THE SIXTY-THIRD PAGE

Within a day it was as if my young friend had never been. In the last week or so his presence had not been known in any room but the death chamber. I cleaned and straightened his room, shelving his books among my own. Stand up, friend, with me.

I spread his ashes on the hill near the house among the wildflowers--kinship, another goddamned metaphor.

It is difficult to know how many people were saved from hurt and destruction by my friend. While he lived with me I gave scant thought to my chronic vendetta against the publishers.

His death was charted as another injustice against me, but it could not be avenged. Further frustrated, my need for personal justice was intensified. As time passed, the publishers no doubt thought of me less and less. I thought of them more frequently, especially when I did my little reading reports for them. They acted as if nothing had happened. I suppose they were right.

At the time, it did not occur to me that what I really needed was “how-to” books for my instruction, rather than fiction, which had a tendency to soften the process with convenient coincidence and authorial whimsy.

The debate within raged. Corporal or capital?