I've stopped taking suicide seriously in recent years as a possibility for myself, because there's a perspective that radically transcends the neutrality that forms the basis of most of my criticism of living. The perspective is in fact entirely mundane in its operation, which consists of a commonsensical and humble interpretation of the pain one experiences in living — an unwillingness to generalize to extremes on the basis of one's failures, an assumption regardless of particular experiences that pain is transitory. Obviously I can't plead with you on the basis of a perspective which you may not share. I mention this simply from the hope that it may come as a bit of a reminder to you because (after all) you do live and may have done so on a basis similar to this. I use the past tense because I imagine that considering suicide as seriously as you are there's already quite a distance between you and such a perspective.
Was this what he'd felt? The snow had almost melted, and the sky was pale blue. They went sightseeing at the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque. After lunch they went to the Royal Treasury. The lesbian loved the Chamber of Emerald Objects. By the time they got to the Chamber of Jade Objects, she was bored, but the English boy read every caption aloud just the same. When they got to the Chamber of Weapons, Ulrich tried to take a mace down from the wall, but the attendant smiled and shook a finger.
The lesbian wanted a snack. The boy who wanted to be a journalist got baklava and mineral water. The English boy read the menu aloud. - Shut up, said Ulrich.
Ulrich sat buttering a big piece of bread and the lesbian was eating her soup but the English boy wasn't eating anything. Suddenly his face twitched and he started to stutter.
Ulrich leaped up, slapped his cheek with a noise like a gunshot, and walked out. When the others returned to the hotel that night his pack was gone.
The next day the lesbian and the English boy and the boy who wanted to be a journalist went to the underground bazaar. The English boy's jaw was still numb where Ulrich's hand had struck him, but he hadn't lost any teeth. In fact the incident had significantly benefited him, since Ulrich was gone and the lesbian had been very sympathetic. The boy who wanted to be a journalist permitted his jealousy to construct a proof of almost geometric rigor that the English boy had planned it. It was true that the English boy's thoughts, at least as he had expressed them, seemed to possess little shape or divisibility, but that might well be simply a manifestation of the English boy's cunning. In short, the lesbian and the English boy were now holding hands. Maybe the lesbian wasn't a lesbian after all.
Nonetheless, he felt a very strange sense of well-being. The lesbian and the English boy were away at the Turkish baths. He went to visit the hotel clerk, a dark-skinned boy who always smiled. Since the trip was almost over, and the boy who wanted to be a journalist could not possibly use up all his Swiss cereal, he gave the clerk some. The clerk didn't know what it was at first, but when the boy who wanted to be a journalist ate a handful as a demonstration of its gustatory powers, the clerk also tried a taste. His eyes widened. Then he got out his flute and played a song for glee. He beckoned the other boy to the counter and pointed to his lips to show that he had something he wanted to say. He patted his cheek. Then he got out his Turkish-English dictionary. He searched for the words for a long time. Finally he frowned, mouthed something to himself as though he were rehearsing it, and then his forehead smoothed and he patted the boy who wanted to be a journalist's shoulder and smiled delightedly and said: I — love — you. .
He went outside to take his pill, and Ulrich found him. Ulrich's palms were lacerated and gritty with fragments of glass. Ulrich said: Because I kill my father, you know. In 1972. That doctor you cry for, he was just a little bastard. But my father was SS. He was the peak. He was good enough to die at my hands. .
Do you love your father? said the boy who wanted to be a journalist. I need to know what love means.
Love? said Ulrich. Why not love? You tell me this now, you want to know what love means. Who do you love?
Nobody.
Ah, then no more pills for you, my poor American. You love no one? No one? Good! You are the peak. You and I, we know what love means. .
And he began to applaud, slamming his great grey hands together until the blood and glass shivered out —
~ ~ ~
One obvious question concerning the ultimate reproductive success of males is whether it is better for a male to invest all of his sperm in a single female or else to copulate with several females.
Once upon a time a journalist and a photographer set out to whore their way across Asia. They got a New York magazine to pay for it. They each armed themselves with a tube of cool soft K-Y jelly and a box of Trojans. The photographer, who knew such essential Thai phrases as: very beautiful! how much? thank you and I'm gonna knock you around! (topsa-lopsa-lei), preferred the extra-strength lubricated, while the journalist selected the non-lubricated with special receptacle end. The journalist never tried the photographer's condoms because he didn't even use his own as much as (to be honest) he should have; but the photographer, who tried both, decided that the journalist had really made the right decision from a standpoint of friction and hence sensation; so that is the real moral of this story, and those who don't want anything but morals need read no further. - Now that we've gotten good and evil out of the way, let's spirit ourselves down (shall we?) to the two rakes' room at the Hotel Metro, Bangkok, where the photographer always put on sandals before walking on the sodden blue carpet to avoid fungus. As for the journalist, he filtered the tap water (the photographer drank bottled water; they both got sick). There was a giant beetle on the dresser. The journalist asked the bellboy if beetles made good pets. - Yes, he grinned. It was his answer to every question. - Good thing for him he doesn't have a pussy, said the photographer, untying his black combat boots with a sigh, putting foot powder on; and the journalist stretched out on his squeaking bed, waiting for the first bedbug. The room reminded him of the snow-filled abandoned weather station where he'd once eked out a miserable couple of weeks at the North Magnetic Pole; everything had a more or less normal appearance, but was deadly dangerous, the danger here being not cold but disease; that was how he thought, at least, on that first sweaty super-cautious night when he still expected to use rubbers. The photographer had already bought a young lady from Soy Cowboy. In the morning she lay on the bed with parted purple-painted lips; she put her legs up restlessly.
Last night tuk-tuk fifty bhat, she said. * Come back Soy Cowboy, thirty bhat.
So you want some more money for the tuk-tuk ride, is that what you're trying to tell me? said the photographer in disgust. Man, I don't fucking believe it. You know she only let me do her once. And then she wanted a thousand bhat — that's why I had to get that five hundred from you.
The woman's teeth shone. She slapped her thigh, yawned, walked around staring with bright black eyes.