It took considerable effort but she was able to gulp down a last few swallows of gin and edge over away from the side of the bed. Some of the liquor rolled off her chin down her neck, over her satin pillowcase. Her special crystal nightcap goblet fell to the hardwood floor and smashed.

Shit. Bobby spent half his life behind bars and what did he know really? She knew what it was like to fall back into the inner darkness of the self. To implode nights and come to every morning like reconstituted misery. Come crawling back in the day cell of the puny withering body. She knew all about the black holes of the self. She knew all about prison, about clocks and calendars. She knew single soul-crushing seconds that lasted months of Sundays. She knew sixty-second hand sweeps that were life plus ninety-nine; hours of agony like twenty lifetimes of Methuselah; weeks that tormented like furnace years on the surface of Mercury, months of frozen black solitude like lost ages on the icy black moons of Pluto. All the while thinking about “why me?” and “poor me.” She had heard the sound of the sun and the silence of the crystal moon reflected in still mountain lakes and that did not change a thing. Nothing was altered. It was a very bad deal and then on top of everything else, you had to die. Why has God done this thing to me?

She was no Helen Keller. She had never been up for any of this. Thanks to all of the pills and booze there was, at last, that wonderful sense of detachment. She could take the scissors and cut the thread any time now. Should have done it years ago but finally…the sentence was almost completed. Some people work in that damn gold pit in Brazil, some people sharecrop, some go to jail and…some contract muscular dystrophy. That’s how it was. From the telephone receiver, Wally the Walrus was singing “Hookah tookah my soda cracker? Does your mama chaw tobacco?” Then his voice snapped sober and he said, “Oh, fuck all! Let us stop talkin’ falsely now, the hour’s getting late. Are you there, sugar? Or are you not there? Are you they-ah?”

She was too fucked up to speak. It was getting difficult to breathe. That’s what happened when you OD’d. Your lungs filled up with water and you drowned. She thought you fell unconscious first. You were supposed to. Oh, well, at least it didn’t hurt.

Bobby recited Bob Dylan, “Outside in the cold distance, a wildcat did growl; two riders were approaching and the wind began to howl!…Yeeowwww!”