“So you feel people have accepted things that may not be true?”

“But they have to accept things, otherwise they can’t live their daily lives. They have to feed their family, and put a roof over their heads. They don’t have the luxury of sitting around thinking and asking why.”

Harry clapped his hands in delight. “And now you take the opposite view in order to hear the counterargument! You’re arguing with yourself! That also is the sign of a philosopher!”

“I’m not a fucking philosopher!”

Harry came and sat down beside me, his frighteningly pummeled face close to mine.

“Look, Marty, let me tell you something. Your life isn’t going to get any better. In fact, think of your worst moment. Are you thinking of it? Well, let me tell you. It’s all downhill from there.”

“Maybe.”

“You know you haven’t a chance in hell of happiness.”

That was upsetting news to hear, and I took it badly, maybe because I had the uncomfortable feeling that Harry understood me. Tears came to my eyes, but I fought them. Then I started thinking about tears. What was evolution up to when it rendered the human body incapable of concealing sadness? Is it somehow crucial to the survival of the species that we can’t hide our melancholy? Why? What’s the evolutionary benefit of crying? To elicit sympathy? Does evolution have a Machiavellian streak? After a big cry, you always feel drained and exhausted and sometimes embarrassed, especially if the tears come after watching a television commercial for tea bags. Is it evolution’s design to humble us? To humiliate us?

Fuck.

“You know what I think you should do?” Harry asked.

“What?”

“Kill yourself.”

“Time!” the guard called.

“Two more minutes!” Harry shouted back.

We sat glaring at each other.

“Yep, I advise you to commit suicide. It’s the best thing for you. There is no doubt a cliff or something you can jump from around here.”

My head moved slightly, though it wasn’t a nod or a shake. It was a slight reverberation.

“Go alone. When no one is with you. Don’t write a note. Many potential suiciders spend so much time composing their final words they wind up dying of old age! Don’t let this be your mistake. When it comes to taking your own life, preparation is procrastination. Don’t say goodbye. Don’t pack a bag. Just walk to the cliff alone one late afternoon- afternoon is best because it sits solidly at the end of a day when nothing in your life has changed for the better, so you aren’t suffering the tender illusion of potential and possibility that morning often brings. So then, you’re at the edge of the cliff now, and you’re alone, and you don’t count down from ten or a hundred, and you don’t make a big thing of it, you just go, don’t jump, this isn’t the Olympics, this is a suicide, so just step off the edge of the cliff like you’re climbing the steps of a bus. Have you ever been on a bus? Fine. Then you know what I’m talking about.”

“I said time’s up!” the guard shouted, this time from the door.

Harry gave me a look that set off an intestinal chain reaction. “Well,” he said, “I suppose this is goodbye, then.”

There’s no shortage of potential suicide jump points when you live in a valley. Our town was surrounded by cliff walls. I made my way up the steepest I could find, an exhausting, almost vertical climb to a ridge flanked by tall trees. After leaving the prison, I had conceded that Harry was right: I probably was a philosopher, or at least some kind of perennial outsider, and life wasn’t going to get any easier for me. I’d separated myself from the flow, ejected my pod from the mother ship. Now I was hurtling through space that loomed endlessly ahead.

The mood of the brightening morning was incongruous to suicide, but maybe that’s just what it wanted me to think. I took a last look around. I saw, in the hazy distance, the jagged ridge of the surrounding hills, and above, the sky, which seemed to be a high, unattainable plate-glass window. A light breeze carried the warm fragrance of flowers in waves, and I thought: Flowers really are lovely but not lovely enough to excuse the suffocating volume of paintings and poems inspired by them while there are still next to no paintings and poems of children throwing themselves off cliffs.

I took a step closer to the edge. High in the trees I could hear the sounds of birds. They weren’t chirping, they were just moving around making everything rustle. Down near the earth brown beetles were rummaging in the dirt, not thinking of death. It didn’t seem to me I’d be missing out on much. Existence is humiliating anyway. If Someone was watching us build, decay, create, degenerate, believe, and wither as we do, he’d never stop laughing. So why not? What do I know about suicide? Only that it is a melodramatic act, as well as an admission that the heat is too hot so I’m getting out of this crazy kitchen. And why shouldn’t a fourteen-year-old commit suicide? Sixteen-year-olds do it all the time. Maybe I’m just ahead of my time. Why shouldn’t I end it all?

I stepped right out to the edge of the precipice. I thought that when Caroline saw me afterward she’d cry, “I loved that mashed-up piece of human wreckage.” I looked over at the terrifying drop and my stomach lurched and all my joints locked and I had the following horrible thought: You experience life alone, you can be as intimate with another as much as you like, but there has to be always a part of you and your existence that is incommunicable; you die alone, the experience is yours alone, you might have a dozen spectators who love you, but your isolation, from birth to death, is never fully penetrated. What if death is the same aloneness, though, for eternity? An incommunicable, cruel, and infinite loneliness. We don’t know what death is. Maybe it’s that.

I stepped away from the cliff and ran in the opposite direction, stopping only to trip over a large stone.

I went back to see Harry West to give him a piece of my mind. He didn’t look surprised to see me.

“So you didn’t do it, eh? You think you will wait until you hit rock bottom before taking your own life? Well, let me save you some time. There is no bottom. Despair is bottomless. You’ll never get there, and that’s why I know you’ll never kill yourself. Not you. Only those attached to the trivial things take their own lives, but you never will. You see, a person who reveres life and family and all that stuff, he’ll be the first to put his neck in a noose, but those who don’t think too highly of their loves and possessions, those who know too well the lack of purpose of it all, they’re the ones who can’t do it. Do you know what irony is? Well, you just heard one. If you believe in immortality, you can kill yourself, but if you feel that life is a brief flicker between two immense voids to which humanity is unfairly condemned, you wouldn’t dare. Look, Marty, you’re in an untenable situation. You don’t have the resources to live a full life, yet you can’t bring yourself to die. So what do you do?”

“I don’t know! I’m fourteen!”

“You and me, we’re in the same boat. Here in this prison a man cannot live properly. He can’t meet girls or cook his own meals or make friends or go out dancing or do any of the skimming-the-surface-of-life things that gather leaves and lovely memories. So I, like you, can’t live. And like you, I can’t die. I ask you again, what’s a man to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“You create!”

“Oh.”

“Can you draw or paint?”

“Not at all.”

“Can you make up stories and write them down?”

“No.”

“Can you act?”

“No.”

“Can you write poetry?”

“Nope.”

“Can you play music?”