My workday. Up at seven, summoned by the extravagant outburst of an alarm clock, compliments of the house. Half-drugged with inflamed sleep, I’d drag myself from my onanistic bed, wash, dress, and stumble downstairs.

Breakfast was whatever remained from last night’s dinner, usually hardboiled eggs or Spam or canned spaghetti, a diet that might have caused rebellion in a holding tank for felons. Then back to the frozen solitude of my room, to slump into the chair and get to work.

Still I did it, if not industriously, because it was preferable to doing nothing, which was even more irksome and somehow induced melancoly.

And I didn’t make much progress gedankening about suicide; it was a subject easily resisted, more so by my confusing awareness of the clangor and clatter of Gorelik and the others scattered around the house. Were they too in their time-outs mulling over suicide?

It was a puzzlement, and I for the most part was uneasy, cinched in the serpentine coils of the sousaphone, um-pah-ing for hours on end for the edification of that damned stone block (Chatterton maintained a discouraging silence whenever I asked him why I was so engaged) or thinking about self-immolation, an exercise in unfulfillment unless, I suppose, you have a personal interest in the subject. I needed stimulation, source material, reference works, and like a wretch in a famine intoxicated by the remembrance of a full pot simmering on the stove, so my nostrils inhaled the imaginary smell of books, that delicate and overpowering perfume nothing on earth could match, not fresh-mown hay, not automobile leather, not vulval musk.

I was a prisoner of my own resources, which I found were surprisingly limited, and of a silence that was daunting. I came to welcome the sneaky and infrequent infiltration of Gorelik’s fipple flute, but I cringed when, suddenly and violently, those shadowed corridors were rattled by Chatterton’s voice booming some displeasure, the cause of which was never made clear. “Gorelik!” he would yell. “You double-humped Bactrian…!” or “Pierson! You yellow-bellied sapsucker…!” It was unnerving, and to regain some modicum of reason I would have to remind myself why I was there.

From the time I had crossed the threshold of my frowsty cell, a postulant closing the door on the outside world to worship my goddess, what equilibrium I had previously possessed gave way to confusion, an aphrodisiacal compound of great expectations and sheer panic. Poised like a cunning little animal in a wilderness of predators, I listened for her footsteps, her voice, some small sign of her presence.

Thinking of her had its compensations—there was a kind of perverse enjoyment in it. Her incorporeality neither discouraged my vigilance nor restrained my speculations. Somewhere she was, but where I hadn’t a clue. Where she was not became increasingly obvious as the days shambled by: she was not in her father’s house. Had I committed myself to this underendowed asylum for nothing?