Here comes Slave. ULTRA MAX errands accomplished, purchasing Eye’s Night Sugar is all that stands between him and the relative sanctity of home. 

Maybe even some me-time if Eye simmers down easy. 

Slave’s Instructions (on the reverse of the Leather Shopping List is to be found the List of Leather Instructions) clearly state that he is to gather and bring home all purchases in the ULTRA MAX shopping cart, even though the wheels lock at the far edge of the parking lot. 

The cart lives in its own room in Eye’s house, never disturbed save for these biweekly purchasing events, though sometimes Slave peers at it through the keyhole. 

This amounts to Slave pushing the cart, locked wheels and all, with the sum brute force he can muster, so much that his limbs and face turn a pale purplish color, a lilac or a lavender. Not unbecoming. 

It’s like, he thinks, struggling to think of what it’s like, pushing a block of marble in the shape of a shopping cart: Eye’s Renaissance Lessons are finding purchase within him.

Luckily, he’s exited through the ULTRA MAX Service Exit, which puts him nearer to Culvert City, saving him the trek back across the parking lot. 


He dons the special glove he wears for all Culvert City transactions. It’s a thick, padded affair with metal buckles and a nest of straps, and he’ll wear it throughout all imminent methadone handlings, as if they were snakes. 

For now, thankfully, it cushions the bodily impact of his expended brute force upon the shopping cart, though his fingers are still lilac or lavender inside. 




There’s a sign out front that reads Culvert City, Pop. 2, meaning Rib and Stacee you’d guess, but the horde of teens lingering beside it, on the Culvert edge, would seem to tell a different story. Though perhaps on some vague, self-appointed guard duty, these teens shuffle away as Slave – a legitimate buyer and known as such – approaches. They take their resting dogs with them. Some of them shoot off their guns as they recede.


Some dogs, when kicked, do not stir. These are left where they lie. Slave steps over them, negotiating the cart as best he can so as not to ensnare their hides.


Beyond the lip of the Main Culvert float spiky dud bombs from yesteryears of several vintages, lengths of polypropylene tubing and tape, sheets and feathers hanging from the Culvert’s upper grooving.

There are also big chunks of floating fat in the water, like white lumps of some soft ore. These Rib and Stacee burn to keep warm in winter and to see by, and gnaw on when need be.

Off in the distance, Refinery workers are on their lunch break. The Refinery opens onto and spills runoff into another Culvert, another district of Culvert City, but sometimes the workers stray this far down, in their blue coveralls, when they crave a little what they call, sneeringly, “fresh air.”
On occasion Phil, Slave’s father, though he’s a Vice Manager, comes down here with them, and, on even rarer occasion, actually witnesses his son buying Night Sugar from Rib, but not today, not today: Phil and Betsy are safely returned home after their ULTRA MAX excursion and encounter.

Slave presses in past Rib’s bookshelves and mealy boxes, fighting for balance amidst the undertow of floating books in the Culvert mess. 
Now he’s in Rib and Stacee’s home: a microwave, a toaster, and an iron hang from an elaborate snare of wires strung from a more slender pipe at the top of the Culvert, clacking together.

A hammock hangs nearby as well, in which Rib and Stacee lie, resting, regarding their visitor.

A PAUSE.

Everyone can feel it getting darker outside, later, cooler despite the summer.

Slave rings a little hanging bell.

Rib heaves to his feet and mucks over to Slave and his cart.

Slave never speaks, or barely ever, in public, and this time is no exception.

“One … thing, coming up,” says Rib, 
instead of something like, “The usual again?”
 or trying to rile Slave into speaking, which he used to do.




He holds his paperback down by his side, flayed open to hold his place.

Slave nods.

Stacee produces a wrapped bundle from beneath a sheet in the hammock, holds it out to be taken.

She explains how she has wrapped the dose – two weeks’ worth, as ever for Eye – this time, in a macramé rhesus monkey. Whether the drug is secreted in the monkey’s genitals, bowels, heart, or cranium, is for the customer to find out, not her to divulge.

Stacee brings it to Slave, helping settle it into the shopping cart.





Slave nods, holds up the Change Purse 
full of Eye’s freshly drawn money.




Rib takes a fistful, the right amount. He stuffs it away and begins to read again where he stands while Stacee hums a tune. Slave, neither quickly nor gracefully, begins his maneuvers out of the Culvert. 

The rhesus monkey sits up in the childseat of the shopping cart, peering out as if alive.