Argenis’s grandmother Consuelo, his father’s mom, had folded many more shirts and pants than Etelvina had, and not for her good-for-nothing kids, but because she had worked as a servant for more than forty years. Reflecting on those numbers, Argenis decided to fold a few items in her honor. He gathered up his things and threw them on the bed, but as he looked at the pile of dirty clothes he saw his grandmother as the Little Prince on a tiny planet of stinking clothing and dirty dishes, fighting against other people’s grease, her eternal baobab. The apathy came over him again, a profound feeling of sloth, a tiredness of the world in general. “My grandmother has folded enough clothes,” he thought, as if the old woman’s years of hard work had exonerated him from doing the same. That exoneration, bought with Argenis’s grandmother’s sweat, was the excuse he used for spending every day he was married to Mirta watching porn on the internet and snorting coke, then his preferred drug, while his now ex-wife put in her nine-to-five in the Banco Hipotecario.

Argenis felt for the pack of cigarettes in his pants pocket. That rectangular bulge in his jeans calmed him a bit. He rolled everything into a big ball and stuffed it into the suitcase, pulled the zipper up with some difficulty, and went outside to smoke a Popular. It was not yet ten a.m., and after three weeks of treatment the mornings were often pitted by brief yet recurrent feelings of unease which Argenis calmed by silently repeating, “Bengoa will be here soon.” If he had been under the effects of Temgesic, he’d at least have folded a shirt or two. Temgesic makes everything interesting, even dirty clothes.

Bengoa arrived and Argenis noticed that he wasn’t wearing the little fanny pack with the syringes, cotton, alcohol, rubber, and vials. By way of a greeting, Argenis nervously asked, “Is the treatment already over, asere?” With a half-smile, the doctor wheeled his cases toward the car under a sun that made his bald head glisten and answered, “Now that you’re going to have your own place, you’ll be injecting yourself.” When they got to the car, he handed over a box filled with twelve 3mg vials, and Argenis couldn’t remember ever having been so happy in his whole life.

On their drive, Havana was looking glorious and desperate, an old woman with legs open, brazenly displaying her wide and empty streets – streets that reminded Argenis of an amusement park; no cars, buses, or trams. The people who were coming and going wore an anguish on their faces he could recognize as his own: it was the anguish of having to hustle for everything on the black market, just as he’d hustled for heroin in Santo Domingo.

The routine at La Pradera had been good for him. He felt strong and self-sufficient. “This is a new era,” he told himself. As he helped to take the suitcases out of the trunk, he was conscious of the eight pounds of muscle mass he’d gained thanks to Bengoa’s attentions. The renewed capabilities of his body surprised him as they carried the bags upstairs together. As if going through a second puberty, his insides swelled with something resembling the awkward happiness he’d felt when his childish cheeks were newly populated with dark hairs.