No. I…

I’m joking.

Oh.

I thought we’d decided that I was. Or you’d decided.

Where was your brother during this time?

In Italy.

So this was fairly recent.

Yes. You should just ask me what it is that you want to know.

A lot of the time you wont answer. About your brother, particularly.

I know.

What other plans did you entertain for doing away with yourself?

Serious plans?

Any kind. All right, serious.

I’d always had the idea that I didnt want to be found. That if you died and nobody knew about it that would be as close as you could get to never having been here in the first place. I thought about things like motoring out to sea in a rubber raft with a big outboard clamped to the transom and just go till you ran out of gas. Then you would chain yourself to the outboard and take a big handful of pills and open all the valves just very slightly and lie down and go to sleep. You’d probably want a quilt and a pillow. The rubber floor of the raft is going to be cold.

Cold again.

Yes. Anyway, after a couple of hours or so the thing would just fold up and take you to the bottom of the ocean to be seen no more forever. Stuff like that.

Stuff like that.

Yeah.

Is this an ongoing study?

I shouldnt have told you all this, should I?

Why not.

It’s only going to worry you. To no purpose.

Meaning that there’s nothing I could do about it.

Well. I dont think there’s much that anybody can do about anything.

For all the bleakness of your views you really dont present as clinically depressed.

I know. You said. My cup runneth over.

Is it your belief that your pessimism is based on an understanding of the world not so readily available to other people?

Is this a trick question?

I dont think so.

I think that people in general have a reasonable understanding of the world. I think that if they didnt we wouldnt be here.

Spoken as a Darwinian.

Spoken. Some gifts are unwelcome. I suppose the suspicion is that our common past can only warrant a common future if we are willing to rid ourselves of the outliers. One by one. As they appear. Rid. Confine. Whatever.

Are we approaching the world of the…what? The Archatron?

I dont know. Dont look like that. I really dont.

The presence beyond the gate. You must have some sense of it.

Such as what? A vile wind? A darkness?

The Archatron.

I suppose. Originally the Imperator. I was twelve and a fan of language. I saw the gate and the guardians of the gate. I couldnt see beyond.

Did they warn you back?

They did.

How did they warn you?

With a flick of their cold rats’ eyes. I saw them through the judas hole that I wasnt supposed to find. But then I hadnt been here before. They were surprised to see me. Anyway, not every view of the world with but a single speculation is thereby a false one. Or a mistaken one. Any number of truths hitherto unknown to us have entered the human domain through the testimony of a single witness.