The soiled clothes I had folded into the large paper bag. I now tucked the bottles in among them and shoved it under the bed. This was to prevent my mother from guessing the true state of my affairs if I was not quite dead when she got home from work.

In theory there was nothing downstairs that would alert her to my presence in the house. Still I was afraid of being slotted with those unfortunates who intended to be discovered “in time!” In a society where suicide is frowned upon in principle—considered cowardly by the staunch, deranged by the wishy-washy, forbidden by law, and contemplated with varying degrees of lust by fifty percent of the population throughout twenty percent of their lives—in such a society nothing is judged more despicably self-seeking than failing in an attempt to do away with yourself. In this as in other endeavors, you can’t argue with success.

The bandaged wrists and woeful eyes that were the aftermath of my previous experiment had proved totally useless as levers to buoy up the sagging interest of my lover. The few friends whom I had tried to intrigue with the tale were either bored, disbelieving, or openly scornful. But I didn’t view the exercise as wholly wasted since it invested my culminating performance, extempore though it was, with more practical cunning than I might otherwise have managed.

With any luck I wouldn’t be found until my mother’s next dusting foray, and hopefully that would be before my rot was extensive enough to ruin this really marvelous mattress.

If, on the other tack, my mother’s vaunted intuition should cause her to stick her nose in while I was only in a coma, she would notice no disarray, only her darling in a blue-flowered nightie sleeping deeply. Convinced that her maternal longings were to be satisfied and I was home from the wars to stay, she would tiptoe out, and flit down to the kitchen to roast some enormous hunk of meat and make a potato salad for a snack when I woke.

Lying on the fresh pillows and plotting thus, I waited to see if the reaction to my concoction would be drastic and immediate. Would the aspirin’s acid devour the lining of my stomach and have me shrieking in agony? The discomfort in my gut was distinct but not really different from the whirring it had been suffering from nerves alone.

I decided there was time to write a farewell note. My pad and pen were beside me. I doubled up my knees and began to write in my tidy calligraphy.

This is just to say that I have had enough. No one is responsible for my death except myself.

I signed it, wrote the date and the hour, and then slid it under the pillow.