29.

I stopped noticing most of this junk years ago. Each item has its little story. The ukulele, a garage sale whim, which my sausage fingers could never play. (Did I buy it to compete with your charango, Bob?) The mannequin arms arranged on my wall a la God and Adam, retrieved from a neighbor’s bulky waste at the insistence of a girlfriend whose name I can’t remember.

The stories no longer touch me. Everything must go!

So much dust: slowly floating, coating my underground world like snow. When they find me, they’ll judge me a pig. Ah, well.

In the medicine cabinet, just now, I found Lotrimin, Clobetasol, Afrin, Compound W, Elidel, Robitussin. Let me dump it all before they discover that I was just a clump of fungus, dandruff, snot, warts, eczema, and phlegm.

Shoe box overflowing with credit card slips. Folders of tax returns. Manuals for appliances set out by the curb years ago.

Here’s a folder of fortunes saved from Chinese takeout dinners over the decades. Let’s see, randomly, before all of it goes in the Hefty bag:

Show your love and your love will be returned.

How apt. And even truer in the negative.

The old notebooks, though.

Their varied covers, yellow, red, and mustard-brown. The spiral wire, still shining like new. The brands, Mead, Pen-Tab, University. The evolution of my handwriting from jagged disorder to jagged regularity.

Once, Bob, I hoped that these rancorous seeds would magically grow into a book of allegories, aphorisms, and acid observations—an acknowledged masterpiece that would earn me universal admiration. Deluded as I may have been, I’m still fond of the notebooks. I touch the paper tenderly and feel the faint engraving of the ballpoint from the other side; it’s as if I were stroking my child’s hair.

Thinking you’ve finally understood something is a sure sign that you’ve got far to go.

Lunatic on subway bench, feverishly scribbling a deranged dissertation on a thrown-out newspaper. Notes from Underground.

The Big Vote. Americans are given the choice: eliminate world hunger or reduce the price of gas by 20¢ a gallon. No contest!

There are too many people for the planet to support. Humankind has made the Earth sick. The world has a fever, its temperature is rising—a self-regulatory mechanism like our own, the fever that burns out infection. Melting ice caps will submerge densely populated coastal areas. The flooding will continue until sufficient millions drown and balance is restored.

Look at that, I beat Al Gore by two decades.

Letting go of my life is no problem, but consigning these spiral-bound pages to the trash—that I cannot do.

So I won’t. I’ll leave them for you. If what you read strikes you as mediocre and unimpressive . . . that was me, all right.

One thinks, I’ll do that eventually. Scuba dive in Micronesia. Pilot a small plane. Learn to bake pastries. Become happy. It seems I won’t be achieving my old goals after all: one more thing to let go of.

Many lasts lie ahead. Last beer. Last piss. Last sight of another person. Last syllable spoken. Last thought. Last breath.

I admit to a flinch of hesitation. Despite appearances, I’m human, and subject to the survival instinct. This intention is stronger than instinct, though.

The question is, how?

Not by grisly gore, no sirree. No gun barrel in the mouth, no leap onto the train tracks, not even if I could still leap. Self-centered I may be, but I don’t want my remains to give strangers nightmares.

Nay to the noose—involuntary flailing lacks dignity, and anyway, my ceiling is too low.

I don’t seek violent self-destruction, just a painless exit. Pills are the obvious choice. Or else carbon monoxide.

If one lies in a waterless bathtub, any involuntary mess will be contained. The thoughtful suicide must consider such things.

Here’s something: Thatgoodnight.com recommends a sedative, and then a plastic bag over the head, taped snugly at the neck. The danger is being found too soon, and forced to live out your remaining years as a blob. Not much chance of that, though—no one but the meter reader has rung my buzzer in years.

What to wear? The brown summer suit: I’ve been mistaken for a professor in that. A tragic tableau, the great man in his final repose, with his head in a trash bag.

A month from now, I won’t exist. My grasp of this fact comes and goes. One moment I have it, then it turns to air between my fingers. I’ll follow through when the time comes, no doubt about that, but we can expect vacillation in the meantime.

If you’re reading this, Bob, then you know I meant every word.

Cast down by all this dreary biz—and what’s the point of setting yourself free if you’re going to mope about it?—I hauled myself upstairs and went to explore the Death section at Barnes & Noble. An unseasonably warm November afternoon awaited me, full of neighbors I usually avoid. The brilliant, blue-bottomed clouds, the laughter of unseen children—all of it seemed to sing, There’s beauty right outside your door/You just need to get out more.

A girl went skipping by in the street, twirling a glittery ball around one ankle. Two boys practiced jumping and catching their spinning skateboards. A cracked voice called to me from behind, “Angus, this is you in the paper? Writing about poor people?”

I don’t think you’ve ever met my landlady, or the others who live in the house. I’ll introduce you—because, after all, summing people up is what I do.

Mrs. Nieminen spends many of her waking hours at the redwood table behind the house. She waved her folded newspaper at me—battleship gray hair wrapped around green mesh rollers, yellow daisies on her housecoat psychedelically vivid—and said, “I never knew you did that.”

Actually, she has known since my first week on the job, but her stroke zapped certain neurons, with interesting effects. She doesn’t talk much, but when she does, it’s often to tell the same story, about her husband getting shot down behind enemy lines and parachuting into a swamp. She drops plates and utensils so frequently that the clatter overhead no longer alarms me, and sneaks licorice cats and gummi worms whenever Eka isn’t looking. When I moved in, she was a young woman of sixty, who unloaded her own groceries and baked barley bread every Sunday. Now she needs help to put her shoes on.

The local landscape struck me as blighted and sad today. Dents in the old white aluminum siding, weeds sprouting through cracked concrete, overhead wires everywhere you looked. Admittedly, though, I was in a cranky mood.

Eka gave me her usual wan smile and kept typing on her laptop, presumably chatting online with her family. This is how she spends her days: leaving her employer to her lonely newspaper and magnifying bar while she loses herself in her computer, humming contentedly, or else chatters away on a cell phone in her native Georgian, an octave higher than when she speaks English. Shishkolish kavadjsky dadiskotish, or something like that. Six years of American servitude have wilted her Snow White beauty. The milky skin now looks pallid, the striking eyes have sunk deeper into their sockets. (I used to wonder. She’s young, pretty, and imprisoned. Does she lust? Might she ring my buzzer in desperation one night? . . . Nahhhh.)

Mrs. N, meanwhile, rolls her eyes at the Georgian gibberish, and wishes (aloud, sometimes) that she could have her house to herself again. It’s as if each of them were the other one’s punishment for crimes unknown.

Garrett and his mother were lugging a model of a brown castle on a masonite base. They’d just shown it off to Don Quinones across the low hedge, and now it was my turn to encourage the lad, who turned twenty-one recently. “You recognize it?” Garrett demanded.

It takes so little to mark a person as different. A minor intellectual deficit, a subtle obtuseness about when and how to address others. Everyone knows within seconds.

The castle had tubby turrets and crooked crenellations. “Not a clue,” I said.

“It’s Hogwarts! We built it from sugar cubes.”

“It took two months,” his mother added.

“Pretty impressive,” Don called over the hedge.

What could I say? “You were born too late. You should have been a medieval stonemason.”

Garrett frowned, as usual. It’s not that my responses confuse him, but that dealing with people takes so much out of him.

I remember the day perky Cindy Olekas moved in upstairs. She shook my hand: her skin satin against mine, softer than any before or since. I don’t remember what I said to her, but her laugh made me think of sleigh bells. And then little Garrett tugged on her shirt and said he’d made in his pants. Endlessly sweet, she never loses patience. She had a boyfriend for a while, a swarthy contractor with slicked-back hair and a Porsche Carrera, but it didn’t last. And now, incredibly, Cindy must be close to fifty, still alone with her son, building sugar castles.

You can see her fine features on him, if you stare, but his sour expression obscures the resemblance. “She should put him in a home and give herself a chance,” Mrs. N told me once. But Cindy knows how the world sees her son. She’ll shield him as long as she can.

I could tell you all about neighbor Don, too, but I’m tired of talking about other people.

A question arose as I made my way around the corner to the garage. Why am I the one planning suicide, when each of them has more reason than I to despair?

Answer: because they’re blinkered horses, who will turn their respective millstones until they drop.

Or so I thought as I drove off in the Shitmobile. Looking back, I see it differently. They don’t need to escape. I’m the one with the defective soul, not Mrs. N, or Eka, or Garrett, or Cindy.

A surprise awaited me at the shopping plaza. I’d forgotten what day this was. Enraged, thwarted drivers prowled the lot, seeking spaces that didn’t exist. My handicapped placard never came in handier. (You didn’t hear about my knee surgery, did you? Well, a kindly coworker took the original and photoshopped a few fakes for me. I’ve been punching new expiration dates in them ever since.)

A small whirlwind stirred the dead leaves in circles—so symbolic that I laughed.

The bookstore on Black Friday was festive, bustling, a coffee-scented bazaar. Gazing down from the escalator at the shuffling throng, I saw the book shoppers babbling with their friends, choosing among cutesy calendars, and moving about as randomly as ants in a glass-sandwiched colony. What, I wondered, are they so happy about?

The shelf of books on death turned out to be pitifully small. Most had to do with surviving grief—not a single How-To manual in the bunch.

While browsing titles, I noticed a man in the next aisle who was even fatter than I am: a gabby, grinning buffoon, who practically begged the young salesgirl not to despise him. My contempt knew no limits. Then his wife and children came to fetch him.

On the way out of the store, I spotted a consolation prize: 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. A tailor-made invitation, and one that I gladly accepted.

Before returning to my hole, I had one more trial to endure.

At the Chevys near the bookstore, sipping a mango margarita while waiting for my Grande Chimichanga, I watched a cowboy-hatted jackass make a play for the tanned young queen of the hostesses, who wore a red napkin tucked into the rear of her waistband. As she whisked back and forth, ignoring him, the red tail bobbed provocatively. Once he gave up and left, she punched an order into a nearby computer, and I commiserated with her back. “Must be tough. You bait your hook, but you never know what fish will bite.”

She whirled around and cauterized me with an indignant glare. Know your place, slug!

Beauties don’t scare me, Brother Bob. I asked innocently, “What?”

I understood her point of view, though. Just so you know, I’ve put on weight since you saw me. Last time I visited a doctor, my BMI was 42, if that means anything to you. (It’s about twice yours, I’m guessing.) The playboy cowpoke was just an everyday annoyance, an occupational hazard. For someone like me to address her—no goddess should have to endure such a thing.

Ah, well. Soon I’ll trouble no one with my unsolicited comments.

If I visit 34.5 places daily, I’ll reach number 1,000 on the last day.

Maestro—traveling music, per favore!

Cliveden (Taplow, Berkshire), overwhelmingly grand, this National Trust property is England’s most majestic country-house hotel—in the photo, it looks massively overbuilt; might be fun to ride a big tricycle up and down the halls, though—dinner in the excellent Restaurant Waldo’s is reason enough to drive from London . . . (better than this chimichanga, no doubt) . . . fifteen-foot-high window . . . antique boats— oh, here’s something, Nancy Astor’s silent electric canoe.

Okay, one down, 999 to go.

Windsor Castle. The walled city of Closter. Penzance and Land’s End. The artists’ colony of St. Ives.

Flip faster.

Biarritz. The Dordogne and the Cave of Lascaux. The Walls of Carcassonne. (“What are you doing with that carcass, son?”) Sans Souci . . .

My amusing plan is turning sour already. I have a reverse Midas touch. Always did.

Keep on.

Mount Etna. The Anne Frank House.

Marvão, U Fleků: meaningless syllables.

Sidi Bou Said, Ngorongoro Crater.

Why am I doing this?

The Heart of Bali.

Cape May and its charming B&Bs, just a two-hour drive on the Garden State. Victorian gingerbread, sea breezes, a lovely setting in which to stop breathing.

Good night, Brother Bob. Another delightful day is done.