That said, I am sure we have met. I am careful to visit every eighth-grade class at Kingsward Junior High, and I think it highly likely that I have gaped at you through my bifocals and you have gaped back, probably while picking your nose, from across your desk, wondering when I’ll stop talking so you can go to lunch.

On the sunny fall morning on which I write this note—I can see fat chipmunks outside my window, frisking after one another, caught up in their torrid rodent romances—you are probably in your mid-teens. By the time you read it, however, you will be close to thirty. See, you are not the only one who can stretch the rubber band of time and shoot it in someone’s eye.

It is possible you are anxious about my death. Perhaps you wonder if I killed myself after I wrote my last book because I had no more books from the future to copy. Did I copy them, line for line, over the years, spacing the publications for maximum commercial impact? Beginning with that first one, which I received in the Da Nang province in 1966, shortly before I received notice of my mother’s death? Did I come home and discover twelve more novels in a cardboard suitcase in the front closet? Did I study their titles and covers with a dry mouth and my heart beating tremulously and then burn them in my fireplace without reading them? Does it matter? I had my life. The books have theirs. But when I put a pistol in my mouth, a few days or a few hours from now—I’m still making up my mind about it—it will not be because I ran out of things to write. It will be because I miss my mother, and because I broke my back in a motorcycle accident in 1975 and the pain is rotten, and because I shot an unarmed woman in the throat in Vietnam and have never forgiven myself for it. She was hiding under a blanket in a dark room, and when I poked the blanket, she rose, screaming, and I killed her. Upon seeing the body, my sergeant put a grenade in her hand and said he’d file papers to see I got a medal. I have been a war hero ever since. That is why I did not write to my mother for three months: not the clap, as I have said elsewhere. This is why I wrote fiction for thirty years: because I could not bear the truth.

Or at least I could not bear most of the truth. Once my mother was dying and a man was kind to her. That is a truth that has kept me going well past my time.