*

BELLA

(To the audience) Following the November recess I convince the academic dean that I feel well enough to return to class where my students regale me with stories of the substitute professor’s bizarre habit of adjusting his testicles while incessantly pacing the room.

I lead a twenty-minute writing exercise whose only rule is that your pencil must never stop moving, even if language breaks down into illegible hieroglyphics. The purpose is to tap into your unconscious and free up the velocity of thought. I ask the class to meditate on the idea of doing something terrible—the worst thing they can imagine: a rape, a murder, setting fire to a family home, whathaveyou—and let the writing spring from this.

I also participate in the exercise, and minutes later I find myself writing the same phrase over and over:

Listen to the sound inside. Listen to the sound inside. Listen to the sound inside. Listen to the sound inside. Listen to the sound inside. Listen to the sound inside. Listen to the sound inside. Listen to the sound inside. Listen to the sound inside. Listen to the sound inside. Listen to the sound inside. Listen to the sound inside.

I fill almost an entire legal pad.

The same five words.

I have no idea what it means.

At the end of class, Christopher Dunn approaches me.

“Hey,” he says.

I say, “Hey.”

“Welcome back,” he offers.

I tell him that it’s good to be back.

I say, “How’s the novel coming?”

“It’s coming,” he replies.

I ask if Student X has a name yet.

“He does,” he says. “Christopher.”

Somehow this comforts me.

I hear myself ask him about the Econ major.

He says that she started dating some senior in The Whiffenpoofs.

“Ouch,” I say. “The Whiffenpoofs.”

He says, “Dumped for a member of the glee club. Not emasculating at all.”

I tell him he got whiffenpoofed.

Then I ask him if he’d like to have dinner with me that weekend. I tell him that I have an idea. I’m reaching toward something in a dark room. But I’m excited.

“I love that,” he says.

*

BELLA

(To the audience) I spend the next two days scouring the internet for the most painless way to commit suicide. There are countless websites. Everything from the discreet, tasteful brightfields.org to the gauche doyourselfin.com, which features instant-of-death photos. There are message boards detailing the process of asphyxiating yourself with a plastic bag and then floating to your death in a warm bath. This was Jerzy Kosinski’s method of suicide; purportedly one of the most trauma-free techniques because you lose consciousness before you drown, and the warm, body-temperature water tricks the nervous system into thinking that it’s somehow entering a safe, womblike space, so you never go into shock.

Unfortunately, being discovered with a plastic bag over my head in my bathtub seems grotesque and obvious, and, when it comes to a surefire self-dispatching, I can’t bring myself to wholeheartedly trusting the plastic bag industry.