“Really,” grins Enzian, flirting. “I can’t think of what that would be. Give me a clue.”

“It’s a non-repeatable act.”

“Firing a rocket?”

“No, because there’s always another rocket. But there’s nothing—well, never mind.”

“Ha! Nothing to follow it with, that’s what you were going to say.”

“Suppose I give you another clue.”

“All right.” But Enzian has already guessed: it’s there in the way he holds his jaw and is just about to laugh… .

“It embraces all the Deviations in one single act.” Enzian sighs, irritated, but does not call him on this use of “Deviations.” Bringing up the past is part of Ombindi’s game. “Homosexuality, for example.” No rise. “Sadism and masochism. Onanism? Necrophilia… .”

“All those in the same act?”

All those, and more. Both know by now that what’s under discussion is the act of suicide, which also includes bestiality (“Think how sweet,” runs the pitch, “to show mercy, sexual mercy to that hurt and crying animal”), pedophilia (“It is widely reported that just at the edge you grow glaringly younger”), lesbianism (“Yes, for as the wind blows through all the emptying compartments the two shadow-women at last can creep out of their chambers in the dying shell, at the last ashen shoreline, to meet and embrace…”), coprophilia and urolagnia (“The final convulsions…”), fetishism (“A wide choice of death-fetishes, naturally…”). Naturally. The two of them sit there, passing a cigarette back and forth, till it’s smoked down to a very small stub. Is it idle talk, or is Ombindi really trying to hustle Enzian here? Enzian’s got to be sure before he moves. If he comes out sez, “This is a hustle, right?” and turns out it isn’t, well— But the alternative is so strange, that Enzian is, in some way, being

SOLD ON SUICIDE

Well I don’t care-for, th’ things I eat,

Can’t stand that boogie-woogie beat—

But I’m sold, on, suicide!

You can keep Der Bingle too, a-

And that darn “bu-bu-bu-boo,”

Cause I’m sold on suicide!

Oh! I’m not too keen on ration stamps,

Or Mothers who used to be baby vamps,

But I’m sold, on, suicide!

Don’t like either, the Cards or Browns,

Piss on the country and piss on the town,

But I’m S.O.S., yes well actually this goes on, verse after verse, for quite some time. In its complete version it represents a pretty fair renunciation of the things of the world. The trouble with it is that by Gödel’s Theorem there is bound to be some item around that one has omitted from the list, and such an item is not easy to think of off the top of one’s head, so that what one does most likely is go back over the whole thing, meantime correcting mistakes and inevitable repetitions, and putting in new items that will surely have occurred to one, and—well, it’s easy to see that the “suicide” of the title might have to be postponed indefinitely!

Conversations between Ombindi and Enzian these days are thus a series of commercial messages, with Enzian not so much mark as unwilling shill, standing in for the rest of the tip, who may be listening and maybe not.