incarcéré (REALLY CONTINUE, REALLY DO, Joshua)

As he sat there on the hard bench, he looked down at his feet and the floor. Luc was being booked into the prison. He examined his wrists, which were fine after being handcuffed. It was well over twenty four hours since his last fix, so the dope sickness was setting in. The quote "No man can eat fifty eggs" mocked him in an internal dialogue he was trying desperately to stifle. He heard that phrase in his old friend Drew's voice. For as long as he'd been not quite right in the head he read too much into things. Things people said, the names of things, the synchronicity of things and the symbolism of experiences held meaning and were omens and auguries. Drew was mocking him in a friendly way from his memories as he sat in a large cell with a dozen other men who were, for now, the bad guys.

"JACKSON" a small man in a uniform called into the room. Luc looked up and his eyes saw the corrections officer in the sickening fake lights. Those lights made his vision vibrate a little bit. They were bright and made every dirty corner and filthy step of floor a harsh reality. The small officer walked behind him and told him to walk into the first room on the right. Luc saw another small man, a dark asian man with glasses and doctor's whites sitting down behind a desk.

When Luc was in the holding cell with the other men, one of the men was spitting on the floor, holding his stomach and moaning that he was sick, trying to make the corrections officers believe that he was somehow sicker than he really was, that he needed immediate medical attention. Luc sat down in front of the doctor on the edge of the chair, his hands cuffed behind him. The doctor asked, "You are Luc Jackson?" and several regular questions. He asked Luc about his addiction. "I know that everyone exaggerates their drug habits so that they're medicated with as much as they can get. It's not my way to make a drama of it, and to be truthful I've been much worse off. The problem is that my drug use is bad and my withdrawal is just starting. Believe me that it's going to get worse." For some reason the doctor looked up from his pad, turned his head and examined luc, smiled and returned to his pad. Then he concluded the session.

After waiting for an eternity in the holding cell, he was finally walked into the prison and to his cell. He had the cell to hisself, and a nurse came and brought him medication that made him feel better. There were 4 white pills and one blue pill. Because there were so many and he was afraid that he wouldn't be getting any more doses, he held one of them in his cheek as he swallowed the rest. When the nurse moved on he climbed back into his bed and took out the pill to examine it. It was marked DF 118. He wasn't sure what that was, but the three he had swallowed seemed to be making him feel better.

When he was still at the police station, he presented that he had a medical condition which could cause death if untreated. True words, they were, and treated as such. So the on-duty nurse that New Year's Eve medicated him with narcotics and what he believed to be a 20 mg valium. He felt just fine. Their threats held little to no bearing over him and so long as the drugs didn't wear off, he was ready for whatever they would throw at him. At least, in his favor, it was a country where they treated narcotic dependence as a disease, rather than a moral shortcoming or other despisable way. They gave him drugs. He felt better. When the detectives interviewed him he kept repeating, "at the advice of my counsel, I decline from making any comment. The hard-nose cops made the point that his responses were his own, and that if he chose not to comment that was on him, rather than on the Solicitor. Soon enough he was back in his cell, a big bright and cleanish one. He was jonesing for a fix, but the meds tempered that. He would make it, no doubt. He had kicked cold from much worse habits. There's no such thing as a free lunch, his grandfather used to say.

All too quickly a van came to pick him up and take him to the Her Majesty's Prison Brixton. It was there that he won the doctor's pity, if not repect, and was given a very generous detox over 4 weeks. In fact, it was more humane that those which had been provided ny insurance or Medicaid in the U.S. The doctor had done him a good turn.