Again I check jails to see if he has been arrested. Again I call hospital emergency rooms. Then Karen’s brother sees him, or thinks he sees him, on Haight Street, huddling on a street corner, shifty, jittery, and suspicious-looking. I am beside myself—uncomprehending, terrified. Nothing in my life has prepared me for the incapacitating worry when I don’t know where he is. I imagine Nic on the streets of San Francisco, like a wild animal, wounded and desperate. Like some off-the-deep-end anesthesiologist presiding over his own brain surgery, Nic trying to manage the flow of drugs in order to
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