2.

Marty first got back into the workforce while he was staying at the Denver Rescue Mission. He was lucky enough to get a permanent bed there and a place to shower and shave, some clean clothes and toiletries, all necessities for someone determined to get back employed and housed. He’d spent some time depressed after Alex had been arrested and never really learned a thing till a few months later, when he found out from someone returning from the Denver County Jail on a loitering charge that Alex had been sentenced to eighteen months in the state prison at Cañon City. Marty and he both thought Alex would serve about nine of those eighteen months, and so after a time of drifting and lots of drink, he suddenly woke up one morning with a resolution to get a job, an apartment, and back into a regular life. In the back of his mind, he was sure that once he was housed and employed, Alex would show up after his sentence and Marty would have a room to offer him and a bed and food and all of it. But after Marty saved up enough at his custodial job at US Bank, he got a mere one-bedroom apartment, so he wouldn’t have a room or bed to offer Alex when he got out; but at least he’d have a couch.

For the first six months of Marty’s housed life, he resisted getting a computer. It wasn’t just the cost involved--it was that he dreaded working on 10,000 PSI ever again. The novel had been his dream and obsession for a long time, but it was the wrong type of obsession for a novelist. For novelists, or especially artists, obsession is good. To fixate on some idea and blast it through with undying devotion and attention--this is what makes a man an artist. But Marty was obsessed with the image of the artist, never the work itself; he had loved being a “writer”; he loved being unsuccessful at it, loved to think of himself even as a loser. He liked that idea, of being a loser, and he was never sure quite why. Through some bizarre psychological acrobatics he’d manage to make not only failure at publication romantic, but failure at writing something good.

Now, not having worked on the novel for so long--whose only copy was that three and a half by five disk he’d carried all this time--now he dreaded being that loser, tinkering with the brainchild that would never be good and never be finished. He’d achieved separation from it for a couple years now; he’d put it down because the disk could not hold any more characters, and he was happy not working on it now that he couldn’t. The thought of working on it ever again put a bad taste in his mouth. He wasn’t sure why he did not want to work on it; for so long it was his only hobby and the only thing that separated him from the unbearable tedium of his life’s reality. Perhaps it was just the way in which a child up late would rather not go to sleep, and a child asleep does not want to wake up. Now that he wasn’t working on it he’d rather keep it that way.

But he did end up getting a computer, mostly so he could browse the internet, which he could afford now and which would be a welcome diversion in his lonesome off-hours. He took a deep breath once he’d had the machine up and running and booted; he took a breath and slipped in the 10,000 PSI disk very reluctantly; and he got this error message: “Cannot read drive A.” He tried it a few more times, then retrieved the disk. Perhaps it was just a glitch, he thought; maybe the disk isn’t unreadable but it would work on a different computer; then there were those data retrieval services that could open it and . . . but no. He went to his kitchen trashcan. It was full of the paper plates and bowls he ate off so he wouldn’t have to worry about washing dishes, roach motels full of dead insects, bacon packages, empty coffee cans. He pulled out the bag, dropped the disk into the space that was left, and somewhat ceremonially walked outside to the building’s dumpster and tossed the bag in.

Now what? Not another novel, certainly. He could acquire a habit of reading, smoke more dope, maybe study chess or the alien abductions he’d read about at a certain time in his life but . . . well, he’d settle on something.

He returned into his apartment after dumping that bag with the novel’s disk, a grin on his face, and went like an excited boy to the computer that had been win-win for him. He now had the internet and did not have 10,000 PSI. It had worked out the best way it could.

The months and years passed by, and he got no word of Alex or what ever became of him. He assumed he was still alive and out of prison now, but it was just a case of neither of them knowing where to find the other. He vaguely wished Alex would show up, but the more time that passed by, the more he wanted Alex to never show up. Sometimes a man will be in such a painful state of love and infatuation that, if he loses his lady and gets away from her for years and years, he will only remember pain when he thinks of her; and he won’t want to see her ever again. This was not a perfect analogy, since Marty’s friendship with Alex was far from romantic or sensual; but they’d been good friends, damn good friends. And the farther Marty got from the time when he’d been anguished by the thought of Alex going to prison, that guilt and pain, the less he wanted to ever see the man again. But then again, if he ever did, he was sure he’d be overjoyed.