Driving away. Pressing too hard on the gas pedal, the car lurches. Goddamn! Damn her.

The money I’ve given the woman was for her, not her family. Can’t be trusted to spend money on herself. What are families but leeches.

So angry! Feeling betrayed.

Deciding then, I will never return to dingy McGuire’s. Never again risking such ignominy.

Led by curiosity to discover Keisha’s last name: Olen.

9.

… soon then calculating that I must seek out Keisha to speak to her directly. To address her in my own person. I have seen in your face a soul of beauty. You are kind, generous, good. You must be protected from your own goodness. My wish is to make you happy …

All this is true. Yet the words are laughably banal, vulgar.

Such ordinary words, I can’t bring myself to utter. My fear is that one day I will wish to commit suicide, a most reasonable decision, yet, being unable to compose a suitable note, I will be thwarted and forced to live forever.

Silence is not really an option in matters of suicide. As nature abhors a vacuum, so silence is a kind of vacuum that others will noisily fill with idiotic theories that will debase the dignity of the suicide simply in being suggested.

Not sure (now) how to proceed. Not (it seems) able to desist.

Like a compulsive hand washer, required to enact the identical ritual dozens of times a day simply to be able to breathe normally, I now find myself unable not to think of Keisha Olen virtually all the time. Not the woman herself, but the riddle she represents.

Have I fallen in love? With—her?

But I am immune to love—that’s to say “love.” No emotions engage me except as fossils of living feeling, transmogrified into language and, through language, into texts.

True, decades ago such emotions coursed through me like electric jolts, as (no doubt) they course through you, leaving you exhausted and uncertain about who you are—the emotions or the vessel through which they course.

Take comfort: in time, if you apply the proper strategy, these emotions will drain away like a sutured abscess.

And so the elaborate strategy I’ve decided upon is a kind of triage: to satisfy the spurious attachment I (seem to) feel for a woman scarcely known to me, by the name of Keisha Olen, I am writing (typing, on my Japanese electric typewriter) a letter to her, which I hope will be the last I will write to her—

Dear Ms. Keisha Olen:

I am writing to you as the executive director of the Society of Deserving Americans. Originally established in 1889, the Society has an honored tradition of providing monetary gifts to individuals who are deemed—by virtue of their kindness, good-heartedness, and inner worth—outstanding citizens in their communities—“deserving” of recognition. In bestowing these awards, the Society does not seek publicity and requests from all awardees that its bequests remain confidential.