There is a feeling of nothing when the tide has gone out and the barge tips on its side as if felled. The side of the embankment—grey and red stone, drizzling with river slime. And to the right, the long concrete legs of the pier. I am sunk. Because the sky never adjusts itself, just remains the color of a weapon, I can’t tell how many hours pass before the water returns again and I am buoyed up, in another life or universe a corpse shooting to the surface after some sea battle.

I have no more heroin and there will only be the present unless I can make a small future that will eventually collapse in on itself and become the past again. I am my own self-generating universe running on junk.

Beyond the top of the pier, before the path to the main road, there is a bar for the river folk: porno filmmakers, young families desperate to be broken from ordinary living, women who live alone but keep their windows unlatched, me in my invisible kingdom.

I’m there by the door in the violent hours, some crepuscular dawn-creeping thing.

Today, on the unclear minute, I wait outside the entrance, no coat for December. Sometimes it’s better to surge a body with feeling, sometimes comfort is an execution. Sadie is there, one leg propping her against the wall. Sadie in her yellow fur coat, her tarnished eyes blinking slowly against the wind off the Thames. We walk together in silence. Our usual route, from the water to the winding back allies behind the power station. The buildings, the broken walls, our empty hands—all of us brutal.

At the corner of a small side street, litter across the cobbles all silver and light. I knock on the door of the basement apartment and don’t wait for an answer.

Sadie slips in first, her hyena back shudder-bones and bristles. Claude is already on the bare living room floor. Or dying room. If life is a loop then all rooms are the same.

Sadie sits beside him and shrugs off her coat. It’s like watching a soul slip out of a body. She offers her arm for a fix and doesn’t move as the needle enters her.

It’s good to be here, says Claude. Sadie’s head is beside his on the floor and they look excavated.

King Joe, Sadie says. Her voice is lighter than when we were outside.

They used to make magazines for the soldiers who were living in trenches during the First World War, I say. Poetry and jokes. A lot of it gallows humor. People would write them back home and then they’d be delivered, or sometimes soldiers made them on the front lines.

Jack and Bill went down the hill

And sat in a trench for hours

They used bullets for showers

And now they’re just flowers

With the rest of the heads in Flanders

What are the heads doing in Flanders? Asks Claude. A field full of heads?

The heads of poppy flowers, I say.

There was always someone, I say, who kept the first watch. Then he was allowed to sleep.

They nod slowly. Sadie closes her eyes.

I pull a syringe from my pocket. There is a lighter and a spoon next to Claude’s hip. I go down or I go up. The ceiling is cosmic and the walls are burial. A Dante-pit. I’m down.

There is a horizon here with me and I open it.