Now it’s my turn, and I step straight out of ancient Rome to declaim energetically, “The law must exercise greater rigor in forbidding the act of suicide. Perverse habit, even the slaves are hanging themselves now. At this rate, who will cultivate my lands?”

Marcela, a prince’s wife in medieval Lorraine, applauds the Roman lord. “A prudent and necessary remedy. Good heavens, what damage the servants’ pretension to dispose of their own lives does to us. How can we allow it, how can we tolerate it?”

I go further back in time: I’m Zeno, the Stoic. I fall, hit my hand, fracture a thumb. I stare in indignation at the ground and reproach it. “‘I’m coming to you now, earth! Why do you call me?” and lift my fingers to my neck to strangle myself.

Delighted, Bibi assumes a dramatic attitude, picks up a serpent, and clutches it to her bosom.

CLEOPATRA: Come, enchantress of death! With thy pointed tongue untie this knot of my life! Be angry, poor poisonous creature, and finish quick!

Enter Marcela.

CHARMIAN: “Oh, eastern star!

CLEOPATRA: Peace, peace! (Indicates the asp with her eyes.) Dost thou not see my baby at my breast? That sucks the nurse asleep? (Dies.)

•

A long silence has ensued. Bibi is tactfully putting out the lights, except a single nightlight that illuminates one side of my face. I emerge from the stillness as Beethoven, confessing to a friend, “I’d have committed suicide long ago if I hadn’t read somewhere that it’s a sin to part from life voluntarily so long as one can still do a good deed. Life is so beautiful, but for me it is forever poisoned.”

A very gentle moment, and then this erupts:

HAMLET: Who would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.

From the shadows, someone says:

AN ORDINARY VOICE: Suicide is for cowards!

And I say:

KIERKEGAARD: Agreed, it is cowardice, but it is a cowardice that demands a great deal of valor.

Bibi switches on the lights; the smiles each of us finds on the others’ faces demand to be seen. We celebrate our delight in the philosopher’s sound reasoning and restrained eloquence.

Immediately we find ourselves with Marcela in a workers’ café, circa 1930. Bibi goes past, dancing with a fellow who is economically superior to the place’s ambience. Marcela crucifies her. “That one over there . . . she’d do anything for money and for luxury, she’d even cut herself with a Gillette.”

But Bibi prefers Hadrian’s Rome and proclaims the emperor’s newest decree to his armies: “The soldier who attempts suicide will be punished.” By what? “By death.”