I'd been in a coma long enough for my wounds to start healing. The surgeries were long in the past. The sutures were gone and the grafts are taking and the set bones are knitting straight and true. All that remained was a morphine habit and the bad, fucking itching of healing. The itching from the skin grafts was almost unbearable, so my hands were strapped down. They also turned up the morphine drip. And that's how it was when I woke up two months after my last convoy. Stoned and itching. Getting incomplete sponge baths while laying on thin government sheets purchased from the lowest bidder. And cold. God, I was so cold. After six months in the sandbox, the hospital in Germany might as well have been at the South Pole. How could they live in such a cold place? All those white people poking and prodding me. Liquid food dripping into my veins. I said, "Somebody open a window and let the heat in for me, OK?." But that made them laugh. They put the head of my bed up and opened the blinds. Snow. The world was covered. The snow was like an unstained bandage on an old corpse. God, how it made me itch to see it. So they kept my hands strapped down and turned up the happy knob. And I got warm and then I was sailing on the good ship Itch-Scratcher. I wanted not, nor did I ask. I wasn't at the helm of my life, but I could direct the helmsman to steer. It was my good ship, so I closed my eyes and went south to Tahti to see Marlin Brando's place. The sweet-rot heat of the jungle. The fat man's bed. Thatched huts and cold drinks. Servants. I don't usually like people to do things for me, but after I got on the morphine I liked it a lot. People did things for me. My course was set. Without the morphine, the itching would've driven me crazy, like a caribou in the north driven so mad by mosquitos that it runs over a cliff to stop the itching. I wish I could describe that itching. I wanted to rip my skin off. I would've done it, too. So they didn't have a choice. Retraints and drugs. And that's how they turned me into a junkie. And there's no going back now. At least not yet. My good ship doesn't entirely belong to me anymore, but I can still sail the goddam thing.