Page 28 of The Chain

Rachel tries to think of a reasonable explanation. “Um, yeah, we’ve lost wireless in the house, which is why she’s been out of touch. She can’t text or Instagram or anything.”

“I thought she still had minutes left on her phone?”

“Nope.”

“Hey, do you want me to come over and look at your wireless? It might be a router issue.”

“No, better not. I’m coming down with the flu bug as well. It’s very contagious. Don’t want to get you sick too. I’ll definitely tell Kylie you were asking for her.”

“Um, OK, ’bye,” he says, and she stares at him until, intimidated, he turns and waves and walks back down the road again.

She drives the remaining fifty yards to the house. She hasn’t thought of that. Kylie’s school friends text and message all the time. If Kylie goes radio silent for more than an hour, it creates a big vacuum in their lives. And soon she’ll start running out of plausible excuses. Another thing to worry about on top of everything else.

19

Thursday, 5:11 p.m.

Pete isn’t home yet but he can’t take it anymore. He’s been in the woods all day.

His skin is crawling; his skin is on fire. It is, as old man De Quincey said, the itch that can never be scratched.

He pulls the Dodge Ram off Route 2 and into the Wachusett Mountain State Reservation. There’s a pond there that nobody ever goes to.

He reaches over the seat and grabs his backpack.

He looks up and down the road but there’s no one around. From the backpack he removes a small plastic bag of premium-grade Mexican heroin. The DEA crackdown on legit opiates has affected all the patients who get their meds through the VA; Pete was able to fill the gap through the dark web for a while but then the feds got active there too. Heroin is actually easier to obtain than OxyContin now, and heroin is much more effective anyway, especially golden-triangle H and the new stuff coming up from Guerrero.

He takes out a spoon and his Zippo lighter and a syringe and a rubber arm tie. He cooks the heroin, ties off a vein, sucks the drug up into the syringe, and flicks the needle to get the air bubbles out.

He injects himself and then quickly puts the paraphernalia in the glove compartment in case he passes out and a National Park Service clown gets nosy.

He looks through the windshield at the fall foliage and the azure pond water. The trees aren’t at their peak but they’re still beautiful. Fiery oranges and reds and crazy sunburned yellows. He relaxes and lets the heroin dissolve in his bloodstream.

He’s never looked at the statistics, so he has no idea how many veterans are opiate addicts of some sort, but he imagines the number is quite high. Especially for people who have done a couple of combat tours. During the ’08 surge, every single member of his company had been injured or wounded. After a while people just stopped reporting themselves to the medics. What was the point? Nothing they could do about a concussion or a broken rib or a sprained back. You were just taking up a bed when your buddies were out there clearing roads and removing explosive charges from bridges.

What these opiates do, what heroin does, is remove the pain from your body temporarily. All the accumulated pain of all those decades walking the Earth. Pain from the grinding of bone on bone, pain from falls, pain from people dropping girders on you, pain from the incompetent operation of machinery, pain from falling thirty feet into a wadi, pain from an overpressure shock wave from an IED thirty feet to your rear.

And that’s just the physical pain.

He tilts the car seat back and lets the heroin ease his burdens in a way that even sleep cannot. The μ-opioid receptors in his brain activate a cascade that leads to a release of dopamine and a rush of well-being.

His eyes flicker and he zoetropes the strange twiggy trees on the pond’s far shore, the falling leaves, and the thin-legged wading birds walking over the pond’s mercury surface. Memories and images flood his mind whenever he uses. Usually bad memories. Usually the war. Sometimes 9/11. He thinks about Cara and Blair. He’s just over forty, but he has been married and divorced twice. Nearly everybody he knows is in the same boat, of course, and it’s worse among the enlisted men. Sergeant McGrath, a guy on his last tour, had been divorcedfourtimes.

Cara was just a youthful mistake—they were married for only thirteen months—but Blair…oh boy, Blair was a Townes Van Zandt song. She had taken a big chunk of his heart, his life, and his money.

Money. Another worry. Seven more years in the Marines and he could have retired on half pay. But the truth was that he had just barely avoided court-martial for what had happened at Bastion in September 2012.

Women, money, the goddamn war…hell with it all,he thinks and closes his eyes and lets the heroin fix him.

The H fixes him.

Fixes him in spades.

He sleeps for about twenty minutes and wakes and drives to a 7-Eleven to buy a pack of Marlboros and a Gatorade. The worry about Rachel has temporarily slipped his mind.

He gets back in the cab and turns on the radio. They’re playing Springsteen. It’s new Springsteen and he doesn’t know new Springsteen but it’s all right. He lights himself a cigarette and sips the Gatorade and then drives to Holden, where he takes 122A into town.

He’s been back in Worcester about two months now. He doesn’t feel sentimental about the place. He has no family left here and very few friends from the old days.