The Depo, though, played hell with his bladder, because it was a steroid. As for not wanting anybody to see him, he guessed that was just part of the way his mind worked now. The shrink told him about this, and like everything else, it had come to pass exactly as he’d said. The inconveniences were slight, but Grey spent a certain amount of time looking away from things. Kids, for one, which was why he’d taken so well to rig work. Pregnant women. Highway rest stops. Most of what was on television—programs he’d watched before without a second thought, not just sexy things but things like boxing or even the news. He wasn’t allowed within two hundred yards of a school or day-care center, which was fine by him—he never drove if he could help it between the hours of three and four and would go blocks out of his way just to avoid a school bus. He didn’t even like the color yellow. It was all a little weird, and certainly nothing he could explain to anyone, but it sure beat the hell out of prison. More than that: it beat the way he lived before, always feeling like he was a bomb that was about to go off.

If his old man could see him now, he thought. With the way he felt on the meds, Grey might even have been able to see his way to forgiving him for the things he’d done. The prison shrink, Dr. Wilder, had spoken a lot about forgiveness. Forgiveness was just about his all-time, number one favorite word. Forgiveness, Wilder explained, was the first step on a long road, the long road of recovery. It was a road, but sometimes it was a door; and only by going through this door could you make peace with your past, and face the inner demon, the “bad you” inside the “good you.” Wilder used his fingers a lot while he was talking, making little quotation marks in the air. Grey thought Wilder was basically full of shit. Probably he said the same crap to everybody. But Grey had to admit Wilder had a point with the “bad you” stuff. The bad Grey was real enough, and for a time, most of his life in fact, the bad Grey was really the only Grey there was. So that was the best thing about the meds, and why he planned to go on taking them the rest of his life, even after the court-ordered ten years were over: the bad Grey was nobody he ever wanted to meet again.