We needed Gagin more than we needed our own families. Sometimes he’d front, sometimes he wouldn’t; sometimes he’d take a decent trade, sometimes he’d nod no way. But his shit was always good and he was usually reachable, unless it was past 4:30 am. His only other admirable trait was that he could cook up rock while driving. In broad daylight no less. Otherwise, he was pretty dull, often unintelligible, and constantly hacking up bloody phlegm due to his prodigious blow intake.

For some reason he liked me while merely tolerating the others. He didn’t even fuck me up after I was involved with a drunken plan to rip him off. Posing as new customers over the phone, we had arranged a bogus buy of an ounce, which we could never afford in a million years. We actually thought that one of us would be capable of sneaking up behind him when he got out of his car, then hitting him over the head with a baseball bat, grabbing the drugs and hauling ass. But he knew something was up when he saw two cars instead of one and just kept on driving. I still had the nerve to hook up with him a week later. “One of them was you,” he said almost sadly. But he shrugged it off.

One night he set up shop in one of those shitty motels off the highway and gave me a call. I drove over in Dad’s car. Gagin’s girlfriend Janine answered the door, wide eyed and obliterated. When she first started hanging with him she was beautiful, now she was desperately thin and had only one reason to live. The word was that she was disowned by her father, a well-known plastic surgeon in town, because of her debasement. Who knows.

Janine shut the door behind me and sat down at the small round table with Gagin, who was counting bills. She was so wired she was incessantly scraping the roof of her mouth with her tongue. I heard a soft sigh and saw that their baby girl, maybe five months old, was asleep in a portable carrier next to the TV, which was showing porn. Mercifully the volume was down. I had always been amazed that Gagin and Janine had been reckless enough to reproduce. Contemplating the delusional forces and motivations that led to such a horror was like trying to comprehend infinity.

Gagin slid a gram and a half across the table and I slid back the cash. He hacked and spat in a beer can. As he lifted his head and parted his lips to speak, his forehead blew out in an instantaneous burst of blood, brains, bone, and flesh, splashing my face. He slumped forward. Janine screamed and bolted up, then slammed back against the wall as she too was hit once, twice, then went down and splayed across the carpet like a deer hit by a truck. I hadn’t heard any shots, but my ears were ringing.

I looked up and saw the baby hovering in mid-air a few feet beyond the table, veined membrane wings flapping. She was holding what looked like a water pistol. Traces of gray vapor drifted from its orange plastic barrel. She swiveled slightly and glided a few feet towards me. “Take the fucking drugs and get the fuck out,” she mouthed without sound, motioning with the pistol towards the door. I grabbed what I could without taking my eyes off her, backed up, reached behind me and opened the door, then ran.

I jumped into the car, stuck my fingers into powder and then my mouth, and spat in disgust. I threw the drugs out the window and peeled out, wondering how far I would have to drive to get to the nearest monastery.