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22 My Suicide You may not learn the news for days, even weeks, but when it strikes —by facsimile, by e-mail—it’ll take you hard. You’ll call the survivors of the gang, hope you knew first. Then you’ll schedule in a weekend to drink alone and luxuriate in ruffled mourning. You won’t sleep soundly then, you’ll toss, consider me poor wretch and selfish bastard. If only I had contacted you, you ponder, but recognize better in your tough and lucid moments, the ones you know I loved you for. Did I suffer much? Did I think of you at all that last second before the end? I must have. And even, absurdly, am I staring down now full of piety at your mortal indiscretions as you realize that you must get on with your life? Perhaps I am— stupider things happen— but you doubt it. A lifetime’s cynicism is the bet, and how uncool of me to play my ace of spades this way. How like me. Soon sorrowful 23 fury and moral muddle grow tiresome. It’ll be a thing to remember, an insurance policy of sentiment in the summer home you’ll buy for cash in eight years and three months, and, with ices cubes melting crimson in the glass in your veined hand in just that sublime last instance of sunset, as you watch squinting from the deck with the old dog submissive by your slippers an angle of geese dropped silently to the sculptured lake, by then and probably much sooner I’ll seem only the fool I was and am and will be, and you, and he, and she, and so on very nearly and forever. ...

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