Usually, the door to his room is closed. When I open it, the contained air is desperate to expand. It pours out, a blanket made of the scent of apples rotting, a floral sweetness that’s turned, the smell of sugar becoming alcohol. He stapled a bath mat over the vent, sure that’s how people were listening in on his conversations, so there’s no circulation. All the lights are off and the towel stapled to the wall blocks the window, so it is dark, just the white-blue glow of the tv. Whether high or hoping to get high, he perches on the end of the couch, clutching a pillow folded in half, the weight of his body impossibly projecting forward as if pulled by the screen, an ever-alert gargoyle. The floor is covered with empty containers of frosting and nacho dip and hollowed out cracker sleeves, like bones in cave. Whenever I come in he is always watching these nature shows: lions stalking prey, birds searching for something to bring back to the nest, imperiled frogs protecting their territory.  To make for good television they insert slow-motion video, dramatic music, cliff-hangers before commercial breaks: Will the babies survive? Had their mother really been eaten or did those tufts of fur in that trap belong to someone else? He waits the commercials out, holding his pee for hours or sometimes I suspect filling the empty containers around the room. He is caught in a trance, desperate to know how it turns out. I sit with him and wonder what will happen if the thirsty antelope go down to the watering hole. Will their new babies and elderly be picked off by the big cats foreshadowed in an earlier scene? He is like those hungry lions, I think, they are doing what is in their nature, hunting for a fix, for the moment of satiation when the blood and flesh tangle in their teeth and the ache in the stomach begins to diminish. Then they, he and the lions, have their long sleep. He looks so peaceful, when I find him later, laid out on the couch, his face slack, his needs at bay for a few hours. But in that sleep there is danger too, I think, as I turn him on his side. On the TV the British-accented narrator of the still-broadcasting television agrees: Once satisfied, the lions sleep soundly, but in that sleep they are susceptible. But who? Who could hurt them? the narrator asks rhetorically. At the top of the food chain, the only ones they have to fear are each other and themselves.