2.

Later, after the rain had stopped, they showed up at Scrambles to pick up Alex’s last check. He’d been fired from his job washing dishes for being slow.

“This check,” he told Marty as they were walking back to the bus. “This check--she gypped me. I put in . . . I put in over thirty hours my last week. This check . . .” He fell into silence. The rain did not make the city fresh but seemed to have just stirred up the scent of trash and humanity.

“I wonder what in hell goes on in this world,” said Marty. “It was a hundred years ago when they discovered radio waves. What in hell have they invented by now? Not to mention the technologies they’re getting from the aliens.”

“How do you know there’s aliens?” said Alex.

“How do I . . . how do I . . . Jesus, look around you!”

They got back to the apartment in an hour. Alex was still mourning the loss of his car (which had been stolen, uninsured), and all the way on the bus he’d been saying how he’d like to get a car again, how he’d like to get a flatbed truck this time, and goddamnit he’d ding it up and scratch the paint and smear the bed with mud just so no one would steal it again. It was two years ago when his car was stolen, a fourteen-year-old Chevy Nova, and it had always seemed unbelievable to him that anyone would risk prison for ownership of such a piece of shit.

“It was joy riders,” he once said. “It must have been some gang of teens who saw I’d left it unlocked or some shit and just took it, hotwired it and that was that. Now it’s in some alley vandalized and trashed. I hope they had a damn good time, the fuckers.”

At the apartment Alex took out the bong and reached into his quarter bag to pinch a bowl. He sat lighting it and sinking the marijuana while Marty stood by the wall feeling a vague self-consciousness.

The square nature of the room seemed to infect them both, such that their consciousness became made of blocks and sharp-cornered lines. The outer geometry became inner, and the consciousness of each became boxed, cubed, squared--all right angles, straight lines, ninety-degree corners.