Here I am now, gross in my self-indulgence, maintaining the stock of the cookie jar, lying in bed until the crack of noon, dawdling over the bathtub knobs, meticulously arranging my well-dusted books—first by subject, and then by author, changing my mind every few months when an industrious mood coincides with gray, wet weather. I am free. No necessity dictates my waking or sleeping. No will but mine governs the shaping of my days. I do not work. I am not employed. My money, small and sufficient, comes in the mail on the fifteenth day of the month. I sign the check and put it into a new envelope addressed to the bank and my labors toward the cause of sustenance are ended for another four weeks or so. All those smooth faces on the streets that yearn for time, all those who would sacrifice meat and comfort, heat and fashion for the luxury in which to pursue their obsession or explore their preoccupations are right, if, in sighting me as I scrabble in the garden or polish the door, they condemn me for possessing a treasure that they long for and may never acquire.

I now have, by an accident of intention, been gifted with all a human could require for private life: food that I like, comfortable shelter, and the proximity of a large library with a mailing service. It is true that I cannot afford to dress in any fashion but secondhand, and a show is beyond my budget unless I save in preparation for a few weeks. But I am too large to care about clothes, my only concern with them is whether they will break when I bend, and I am too shy and snobbish to be tempted by shows. The joys I have can be relied upon. The magical independence is not fragile. My card is stuck irretrievably in the computer. My name and number are so deeply embedded in the fluid memory of the central machines of government that if the card itself is shredded to illegibility by some technological convulsion it will make no difference to me. The grooves of habit will remain and the checks will keep coming anyway, in much the same fashion as those magazine subscriptions which go on for eons despite nonpayment, or rejection, or the demise of the subscriber.

This glorious security, this gratefully acknowledged liberty, this beneficent cushion to my sensibilities, is due entirely to that far-off beauty of my last love, to that last, or perhaps sole, genuine wound, the result of having so ridiculously approached a penny-ante orgasm.

That day, awake and alone in the crucial bed, with the morning light of Boston seeping into the sad old room that had once known life lived as I thought it ought to be, I made my plan.