it, Joe. Just one little joy-bomb to get you moving. So you can see what it's like."
A strange life in a strange world.
A funny thing happened yesterday.
I was giving her her four p.m. fix. I cooked the heroin, sucked it up in the hypo, picked up her leg and hunted around for the vein. She was just at the point where she needed the shot and in another five or ten minutes she would have started to shake. I found the vein and fixed her and watched the grateful smile spread on her face before she went under.
Then I was washing the spoon, getting ready to put the kit away. Some junkies don't take good care of their equipment. They die of infection that way. I'm always careful.
I was washing the spoon, as I said, and then I was putting it away. I stopped — maybe I should say I slowed down — and then I was picking up another little capsule filled with funny white powder, putting it on the spoon.
I wanted to take a shot myself.
Silly. Her words hadn't done it, her invitations to find out what it was all about. I wasn't a kid looking - for kicks.
So naturally I put the cap away. And I put the spoon away and put the syringe away. I locked up the kit and the bag of capsules. Even in Vegas you never know when some cop is going to decide his arrest quota is off for the month. I never leave things lying around.
I put everything away.
For the time being.
And I've been thinking about it ever since. I have a damned good idea what is going to happen. It may be the next time I give her a shot, or a week from then, or a month. She'll slip away from me, with the same grateful smile fading slowly on the same sad and lovely face, and I will begin to wash the works.
Then I'll take a shot of my own.
Not for kicks or thrills or joy. Not for pleasure or escape, not as a reward and not as penance. Not because I crave the life of a junkie. I don't.
Something else. To share with her, maybe. Or maybe the nagging knowledge that every time the heroin takes hold of her she slips that much further away from me. Something like that, I don't know. But one of these days or weeks or months I'll take that shot for myself.
I think we're going to be very something together. Whatever it is, at least it will be together. And that's what I wanted, isn't it?
THE END
of an Original Gold Medal Novel by
LAWRENCE BLOCK
Mona Page 15