Boulos awoke that morning and gret the sun, and the face of the sun smiled as he stared into it and Boulos smiled back. Here was a man who ran all the deliveries for a thriving bakery in Ridgewood, Queens. He had begun there, some months earlier, as a delivery boy, but now managed and instructed others in the delivery of bread, cakes, doughnuts and all of the other things the bakery made, of which Boulos loved nearly all, and he loved even better the smell of the place.

On another day, in the afternoon, he had taken something, without paying much heed to what it was, from a tray of staling breakfast muffins, and this turned out to be a banana nut muffin. He didn't much enjoy it, nor did he enjoy banana-flavored things in general—though he loved fried bananas and plantains—but the coffee was delicious. On occasion, when there was nothing better to do, he would sweep up in the bakery, add new spools of baker's twine to the machine which strung up the boxes, or, once more, make deliveries.

It was on that morning, five months after he had begun working at the bakery, that Boulos was asked to deliver a box of cannoli to an apartment on nearby Stanhope Street, where it met with St. Nicholas Avenue.

As he padded along leisurely through fresh fallen snow, Boulos smiled to remember that these motions and gestures of delivering boxes of bakery goods were once the substance of his professional life, and by dint of that, a great part of his waking reality, so that it was quaint now to take up the old hat again and perform the role of a mere delivery boy.

For Boulos knew that, upon arrival at the apartment on Stanhope to deliver a box of cannoli to who would be a comely young professional woman, that he would be regarded by her in a certain way: that was, as a mere delivery boy. Not merely something less than he actually was—that being, a manager of deliveries—but something less than a man: a boy. And a delivery boy at that. So, something less than a boy, something subhuman. She would look at him, he knew, with slight eyes of shame at the guilt of the pleasure she would receive from this simple convenience of delivered pastries. And the guilt in knowing that the two dollar tip she would hand him,—something she must have earned in a few minutes or seconds of leisurely professional labor, and which was nothing to her—that this tip was, indeed, something to him, and very substantial: two dollars towards a badly needed cup of soup? an important pair of shoes?

And she would feel further guilt at her own generally defined superior inheritance of breeding, which guilt might express itself in her body language in some way. Surely she could have nothing about which to speak intelligently with Boulos, he being a delivery boy. Their eyes would meet: his, uncomprehending; her own, betraying the surfeit of strings of data crowding her consciousness, endless spools of which, which would ever mean nothing to one such as he. Here she would stand, in the presence of an inferior. And, perhaps inveigled by mutual embarrassment into some manner of small talk, in which she would surely avail herself poorly. Which ordeal would be, undoubtedly, almost terrifying for a moment. For if she were charged to relay to Boulos, honestly and coherently, her thought patterns of late, the misfortunes and dilemmas she presently faced, how could she ever bring one such as he was to comprehend them?

A delivery boy was something less than a man, yes, and his father had told Boulos to “Be a man;” on many occasions he had said this. Boulos thought, at the time, and subsequently, “What might I be other than a man if I am a man? Might I be a child, though I am no longer a child? Or a woman, though I am a man?”

And, “Be a good man,” his father would say. “And be a man of your word.”

There were “good children,” “good women,” yes, but there were, for Boulous' father, no “children of their words,” nor “women of their words,” and perhaps this was what it meant to be a man: to keep one's word. Boulos always remembered that he'd had this thought and so he tried to do this.

As he approached the landing, and prepared to mount the two flights of steps that would bring him to the apartment, he thought, what a laugh it might be to affect, before the professional woman he was about to face, a pronounced non-fluency in the English language, despite its being his native tongue. It might be amusing to see her struggle to communicate with him.

But then he must ensure that some degree of communication would, in their transaction, become absolutely necessary, so he would intentionally complicate the ordinarily very simple procedure of handing over the box and bill, accepting payment and a tip. He would compel her to attempt communication with a man who spoke no English, and would delight in watching her squirm: the pointing, the gesturing, frustration, guesses at what language he might possess, perhaps even attempts to speak a little bit of it. But he would give no clue as to the language his “character” spoke. After all, he spoke no other language and could not convincingly pretend to.

When she opened the door it occurred to Boulos that this woman was far more comely than he had anticipated, and for a moment a sensibility of lust sought to undermine his most clever scheme in months. It was something uncomfortably hot and it rushed through him, curdling his blood slightly, turning his arms and legs gooseflesh, and finally setting his heart pulsing rapidly through his gender. He was sure that his body temperature clumb an entire degree.

“Good morning,” she said with a smile, creating and maintaining a strong eye contact, which now sent waves of needing desire through every atom of him.

Boulos nodded, with a smile as well, and held up the box of cannoli with an idiotic expressin, with flattened palms supine, suspending the box in the air, smiling into her comely face, poised as though to present her with some mysterious treasure, nodding and smiling, positively incapable of uttering a single sword of English. But he had missed that the bill sat conveniently atop the box, stuck under a bit of twine, so she grasped for it and his scheme was complicated.

To Boulos' relief, “I don't think I have enough cash,” she said, rifling through her attractive-woman's wallet, which ran over with new receipts. Here was a person who didn't ever carry much cash on her, “Like a royal,” he thought.

“Just a moment,” she said, “I'll have to go through my change jar,” and made as though to reenter her apartment. At that moment they heard a squelch of working-class voices from the apartment above: a heavy metal door swung open brusquely with a dull thud, a body shoved into the landing:

“Get out of my house, you creep!” an unseen woman cried out, her voice shrill, astringent. The creep spoke, imprecisely, in a drink-and-druggy fog, of “His bags.”

In a moment, three large black garbage bags, overflowing with dirty looking flannels and variously colored pairs of Dickies, were tossed one by one down the stairs into the landing where Boulos and his customer stood and stared at the void from which these invisible unpleasant sounds and vibrations emanated.

When one of the bags almost hit Boulos in the head, “Why don't you come in,” the woman said to him. He nodded stupidly and followed her over the threshold and stood in discomfort by the door. She disappeared into a bedroom. Boulos immediately removed his penis meaning to work one out quick before she reemerged, his eyes combing the decorations of the apartment: old infinitely painted over wainscot paneling, the bits of art she had hung at places,—like the portrait of a Siamese cat who knew everything; all of her attractive woman's things in disarray throughout the living room, strewing the coffee table, couch, end tables, kitchen counter and kitchen table. Boulos ejaculated and placed his wet hand under his shirt to wipe his semen off on his hairy belly. He quickly became decent again. If she were an upstart of gentrification, then one she had been quite some time: everything seemed lived-in; whoever lived here was one settled-in.

She returned with nine quarters for Boulos. She tossed the currency into his pants pocket and kissed and bit his lower lip, wrapping her arms around his head; they were strangely long, supple animals. It was all he could do to grab her by the waist with both arms and draw her nearer him. A man, he knew, would not analyze the situation, but would merely take advantage. So he would not think, he would only follow the impulse of pleasure-seeking to its obvious resolution.

She pushed him to the couch and he allowed her to do this. She lifted up his shirt and felt the cold ejaculate on his stomach. She stopped, then looked up at him, wincing. “You're a... filthy pervert. Do you know that?”

Now, for his humiliation and excitement, he really could not muster even a bit of English.

“Do you always masturbate in strangers' homes or just some of the time?” she said, and before he could stop her, “I'll bet you like this as well,” she said, and raised her wet hand and smeared his own semen across his beard and lips. She cast a horrified face at what she'd done, but then immediately sucked in her lips and blew a raspberry and burst out laughing, sweetly melodiously. Boulos spit on the floor and pawed at his face and beard, he got up from the couch and ran to the kitchen sink where he bent forward and retched slightly as he ran the water and began to scrub his face and tongue. He saw, in the window box, a number of books, many of which he'd read, most he had at least heard of, but one which he had neither read nor heard of.

He turned back to watch her remove her shirt and bra. She reclined on the couch and began to pick at her toenails. “Her breasts were goregeous,” he thought, and he saw, and was strongly compelled to kiss, her big yummy belly. He returned to her, but she knocked him to his knees, for she was quite strong. She joined him on the floor and he became naked soon after, and when he penetrated her for the first time, he recalled the very first time he had ever done, and realized that, as he had only, in thirty-four years of life, slept with twenty-five—now twenty-six—women, that he had only had that first-time experience just twenty-six times.

And that this was a sad thing because, with most of those women, the most exciting aspect of sexual intercourse had been the moment at which he first... well, he enjoyed everything that followed. But nothing could approach, in physical and psychic delight, the pleasure of commencing the act of love with someone new for the first time.

###

He had wanted so badly to ask her if he could see her again, but recalled that, even had she said yes, there were no “women of their words,” in neither his nor his father's worlds. Boulos was walking back to the bakery when a standing commercial vehicle blew a cloud of exhaust into his face. This must have happened a few times per day, but in that moment he had the following revelation: that if he inhaled enough car exhaust in a short enough period of time, he would die, and that what he had experienced in that moment had been a small moment, part of a system of moments or one larger moment, that would resolve in his death. And if what he experienced was part of a sequence of events leading to death, then he had experienced a moment leading up to death: a moment of dying.

It wasn't that he had escaped the danger of death, he had only escaped death. He had not escaped dying.

And how could he be said to have died if he died in that way? Would it be a painful death, and terrifying? Or would it be as gentle and unobtrusive as the sort of thing which must happen a few times per day in a city dense with standing commercial vehicles? Would it be an ordeal unto death, or a succession of highly palatable dying-moments.

This must have explained this popularity of suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning, as well as suicide by drug overdose: the notion of allowing one's body to become consumed by toxins diminishing the functional capacity of each organ, evenly and indiscriminately in equal proportion, hence, diminishing that of every sense, indiscriminately and in equal proportion—mindfulness of the approach of death diminishing with the diminution of the life of the mind. A physical sensation of its approach diminishing with that of the body.

So that was one way of ending one's life, embodied in two techniques: one involving a car, to be found in any man's garage, and another involving a narcotic, of some kind, to be procured somewhere else.

Then there was hanging. In its heyday as a ubiquitous method of capital punishment, something to be dreaded deeply for the excruciating pain the hanged man would endure in the minutes unto death. The warder would often take pity on the condemned, or accept a bribe, to outfit him with a cyanide capsule that he might secret it in his mouth, and bite into it and die quickly at the moment at which he was dropped.—Maybe women took the capsules as well, he wasn't sure, but they certainly also, some of them, had garages, especially those with cars in them.

The shorter the drop, apparently, the more excruciating the pain. How could the average man, with little more than a footstool in his kitchen, a belt in his dresser, a car in his garage, a supply of narcotics in his bathroom cabinet, obtained from a pharmacy,—how, ensure a long, effective drop, hence, a shorter, less excruciating death? And if he could not, then how explain the popularity of hanging as a means of self-destruction?

Perhaps it was this: that, the sequence bringing about a hanging death, once commenced, was irreversible.

There is nothing, and then there is the choice to drop oneself. Then there is pain, which is great, and there may follow even greater and more painful rumination. But there is no reversal, and this continues for a while, and then there is death.

Boulos was taught by his father that suicide was the act of a totally insane person. That no individual possessed by reason could rationally decide to end his life, knowing, as he would, that life is mostly not that bad. And he didn't believe, nor was he taught, that such an attitude as life being “mostly not that bad” was unduly optimistic, nor even particularly optimistic. Life might very well have been largely comprised of bad, but most of it was not that bad.

Boulos was taught that everyone who commits suicide must invariably regret his decision at the moment at which it is irremediably made: a decision to which insanity brought him. But if insanity was the absence of reason, how might an insane man or insane woman reason that the only means of effectively committing oneself to an easily regretted decision was to drop oneself and commence in fractions of a second an irreversible sequence ending in full commitment to that decision?

So then, insanity, the absence of reason, may still allow for certain kinds of reasoning, but not others? It seemed not to follow. Perhaps then insanity was a too easy explanation for even something as insane as a suicide.

At the end of the film, all of the people Mr. Smith had seen, events he experienced and physical sensations felt, were all in his mind. Not guilty, by reason of insanity. In his insanity my client reasoned that, what was unreasonable was, in fact, reasonable. Therefore, your honor, my client is not guilty for the reason that, he reasoned, albeit while in insanity. He reasoned that stabbing his wife would end her life, but he reasoned in insanity, and insanity is the reason, so he did not reason. We have diagnosed the patient with acute symptoms. No organ in particular has been poisoned, yet still, each is poisoning the other, indiscriminately. Idiopathic insanity: insanity for which there is no cause and there are only effects. Imagine an effect without a cause, imagine a reason without reason. The patient lacks reason, but is reasonable. The patient's actions cannot be explained, and that is our explanation of them.

Insanity is nothing, and Boulos was not insane.

He might be at times overwhelmed by the infinite mnemonic associations of every word or sound he heard, moods and tones of every color he saw, every scent he scented, taste he tasted; distracted from reason by grotesque distortions of meaningless stimuli. But he could not be insane. If insanity could allow for infinite lapses of reason, then he could not be insane because he could not conceive of the infinite.

But he must constantly test his faculties, must prove to himself that he was not, could not be, insane, for that insanity was the standard bearer of reason: that, against which, reason was continually tested. If something was not impossible, then it was possible; if not insane, then sane. If others saw it, he was permitted to see it.

Boulos was not taught to believe, but did believe, that all men and all women all think alike. Because if most of the population, if at least one more than fifty percent had approximately the same brain, then why not the same capacity for abstract thought? The same potential to make meaning out of what was experienced universally? And so then, why not the same kinds of thoughts pertaining to what is experienced. Hence, why not the same thoughts.