The young soldier helped them carry the bags to the car, the muscles of his lower arms barely contracting from the weight of the luggage. He feigned enthusiasm for Bengoa’s topic and looked at Argenis out of the corner of his eye, as if trying to find something of the heroic father in the 120 pounds of skin and bones his son amounted to that spring.

From far away Dr. Bengoa’s brick-red Lada looked new, but now inside, suffering a chill of the sort that precedes diarrhea, Argenis calculated the real age of the car by the cracks in the dashboard. He had gone forty-eight hours without heroin and had thrown up in the airplane. The Cuban flight attendants with their anachronistic uniforms and hairstyles had seemed as absurd to him as the Alka-Seltzer tablets they offered to relieve his symptoms.

Dr. Bengoa opened the glove compartment with a whack of his hand and extracted a disposable needle, some cotton, a length of rubber, and a strip of amber-colored capsules that said “Temgesic 3mg.” The strip fell onto Argenis’s lap and for the first time he noticed the dirt that had accumulated on his jeans. They were the same ones he had been wearing a little less than a month ago when he moved into his pusher Rambo’s house.

As he tied the rubber strap around Argenis’s left arm to make the vein pop out, Dr. Bengoa explained the details of his stay, and then, pushing the syringe into the ampoule, he said, “It’s buprenorphine, a synthetic morphine used to treat addiction.” Bengoa injected him right there in the José Martí airport parking lot, with all the tranquility and legality his profession permitted, and Argenis let him do his job like a girl in love while taxi drivers in Cadillacs from a bygone era came and went, full of nostalgia tourists. Argenis had assumed that his treatment would be one of pain and abstinence, but there he was on his way to La Pradera, a hotel-turned-clinic for the health tourists who came to Cuba from all over the world, completely relieved of his symptoms and feeling how the chemical made ideas and objects lose their borders, their sharp edges.

From the outside at least, the complex looked like a cheap all-inclusive resort, one of the ones that fill up with middle-class families during Holy Week in Puerto Plata. The walls along the hallway to the reception area were decorated with posters of communist solidarity. Argenis tried unsuccessfully to imagine a hotel like this in the Dominican Republic. Colorful prints with maps and flags representing the various peoples of the world paid homage to the medical profession as a revolutionary bastion. On one of them, orange liquid from an immense syringe was being injected into a map of Latin America, with Haiti as the fortunate vein. At any other time Argenis would have made a joke.

Right in front of the injection poster, an older woman with an Argentine accent was asking a nurse for information about Coppelia, the ice-cream parlor, and next to her a younger woman who resembled her sat in a wheelchair, hiding the baldness of chemotherapy under a Mickey Mouse cap. Haydee, as the ID badge clipped to the nurse’s shirt read, was not in uniform but was wearing those rubber-soled shoes that only gardeners or health professionals wore back then – everything-proof moccasins that had come from outside the country, the product of a night spent with a European, a satisfied patient’s appreciation, or the guilty conscience of a sister exiled in Miami.