A steely determination to die

Many times I have attended my own suicide, burial, and mourning. For those who I hope would be wounded by my loss, I have dealt out a ream of eulogies they might recite, pumped their tears, counted the meals they might leave uneaten on my account. I have listened to them quote my quips as well as my dissertations with the awed, too-late understanding of what was possessed in my company, now that they were forever robbed of it.

I love all that and have played it over in many variations for every crisis of my days.

“Go ahead! Do it! I’d be the last to interfere!” Carush snorted. He was another one of my beauties. I had fallen low enough by then to talk about it to him, bragging in soapy melancholy about my plans for my demise in the basement of the student boardinghouse. But all the time I slept with him I never went beyond talk and night walking and lurid fantasies of enacting my own death. He made me happy enough, in his dour and ridiculous way.

No, it was the next year, when I was nineteen, that my ambitions culminated, albeit incompletely. I had become a beastly creature, shredded by vanity, horrified by mediocrity in myself. “I wouldn’t care if it was yo-yo throwing or tiddlywinks as long as I was the best there was.” I thought that, and said it.

Carush, my serious paramour, the future CPA and reader of Freud, Jung, Skinner, and Bettelheim, believed in me. His faith was devastating. I had only to open my notorious yap and wag it with sufficient solemnity for him to bow down with the weight of my nattering. His legs were tapered, finely boned, an elegant and restrained bit of work. He liked me, but had a wide eye for pretty girls. Jealousy burned in me terribly, that ghastly disease.

At a birthday party that I had arranged for Carush—a successful surprise, to the degree that he wandered around the crowd for twenty minutes before he realized that it was all in his honor—he enjoyed himself too much. I had invited all his favorites among my female acquaintance. Emma was my favorite, too. Small she was, and fluffy. She scratched her incredible poems on the tapes from the cash register at the grocery store or threw them out as a counterfeit of conversation in her perpetual confusion at parties. I suppose we could have been friends but we were too prickly for each other. But there she was, her tiny hand elevating her glass like a lucid bite of Christ, her head poised oddly above her shoulders, and he leaning toward her, leering, rapt to her every move.