I answered the phone and he said, “I’m going to do it, Sandini. I’m going to kill myself.”

And I said, “Who is this?”

He informed me that it was Ernest. Knowing it was Ernest, I responded, “No, don’t do that, Ernest.”

But Ernest was an obstinate man, there was no dissuading him. In the past I’d told him that it was silly to go sky-diving. Ernest went sky-diving. I told him he shouldn’t involve himself with a boxer’s ex-woman. Ernest courted, bed, and left that woman. I told him to be wary of the mercury levels in fish. Ernest’s breath always reeked of fish. In retrospect, I believe Ernest may have been suicidal longer than I had expected.

You procrastinate. You study for every exam the night before. You prepare for every meeting that day. But somehow you succeed. Wildly. You are respected and known. So much so that they tap you to head the winter Olympics coming to your hometown. They appoint you five years before the Games. Does anything really take five years to prepare for? A year in, it is still four whole years away. A whole presidential term for chrissakes. With three years to go, you consider lobbing in a call to a couple of construction guys, get some estimates on a bobsled course and somesuch, but then the ex-wife rings your cell with some pain in the ass problem. Three years is 36 months. That’s a buttload of months.

“Why, how deliciously morbid!” said heavyset dowager Belinda Buxingham as she peered through lorgnette eyeglasses at the stout black box in front of her: The Predict-O-Ma-Tron! A thrill of exquisite, almost sensuous pleasure ran through her plump body and caused a single, elegant peacock-feather sticking out from her ornate headband to tremble rapturously.

“And you say it’s never been wrong?” Belinda looked up through the aforementioned eyeglasses at Montgomery R. Whistlingcox-Falsborough, their host for this evening.

When he met her at the marina with a single long-stemmed rose and the poem he had written just for her, she said if he didn’t stop she would have to make him marry her. And when they took her daddy’s powerboat out into Florida Bay and he told her not to worry about sharks she said fine, she trusted him. But when they snorkeled and he said that the death of the coral was caused by her father and other men like her father, they argued.

It was April when it began.

It might have started earlier, but that was when I noticed the first sign. I was chatting to my mother, the phone in one hand and a pen in the other. It was only when I hung up that I looked down and saw, in thin black strokes, that I’d absently drawn a round little banjo.

And that’s how it started.