Free How We Are Hungry by Dave Eggers

he gets to the room there’s no roommate, just a twig of a woman, owlish and sallow, sitting on a chair near Adam, eating a brownie.
    Fish waves hello to the brownie woman and walks around to Adam. He lies flat, with a neck brace on, staring at the ceiling. Fish puts his face in Adam’s line of vision.
    “Hey,” Adam says, surprised.
    Fish grunts.
    Adam doesn’t look forty. He looks twelve. He’s wearing a baseball cap, and his face isn’t wrinkly or strung out or gaunt. With his freckles and the cap, he has the aura of a kid who’s just had his tonsils out.
    “What’s the hat?” Fish asks. It bears a minor-league team’s logo, a beaver holding a bat he’s apparently been chewing on.
    “What are you doing here?” Adam asks. His eyes open a little more, catching the glare of a car’s headlights in the parking lot.
    “Who gave it to you?” Fish says.
    “One of the nurses. Ronnie.”
    “Do you get to keep it, or is it just for here?”
    “I don’t know. I think I can keep it. Did you drive down?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Wow. Thanks, man.”
    “That’s a bitch of a drive,” Fish says.
    “I
know
,” he says with what Fish considers an appropriate amount of awe and gratitude. “Sorry. Thanks.”
    On his mobile table are remnants of dinner or lunch or both—uneaten tapioca and two tangelos, and beside them a little tilting pagoda of Tupperware. The lady with the brownie has finished with the brownie and is now cleaning her nails with a thumbtack. Fish nods to Adam and jerks his head toward her. She has a hospital I.D. tag clipped to her blouse.
    “She sits here with me,” he says. “They’ve got someone in here all the time so I don’t do anything.” It’s clear that Adam is happy they think he’s such a serious customer, such a dangerous man. Fish looks over at the brownie woman to see if she’s listening, but she isn’t; she’s watching a movie on Adam’s TV—Fred Thompson is playing the president, and is wearing that dissatisfied look he uses. Fish stares out the window. In the parking lot, the cars are colored copper by the light from above, the lamps bent over them like tall thin saints over babies. He sees his rental and misses being inside it.
    Adam is holding a little tube with a button on it.
    “Is that for morphine?” Fish asks.
    “Yeah,” Adam says.
    “So you try to jump off a building, and they give you morphine—an unlimited amount?”
    “No. I can only get a certain amount each hour. They’ve got it figured out.”
    Fish knows it’s just a matter of time before Adam starts telling him why he jumped off the motel roof, but he doesn’t want to hear it.
Oh, if only it were interesting!
he thinks. But it never is. “I wanted to hurt myself,” he will say, “I don’t know why.” Nothing of any interest will get said by either of them. Adam will say, “I feel so dark sometimes” or “It’s like I see things sometimes… through a dark water.” Adam wants Fish to understand, but Fish isn’t interested, and, besides, he’ll call Adam on where he stole that dark-water part—
The Executioner’s
Song,
Adam’s favorite book—and remind him of a hundred ways the two of them, Fish and Adam, are equal in this
darkness
. They’ve seen the same things, they have the same urges. Adam will concede this, and will begin apologizing for everything, and for too long. He’ll be too contrite, too docile, and Fish will want to step on him.
    But at some point they’ll start making plans for when Adam is discharged. This is the only part that ever interests Fish: the steps from here on out. Fish will get inspired, laying out what will happen in the first few days, the weeks after, every move for years. First, a different apartment in a new city, away from the therapist-criminals in Bakersfield who keep prescribing drugs, every conceivable drug, for Adam. Then a menial job while doing some kind of night school, and finally a woman, older, hardened, wise, but warm—who will tie him