I CANNOT FIND ALL OF THE DAYS IMMEDIATELY AFTER speaking to Chiggers’s mother, but one of the great horrors of heroin is that there is no merciful blackout attached to its sharp vinegar scent, which is to say that I remember more than I care to admit. Picture what you would like and I will tell you that it was probably worse: a lost weekend cliché of strippers and dope and alcohol and all the rest. When I found myself at last it was upon a stinking, seaweed-covered beach in a twilight that I realized eventually was not dusk but dawn, my body reeking of alcohol and seawater. What day it was I did not yet know, nor the location of the beach upon which I lay chattering with cold. Out beyond the edge of the shushing breakers ran a wall of endless fog that wrapped the whole of that landscape in a blurred and gauzy half-light. My pockets were empty, not only of cash but of my wallet and of any and all forms of identification. For a long while I simply lay there in the sand, feeling the sickness of life itself as it washed over me, staring out across the Pacific in the direction of Asia, of Vietnam, and, it occurred to me somewhat later, of Japan, and in the direction in which my friend Chiggers had walked into the sea, as if in doing so he might cross that gray ocean to return to the place where everything had gone so terribly wrong.

When at last I tried to rise, the movement came with a paroxysm of vomiting that staggered me back to the sand for several agonizing minutes until what ran from my chapped lips was only bile and thin spittle and finally nothing at all. What I knew, what I thought of, was that if I could take just two hits, two quick puffs from the foil, inhale no more than a lungful, a half lungful, all this sickness would go away in an instant and I would be well again. God help me but sometimes I still think this even all these years later. That I was able to clamber achingly to my feet was a kind of miracle and then to stumble away from the water was yet another, weaving up the high winded crests of the dunes and mercifully away from the bracingly cold wind that ran in a wet gusty stream off the gray face of that sea of fog. Were it not for the chill of the fog I might well have wondered if I had fallen into my own memory of Vietnam and, even though I knew it impossible, had I come upon a thick band of jungle palms atop the shelter of the dunes I would have been terrified but not surprised.