The need arose the very next day, so I grabbed my tape recorder, fitted in her tape, and went up to deserted Little Egypt. I pressed the “On” button, and closed my eyes. I let myself believe her good words; they displaced my bad thoughts for the length of an hour. When it was over, I pressed the “Off” button. Nothing happened. The tape continued to wind in its cartridge. I held the “Off” button down with my thumb, and still the tape played, though there was no more voice to hear. I ran downstairs with it, found Warren in the Hostility Suite. I handed him the tape recorder, said, “Can you turn this off for me?” Warren was not able to turn the machine off until he had smacked the recorder into his palm and then against the table edge to empty the batteries out.

Not graduating is how Chatty left this place the first time. This time, all she will have to do is call a car, just as I have done. I have learned to specify town car so the company does not send over a limousine. I remember to tell them to tell the driver to bring along something to read.

With my bags packed and in the car with me, it is like the concert I went to—a chamber quartet—at what was once a private home, a Victorian mansion. In the music room there was a birdcage that had finches in it. The cage was a replica of the house it was inside of, down to the mansard roof and broad-stepped porch. That night I arrived early and heard the musicians already playing. Thinking my watch was slow and I was actually late, I hurried in. The musicians were playing—not tuning up, but performing the evening’s program—to an empty house. And the finches were singing along! When they finished, the cellist explained to me that before every concert given in the house, the musicians played first for the finches so the birds would tire themselves out singing, and would then remain quiet during the concert that was scheduled.

Chatty assures me I will know, I will “just know” when to leave. How does she come by such certainty?

Who said sanity is free? That is the answer to Karen’s complaint about always having to do two jobs.

Don’t you find that there is no right place to begin? When you try to make sense of a thing that has happened? That everything is as important, or as unimportant, as everything else? A poet writes, “He opens a book at random, and consults randomness.” To me, this is what it seems. To me and, Warren has pointed out, a million other people.

I pretend I know you well. I say to Warren, “I have a friend who—” and Warren says, “You have too many friends.”

I waited so long to write to you. I liked knowing, as it came to me throughout the course of a day, that I would be writing a letter to you. It made me think of a doctor here, a man who said he’d have liked to have treated Marilyn Monroe, what a lift it would have given him to look in his appointment book and see her name. He had lifted up for a moment on the toes of his shoes.