My roommate drops the batteries and one goes underneath the couch.
He gets the battery and returns to work.
I slap both hands down on my legs and I yell, “Big naps!” again.
My roommate says, “You’re awesome.”
Then he snaps a piece back into place on the tv remote controller.
“Do you want to split an orange again,” he says. “I need something to do.”
“No, I’m good,” I say.
He nods and turns the television on and the lights off and we lie down on different couches.
The room is dark except for the tv.
There’s a show on about bridges.
A narrator talks about bridges and I wait to fall asleep, feeling poisoned by the hand of some bad magician, like, all the time yeah.
13
This is the third time this week I’ve sat in my room and thought about what I’d buy if I won the lottery — ultimately admitting that I’d use it all to pay NASA to rocket my entire apartment (with me in it) deep into outerspace where the sun’s pull had no effect, or to where there’s this other sun with the exact opposite effect on growth.
14
Something else I do more and more is I sit on the Blue Line train and I ride around for a few hours not-looking for jobs.
It feels comfortable.
I make sure to direct my sight towards my feet so I don’t accidentally see a job.
It’s nice to just listen to the sound the train makes against the track.
It’s just nice.
The best part is at this certain point downtown. The train takes a long curve and the sun and this billboard with a funny looking frog on it both come out.
I love it!
Right now, I’m the only person in my section of the train.
There’s an advertisement for a junior college along the inside of the train.
The ad features a smiling man holding books.
He looks nice.
One day I will figure out which stop the junior college is at and then I will go there and meet this man and we will help each other through life.
15
When I return to the apartment tonight, the first thing I do is I wash my hands in the sink.
Usually I forget.
Any time I don’t wash my hands after riding the train and then touch my eyes in my sleep, my eyes burn real bad.
It’s terrible!
I dry my hands on the couch and then I go to walk down the hallway to my room.
At the dark entrance to the hallway I almost bump into my roommate.
He’s just standing there quietly.
“Hello,” he says. “Did you just get back.”
“Yes,” I say. “You know that. You just said that because you had nothing else to say and you wanted to say something.”
“Did you find a job,” he says. “Anything. Where did you look today.”
I put my hand against the wall, blocking the kitchen from my roommate.
And I position my face close to his.
“Yes, another good day,” I say.
He stretches and uses the stretch to step backwards a little, somewhat into the darker area of the hallway.
He is looking at my mouth.
“Well, good,” he says. “I knew you’d come back.”
“Of course. I pay rent here.”
“Oh,” he says, “I forgot. I have a job for you. I totally forgot about this but I have a job for you if you want it. Can’t believe I forgot about this.”
I laugh.
“Oh yeah — what’s the job.”
“Uh I have, an opening for, someone to uh—” He sniffs, then he yells, “Eat my fucking shit.”
He yells it right in my face.
He laughs and I laugh too.
And yes, we are people.
He says, “So, if you are the right person for the job, let me know.”
We laugh together.
Everything looks exactly the same except we are laughing.
It is good.
I like it.
Then my roommate slowly stops laughing.
“Hey, but really though,” he says. “I do have a job for you. No joking now.”
I’m still smiling.
“What is it,” I say.
“No really, I have a job for you,” he says. “I will pay you five-hundred dollars to kill my dad. I can give you the address and a little under half of the money right now. He lives like two hours away from here.” He points between us and he says, “So if you’re that person, let me know.”
There is a pause in which I imagine a puppy falling out of the ceiling onto my head, then landing in my loving hands.
“I’m being serious right now,” my roommate says. “I will give you the money if you kill him. Make it hurt too.”
He pinches at his t-shirt, scratching his chest.
He yawns.
“Hey,” I say, taking my arm off the wall.
I allow a pause.
“Give me a hug.” I say.
He smiles.
We hug.
The hug is somewhat long and it feels nice.
Then when it’s over I walk down the hallway and go into my room and I call it a day and it calls me something else.
Sometimes I can hear my room laughing at me when I go into it.
16 (Other Version of 15)
The Blue Line train stop by my place is the stop I like the best because it smells the most harshly of piss.
There is no equal.
All the other stops aren’t as harsh.
It’s like, this stop has the best piss smell, because no other piss smell tries this hard to be so condensed and so — just so new.
And I get off the train to walk home, enjoying the piss smell.
I made sixty dollars doing a study on smoking after lying about smoking.
At home, my roommate is sitting on the counter in the kitchen playing a video game on his calculator.
He sets the calculator down on the kitchen counter.
“Battery died,” he says.
17
I’m with this girl I had sex with a few months ago (and then now again just recently).
She lives in a first floor apartment here in the same building.
I have my head in her lap, and we are on the couch in her livingroom.
Her apartment smells like garbage, just like mine.
It’s afternoon and the room is lit but not too bright.
It’s nice to be with her.
My head is burnt badly from trying to shave it last night without shaving cream and her legs feel nice and cool against the skin on my head.
“Your head looks bad,” she says. “Does it hurt.”
“It hurts.”
She leans in different directions to see more of the flaking.
She is nice to me in a way that makes me uncomfortable.
That’s probably why I mostly avoid her.
And anyone like her.
“Why didn’t you put lotion on it,” she says. “Or like, you could’ve dipped a t-shirt in water and then wrapped it around your head.”
“I don’t think I’d like having a wet t-shirt over my head, even in private. When I think about doing that, I mean, I see myself shrugging,” I say.
I wince.
She takes her hand away.
“Did that hurt,” she says.
“Yes, pretty bad.”
“It hurt when I touched it just now,” she says.
“Yeah that made it hurt,” I say. “What did you do.”
“I pressed my finger into it a little. I’m just trying to fix it. Do you want me to fix it even?” She presses her finger in again and she says,
“Boop.”
“That makes it hurt more. Much much more. Think ‘badly,’ but even more.”
She presses her fingers lightly into my head.
“Boop. I can’t imagine anything more than badly,” she says. “I get lost after that.”