Puff. The smoke from my cigarette is lovely, a flat, pale drift catching light in dark places. Harmlessness. I am in here trying to be harmless. That is, after all, the primary attraction of my seclusion: to move and sleep and fling my arms out no matter how the soft undersides swing, to mutter serious nonsense at the fish and flowers and walls and windows, to giggle and stamp with sensuality on the ghastly bodies of slugs and the grinding, clicking snails. In all this coiling self—this child’s indulgence— I would like to injure no one, cause no discernible pain. (I turn my back, of course, on the pain of the gastropods.) I want to see no flinch or change of pulse as the result of my most flagrant acts. I never want to roil the bedsheets as I relive the embarrassment of some stupid moment where my vanity fell crooked on an unsuspecting head. Exuberance has always been a problem of mine. It mutes my judgment, or strangles it. Each blast of idiocy or malice snaps back and chips me till I am sadly maimed and disfigured.

Do not mistake: I have meant harm in my time.

Poor Moira Clancy. I certainly meant her harm.

And there have been others. But so many were accidents, misjudgments, the result of my carelessness and stupidity. How many million tumbling words I’ve let loose without first noticing their particular toxicity. Fortunately, I forget a lot, and what is left to remember is enough to keep me here. I seek out no one, and those who come to me, like visitors to an aging cobra, accept their hazards.

But I don’t dwell on the impersonal wounds, those fated irritations caused by my moods glancing off some stranger like the weather. The countless frenzied sales clerks I have insulted, the thousand bums to whom I have not given a penny or my ear, the small children I have refused to push in swings, and the innumerable lies I’ve told for convenience or color and that have since been found out. They are all too vague and unintentional to harass me.

It is the memories of when my motives have been vicious that are difficult to tolerate. They hit me at vulnerable moments, at vacant periods when my brain is flaccid between manias. The loathing I feel for myself is tremendous. It overwhelms me while I lie in my bed, during my solitary supper, or in the midst of washing out my armpits. While acute, these fits of conscience are temporary; they pass with sympathetic doses of distraction and a diet of ice cream and murder mysteries.