3.

One day, after Marty had been working at the drugstore for several months, he sat down on the morning of one of his off days to work on 10,000 PSI. He hadn’t even glanced at it in more than a month and had done no substantial work for at least three. He began as always by editing the few pages that led up through what he’d written his last session.

When he got to the end of the third page he was editing he came to a footnote that said, “The aliens have eaten my cockroach. I loved that cockroach--he was dear to my heart. See p. 340.” He stared at this footnote utterly confused. He stood, scratched the side of his head, and paced back and forth. Was Alex fucking up his manuscript? Had someone been writing right over his masterpiece?

He sat back down and went to page 340. There it was. In mid sentence, during a battle scene in the second of these deep-sea creatures’ wars, he’d written, “I come to you from the Beyond, and the Beyond is a place like any other. To those in the beyond, we are the Beyond, so shut your fucking lip!”

He was perplexed. Who wrote that? What the fuck?

And then it hit him. The night they’d taken the acid, the night Alex caught his warts--he’d sat up late after Alex and the hooker had gone off into Alex’s room, he sat up writing, writing at random pages throughout his novel. He did not remember what he’d written at all, but now he knew that must be what had happened. He’d trashed up his whole novel with drivel, acid drivel. Now he would have to go through the whole thing and fix it, read through the whole massive document and delete all the parts he written when tripping. It would take both today and his next day off, which was in two days. And that was if he worked hard on it, worked on it constantly.

Fuck.

He stood and brewed a cup of coffee and stood at the other end of the room staring at the computer, dreading to go near it. There went all his time off this week--it was gone, if he was going to fix the novel. Then the thought struck him that the reader may be interested in what he’d written when on the LSD. Once the novel was a classic, once he was a famous genius, perhaps it would be like footnotes in some classic work where it said the author had made such-and-such alterations on his work as it came out in different editions. You know, the way some famous writer will delete a chapter in the third edition, but it is included thereafter with a footnote explaining how the author had deleted it because of blah blah blah. Yeah, he thought, he would use this acid drivel, analyze it via footnotes, explain why he thinks it doesn’t make sense to include it, how he has the doubts about his work that geniuses invariably have. But this really made no sense. Wasn’t it the editors of later editions that made such comments? Shouldn’t someone else do it instead of the writer himself? He grew confused at this train of thought and absurdly started to reason that he should ask Alex to write footnoted comments about his acid drivel; but now he wondered what the point to that was at all. Slowly he worked back to the idea that he should annotate the acid drivel with his own commentary; and though he wasn’t sure just why, it seemed like a good enough plan.

His coffee was ready now. He went and poured it into his cup and sat and sipped it excitedly. This will be great, he thought. Deep down in his head he was happy that he could work on the thing for a month now without having to do any actual writing beyond annotation. Writing was always a painful process to him; he’d sit for ten minutes before a sentence came to him that he liked. Now he could work in relative ease for a month or so, just writing down the footnoted doubts that a genius should have.

He went back to his document and looked up how many words it was. It was roughly 145,000. He cocked his head to the side and tried to remember how long it had been before the acid trip, to see how much he’d written that night and since. But he wasn’t really sure at all how long it had been then.

Alex came out of his room. “Marty--Marty I need you to kill a spider.”

“Where is it?” said Marty.

“On my ceiling,” said Alex. “It’s a brown recluse. I’m scared it’s gonna just drop down on me and bite me and then--”

“Later,” said Marty. “I’m having an epiphany.”

“Marty, just kill this spider.” Alex’s walls, ceiling, carpet were stained all over the place with squished spiders that Marty had killed for him.

“In a minute, just let me think and have my coffee.”