“Sure thing, Alex.” I hadn’t known his face until I saw him. I didn’t know his name until I spoke it. And I didn’t know what his usual was, until muscle memory made me reach beneath the counter and pull out a bottle of vitamin C, which I suddenly remembered contained a baggie with a gram of coke. “I don’t have to count it,” I told him. “I trust you.”

“Thanks, man.”

I pocketed the cash, the little bell above the door jingled as he left, and I felt a whole new level of disgust for what I had just done—at furious odds with the part of me that saw this as business as usual.

The rest of the evening was a mix of normal customers and “special” customers. And it wasn’t like you could pick these people out of a lineup. There was one lawyer-looking guy who asked for two bottles of my “special vitamin C,” which was a top seller. A woman my mother’s age in a tennis outfit, who had her kids wait in the car while she bought our proprietary blend of echinacea. Echinacea = ecstasy. And there was an old lady who was sweet, but slow, and very tired, who asked how my family was, then requested a bottle of our best ornithine. Ornithine = oxycodone. There were some customers my alt-me knew better than others, but no one was new to this ball game.

I found that the only way to deal with this was to fold in on myself, becoming an observer in my own flesh. I knew what to do without having to think, so I did my best to shut down all my higher brain functions. I told myself I was just a passenger on a screwed-up ride. The ride would end, but where would it leave me? What was my next destination? The stop signs were all still blue, which meant the worlds didn’t cancel each other out—instead they built on one another. It probably meant in the next one, my family would still be rich, and I’d still be dealing drugs.

Maybe, I thought, this might be the end of it. I’d be stuck here in this reality, and would have to figure out how to make the best of it. If I could wash away the sleazy part of this life, and stop dealing, I’d be okay. The thing is, sleaziness is like an oil stain on your driveway. No matter how many times you wash it, it just keeps seeping back up through the concrete.

On Wednesday my drug cache was replenished by the deliveryman for Nutro-Quest Supplements—a guy named Ralston. He would leave my private container hiding just behind the other protein jugs. You’d have to restock an awful lot of protein to find it, so it was never disturbed. Sometimes things are remarkably easy to hide in plain sight.