Chapter 4: Reyes at the VA Pharmacy

The VA pharmacy on Gibson was organized like every VA pharmacy Marcus had ever visited — which was three, across two decades, each one identical in its institutional lighting and the particular quality of waiting it produced in people who had learned to wait without any visible distress. The prescription queue moved in increments that suggested the machinery was functional but had been set at a tempo calibrated for a different century. Marcus had been standing in it for eleven minutes.

He held a manila folder. Not the medical literature folder from Dr. Patel, which was still in his briefcase at home, annotated now in the same small handwriting he'd used on Nadia's lab reports. This folder was thinner. A referral form and a prescription for a medication that addressed one of the condition's secondary symptoms — the episodic headaches, which had been occurring with increasing regularity in the left temporal region and which Dr. Patel had described, with clinical care, as manageable for the present.

The present was doing its managing. Marcus stood in the queue and read the label on someone else's prescription bag on the counter, which read CHEN and listed a dosage he identified in approximately three seconds as a blood pressure medication, which was not something he had intended to do and could not stop himself from doing.