6.

They stayed up late that night watching Cops on TV. Fox was one of their four functional broadcast channels these days, and Cops had to be their all time favorite show. Alex often thought it would be worth it to get arrested for drugs or running from the police just to be on Cops. He wondered why the criminals never spoke into the camera or regarded it at all, because he knew when these guys were getting cuffed and questioned there was some fellow there pointing a camera in their face and it must have been very tempting to address it with some sort of profanity. But they probably edited that part out.

“Don’t you have to work in the morning?” asked Alex. He’d either forgotten, or it hadn’t sunk into his foggy brain, that Marty had no job as of today. Marty didn’t mention his job loss again but just said, “No.” He was stoned and filled with anxiety about financial matters and it didn’t really seem to matter whether he reminded Alex that he’d lost his job, so he didn’t.

Presently on the TV the cops were waking up some middle-aged hooker/crack junkie with smeared eyeliner and puffy curls of blond hair. She’d been sleeping in an abandoned truck just minding her own business when the cop came to search her and arrest her for drugs. She kept denying that her purse was really her purse and so the cop said it being not her purse she wouldn’t mind then if he looked through it. Of course he found her crack cocaine and went back to telling her it was her purse after all and she’d be going to jail. It reminded both Alex and Marty of the hooker who’d given Alex the genital warts, but neither of them mentioned this. They were both conscious of it, both conscious that the other was aware of it too; but neither of them said anything for a few minutes, till Marty said, “How’s your. . . .” and Alex said, “Under control,” and they both knew what was meant by this and neither of them quite understood how they knew it.

Later, after Alex was passed out for the night, Marty pulled up his 10,000 PSI file on the computer and read through the opening lines of Chapter 14. He wondered, should I call it “Chapter 14” or just “14” or maybe I should use Roman numerals; but then he didn’t know the Roman numerals for “14”. Maybe I should spell it out, he thought, “F-O-U-R-T-E-E-N,” and he started to get angry and frustrated and before he knew what he was doing he was writing “FUCK FUCKING SHIT GODDAMN MOTHER FUCKING BASTARD SHIT!” over the top of the page in front of the chapter title heading. He sighed when he was done and closed the document and left what he’d written. They’ll call it genius angst, he thought, when it’s published and I’m famous, and they’ll talk about my genius angst for a hundred years, saying genius is agonizing for all the geniuses that have it.

He glanced over to see Arthur twitching his feet in his favorite corner of floor, caught in some dream, his ribs struggling to rise and fall among all their fat, a little green shit from his last excrement meal smeared out on his snout. Alex loved to see Arthur sleeping because Alex liked to wake him with a kiss on the cheek, since it pleased him to think that the first thing Arthur would feel upon waking refreshed was Alex’s kiss. But Marty sank down into the couch exhausted and he didn’t care about how Arthur should awake and so left the hog to sleep and began to daydream.

Marty had an ongoing irrational fear that would come to him as he drifted into sleep, a fear having to do with being raped and filmed for gay internet porn unawares. It was like this: there was a passageway into their apartment from one of the neighbors’ apartments, through which gay rapists would come quietly enough to creep up on his sleeping body and inject him with Demerol or one of the other drugs that gives you complete amnesia. Then he would be raped all night and filmed and the films were all over the internet in places he would never find and could only ever happen upon by random luck. The drug took away all memory of the event, if he were conscious at all when it was happening, so that he had no idea it was going on at all--it could have been happening for years, and he’d never know it. He felt like that now, and he heard some bumps and creaks in the walls, or under the sink, where he often thought the rapists made their entry; but he was too weary to inspect it, and lay for a while in anguished vague apprehension.

But these fears soon left his mind, so that he was unconscious that he’d even been having them, and clouds rushed into his mind so he was unaware of not only what he was thinking, but that he was thinking at all. He thought about the Cops show they’d seen again and the hooker, and though it wasn’t the same crack junkie that had broken in on them, wasn’t even the same city, now he regarded the junkie on the TV as the hooker who had broken in. He thought, “So she’s off in prison; I guess she got on TV at least.” He didn’t quite understand what he was thinking or why; if you’d have asked him he’d have become suddenly lucid and told you it wasn’t the same person; but his beliefs had gone beyond what he willed them to be.

And he thought of two years ago, when he and Alex were almost busted; he thought absurdly, “At least if we were busted we would have been on TV,” even though truly speaking the chances were miniscule that the police who would have busted them would have been carrying around the Cops camera crew at that time.

Two years ago Alex had gone into a seizure right after sucking down a bong hit, his eyes rolling around under his lids and his teeth grinding in great pops of bone. Marty called 9-1-1 and told them of the seizure and they sent paramedics out; and Marty was so freaked out about Alex that he neglected to hide the bong and weed spread out--freshly deseeded--on the coffee table. The paramedics came and by the time they were there Alex’s seizure was over and he was doing fine. Marty was so worried about Alex and so unconscious of the weed that it hit him like a bullet when one of the paramedics said, “He shouldn’t smoke any more pot like that.” Then he knew they were busted; but after the paramedics had checked Alex out they just left, and didn’t call the police at all. Marty thought he’d dodged several bullets there since not only was Alex fine, but the paramedics never called the cops so they weren’t arrested; and there would be no medical bill since they never took Alex to the hospital, so 9-1-1 emergency services would pay for the visit.

Now he opened his eyes in his place on the couch and realized he’d been dreaming one of those dreams that are made more of thought than of images and situations, left aware of information rather than of a scene. He suddenly realized that the hooker on Cops wasn’t the hooker that had broken in on them and wondered why he’d thought that; then he went into his room and lay facedown on his unmade bed fully clothed. Within minutes he was unconscious.