Of the seven, three were part of the funeral parlor’s staff. The undertaker, the man he had hired to dig graves and the priest. One of them was from the insurance company, looking less and less hopeful about finding any relatives in the crowd. Another two were Jeremy and his girlfriend. She seemed more upset for Jeremy losing somebody than for Greg being gone. Jeremy was silent throughout the service. Lastly, there was a homeless man in the back pew, hoping that there would be something to eat at the end.

Greg had driven off with his addict’s lifestyle all those who could have possibly been friendly with him before. He had pleaded with them for cash, rides and anything else he could possibly get from them. They’d moved on. The friends he’d made while being addicted weren’t the type of friends you invited to a funeral. They weren’t the type of friends you invited in, much less anything else. All he really had was Jeremy.

The insurance company had wanted to pick a small plaque with which to mark his grave, cheapest route; but Jeremy made them purchase a headstone. When they inquired about what should be on the stone itself, he hadn’t the foggiest. It took him four days to finally come up with something to sum up Greg’s life without resorting to a cliché. He sought something that would do justice to his friend’s memory. In the end, they engraved one stanza from a poem and a short phrase made popular by Kurt Vonnegut. It reads as follows:

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
So it goes.

“Think I might be able to get a little something extra this time?”

Gregory Faunt is an addict. Everyone at the clinic is an addict, or a doctor. The distinction is a fine line, or at least Dr. Romans thinks so. Dr. Romans is the newest addition to the clinical staff but he thinks he has it all figured out.

“You know I can’t do that, Gregory. You’re already near your limit for the week.”

“Oh, c’mon, you know that isn’t nearly enough, man,” Greg pleads with him.

“There’s loads of the stuff just sitting around, and I need it. I really need it.”

He doesn’t need it, Romans thinks. He just wants a bigger high. Or maybe he just wants to try and sneak some out and sell it. Who knows.

Greg shifts in his uncomfortable little seat, waiting for the answer. Dr. Romans flips open the chart and pretends to examine it. Greg has been having increasingly larger doses since his admission, he notices. There are a few notes from his previous attending nurses about him begging them for more. Each time he’s here, he begs for more.

It occurs to Dr. Romans that we’re all addicts in some way. If he didn’t have his morning coffee, or perhaps if he no longer consumed soft drinks, then he could say differently. Not that caffeine in those doses is going to kill you, but it’s surely enough to make you have a strong headache when you need it. It was with this mentality that he opened the cabinet behind him and located a bottle that was nearly full.

“I will deny this all, you know.”

Forget the legal banter. I’m not sure what they expect to get when they give addicts another addictive drug to combat their first addiction. I don’t mind too much. Better to profit from the folks in suits than be one. The suits seem to constantly flow. I don’t know how to put it better, they are just constantly in flux. Moving. Working. Getting to one place only so they can go to another. Not me. I stop and smell the roses for a good long time. I like to pretend that I’m a doctor when I tie up my arm. Feeling around for my veins, I imagine myself as some suit working on some other suit, all seriousness. Grim-faced, I whisper to myself about scalpels and milliliters, though I’m not positive if I’ve ever seen a scalpel up close.

I carefully thread the needle into my vein and inject about seventy milliliters of beauty into myself. Feeling the ground fall slowly out from under me, I lean back and prepare for the freefall of about a foot. Even though I know I’m sitting, I can feel the air rushing past my body. At this altitude, it becomes hard to breathe. I close my eyes and lean further back. I stop breathing. Just going to breathe when I get closer to the ground, I tell myself. Just when I’m closer.

During elementary school, he missed the bus 46 times before his parents decided that they would drive him to school, and even then he overslept and was often late to class. His teachers sent him to the principal for constant tardiness, and he managed to get lost and turned up late there as well. Fortunately the principal took pity on the lad and merely requested that Jeremy get to class ten minutes early, which meant he arrived on time.

When it came time to ask someone out for prom, he got to the girl of his dreams just after she had agreed to go with another boy. This was just one of the many times he was a little too slow when it came to girls. When he went to propose to his girlfriend, she had already left on a plane for a four month trip to Sri Lanka. He had to do it over the phone when she landed. Later on in life, while she is giving birth to his first child, Jeremy will be stuck in traffic and completely unaware.

However, on this particular day, he was let off work early and arrived home just in time to find his roommate collapsed on the floor.