There was a couch in the ladies’ restroom of the main building. I went up through the bright empty halls and sat on it. It was an old couch with black flowers. For fainting fits and period cramps. During the day there was nearly always somebody moaning on it, for twisted love or academic foul-ups, whatever. I stretched out. Examined the cigarette burns in the slipcover. Listened to the casual grunting and gurglings of the toilets in the next room.

There was a phone on the wall. After a while I got up and put in a dime. Dialed the infirmary.

“I haven’t slept for three nights,” I said. “If I come over there, will you give me something to make me sleep?”

They said all they could give me was aspirin. I hung up and went back to the sofa. Curled up and went to sleep. I woke up when people started coming in on their way to classes the next morning. Went over to the cafeteria to wait for the coffee machine to finish perking. My dark wool sailor’s outfit was rumpled and covered with gray fuzz. The pants were too tight, anyway. They rode up my crack and cut into my hip joints. I sat in the corner with a cup of coffee and picked at the lint.

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.