After the first two years I stopped going to the group therapy sessions. After the twentieth explanation of the exercise and diet required to combat constipation induced by the pills, I did not go back and have never received any official discipline for my absence.

I have thought of saving my pills—I would never dream of taking them—for a rainy day. It seems the checks must stop coming at some point, and the pills would be salable. But I flush them down the toilet each month when they arrive from the pharmacy. Each month, I write the check to Ludlow’s Rx on Water Avenue and put it in an envelope. The envelope, with pennies and nickels taped to it for the postage, goes into the box on my front door. Then the pills go into the toilet, and the little plastic bottles with their childproof lids go into the garbage.

I have contemplated dropping a blue bedtime pill into the fishbowl when I feel ready to die. The potential longevity of the goldfish annoys me, though their fragile realities draw my sympathy.

The red morning pill is small. I keep thinking of clipping minute feather bits from a leaking pillow and pasting them to the pill. Then I could attach a thread and dangle it in front of the toad in the garden. Presumably, it would make him hop, or dance. But each month I forget these malicious fancies and flush the pills down the toilet, not even saving one. This seems to fulfill my obligations to the federal government while also eliminating any fleeting temptations to do away with my sweet self.

This all happened so long ago that even my brother and his wife have forgotten now why they are supposed to keep an occasional eye on me. For a while, my case was reviewed every six months to approve the renewal of my stipend. But then some card tore or a typist skipped a line or a folder was lost in the mail, and the stipend check began to arrive with the declaration PERMANENT DISABILITY PENSION printed in calm, black uppercase.

My celebration involved a solitary but jubilant picnic in the rocks by the water, and the extravagant purchase of a leather-bound Complete Sherlock Holmes.

I offer this in my defense: it is expensive to be alone and still alive. The others do not like it, they make you pay. It is irritating to know of anyone who prefers his own company to ours. It casts an aspersive shadow over our labors as well as our pleasures. The hermit has an evil eye that chills the memory and upsets the digestion. But in other times, bread and milk were laid outside the caves as a token communication and no hermit would be maligned for choosing a hole near a generous village rather than in a complete desert. People are, reluctantly, able to concede a preference for God over their own society.