These clients were also willing to pay the most. By this point, from his drawings animation, Bobby was making something perilously close to a living. The money came into his bank account, and then came in again, like a tide. He withdrew only the minimum necessary. A healthy surplus was building and it disquieted him how much the money consoled him. He did not want to believe in it yet felt a swell of relief each time he thought of it. Enough money meant you did not have to think about money.

Then there were the poems. Bobby had been writing and rewriting and refining and ­re-­refining the manuscript of his debut collection for more than eight years now. The collection was currently entitled Anhedonia, Here I Come. He regularly read from this endless work in progress at ­open-­mic nights, had even had a few of the poems published in ­double-­digit-­circulation pamphlets and once reputable, now posthumous journals. The poems, he suspected, were not good enough. They exhibited decent technical effects but were in some obscure way insubstantial or evasive. He agonised over the accuracy of his inner ear, was not in fact certain he even possessed one. In terms of theme, he could not get beyond what he was convinced was a fundamentally spurious obsession with suicidal ideation, but simultaneously he felt that every other poetic topic or concern was an obfuscation, an eschewal, or a bald retreat from this theme.

Bobby had been smitten with the concept of suicide since he was a teenager, but the problem, he figured, was that he had never truly wished to kill himself. His basic problem was that he liked being alive. Being alive was, if not the best thing, then at least an OK thing, an endlessly OK thing. Much as he wished otherwise, Bobby had gradually come to accept that he was afflicted with an uncapsizable ­psycho-­chemical equilibrium, and no matter how much squalor and degradation he encountered, no matter how many ­ill-­considered partners he initiated relationships with, and no matter how many drugs he crammed into his system, he could not jar himself into a genuine spiral. Not being able to feel crushingly terrible made him feel terrible, but even this second order of terribleness had, to his inquisitive mind, a compelling textural quality that made him wish only to experience more of it: his mind found any sensation or state induced by it fascinating, which was an indirect way of admitting that his mind found itself fascinating, which was to say that he, Bobby Tallis, found every facet of his own disgustingly mundane self and life fascinating. Bobby’s psychic sturdiness was, he feared, a manifestation of a submerged but profound and pullulating narcissism.