FOUR

Raymond, or just Ray, wasn't actually a junkie, in the classical sense.  A junkie has a drug that they're hooked on.  Ray wasn't addicted to anything, when I brought him in.  Ray was just naturally trouble, though - the kind of guy that's never pulled a mark below 90% on anything that he was even remotely paying attention to, but lives on probation because they know (but can't prove) he was making LSD in one of the supply closets. I "brought him in", though. It already felt like that.  Like Gina and I were a team, with our secret.  I think he could feel it, too, when I went to talk to him, with a little sample of the stuff.

"Can you figure out what that is?"

"If it's simple, probably.  You can owe me one.  If it's complex or organic, though, only sort-of.  Unless you've got, like, grant money to throw at me.  Why? What's it from?"

"It's from my cousin.  Weird stuff.  Egyptian, or something like that."

"Drugs?"

"Incense.  Supposedly.  But weird incense, so maybe drugs.  Maybe poisonous."

"There's not so much of a line between drugs and poisons at you might think, when you get down to cases."

"Uh.  Okay.  So, how long?"

"I'm doing some testing tonight - basically, work ten minutes, wait an hour, work ten, like that.  So I can do this at the same time, easy.  Check in with me tomorrow, I'll see if I've found anything interesting out."

I left it with him, and went on shift.

...

That night, Gina snuck into my dreams.  It was...   an awkward arrival.  There's another intern, Katherine, and we've had coffee a couple times, but nothing serious.  Still, blonde, petite, knows what she wants in life, and I can make her laugh out loud to the point where she waves one hand around to stop, stop; if I've got buttons, she's standing on them.

It was a sex dream, is what I'm saying.

So, when Gina called out "Hey, don't let me interrupt you", and I suddenly knew I was dreaming, it threw me.  I had to take a second to collect myself, shaking my head - in the dream.  Gina said, after, that when I did that, it was even weirder from where she was.  She said there were all these other figments of me, doing other stuff, overlapped with me for a split second.  Something like - I'd been thinking about other stuff, at the same time, and that meant there were other versions of me doing those other things.  But coming to alertness yanked them all into the one person, fully dressed.  She backstepped.

"Damn, coz."

"...The drug.  You took the drug."

"Sure thing.  We can yell at each other when we wake up; otherwise, we risk doing it twice, depending on what we remember.  Besides, look!"

Successfully bamboozled, I looked.  And saw the landscapes of my whole day, half-transparent, half-exploded, laid out like some kind of fractal painting all around me. My bedroom.  Corridors of patients, the way home, the apartment, all one big overlapping mishmash. When I focused on this or that bit, that scene started to come real, and the bits of the other scenes faded.

A few moments later, we were standing in my apartment again - though all the boxes and files were absent.  Just clean, bland space.

"Nice pull.  You gotta tell me about those hills, though; where you remember those from."

"The hills?"

"Okay, when I started dreaming - like, this kind of dreaming - I was in my parent's old house, from when I was a kid.  And I wandered around a bit, through all these places I remembered.  And then I thought, If I was going to find you, I should look for places you think about, right?  Especially, like, bridges. As a symbol, tell myself I wanted to go across."

"I get it, yeah." It made sense, in a Gina kind of way.

"So, you know the bridge at the hospital, over the road?"

"The pedestrian thing.  Walkway.  'Course."

"Right, I thought about that, and walked over it, into the hospital.  But not the hospital bits you had here.  More like your memory of the hospital, instead of the bits you were dreaming just then.  Getting from that hospital to the one you were, I dunno, using?  It felt like coming up, sort up.  Like I was deeper down in your head than I am now."

"And the hills?"

"On the walkway.  Looking out the sides, the bridge didn't go over the road.  It went over these low hills way below, just going on and on, with this crazy too-bright too-full night sky."

There was more that we talked about that night, more that we explored.  But that's the last clear thing either of us could recall; we didn't find the hills that night.

In the morning, we had a fight.