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cheapest, most durable clothes I could find: work boots, blue jeans, flannel shirts, and a secondhand leather jacket from an Army surplus store. My friends were startled by this transformation, but I said nothing about it, since what they thought was finally the least of my concerns. The same with the telephone. I did not have it disconnected in orderto isolate myself from the world, but simply because it was an expense I could no longer afford. When Zimmer harangued me about it one day in front of the library, grumbling about how difficult it had become to reach me, I dodged the question of my money problems by sailing into a long song and dance about wires, voices, and the death of human contact. “An electrically transmitted voice is not a real voice,” I said. “We’ve all grown used to these simulacra of ourselves, but when you stop and think about it, the telephone is an instrument of distortion and fantasy. It’s communication between ghosts, the verbal secretions of minds without bodies. I want to be able to see the person I’m talking to. If I can’t, I’d rather not talk at all.” Such performances were becoming more and more typical of me—the excuses, the double-talk, the odd theories I propounded in response to perfectly reasonable questions. Because I did not want anyone to know how hard up I was, I saw no choice but to lie my way out of these scrapes. The worse off I was, the more bizarre and contorted my inventions became. Why I had stopped smoking, why I had stopped drinking, why I had stopped eating in restaurants—I was never at a loss to devise some preposterously rational explanation. I wound up sounding like an anarchist hermit, a latter-day crank, a Luddite. But my friends were amused, and in that way I managed to protect my secret. Pride no doubt played a role in these shenanigans, but the crucial thing was that I didn’t want anyone to interfere with the course I had set for myself. Talking about it would only have led to pity, perhaps even to offers of help, and that would have botched the whole business. Instead, I walled myself up in the delirium of my project, clowned at every possible opportunity, and waited for time to run out.
    The last year was the hardest. I stopped paying my electricity bills in November, and by January a man from Con Edison had come to disconnect the meter. For several weeks after that, I experimented with a variety of candles, investigating each brand for its cheapness, luminosity, and long-lastingness. To my surprise, Jewish memorial candles turned out to be the best bargain. I foundthe flickering lights and shadows extremely beautiful, and now that the refrigerator had been silenced (with its fitful, unexpected shudderings), I felt that I was probably better off without electricity anyway. Whatever else might have been said about me, I was resilient. I sought out the hidden advantages that each deprivation produced, and once I learned how to live without a given thing, I dismissed it from my mind for good. I knew that the process could not go on forever, that eventually there would be things that could not be dismissed, but for the time being I marveled at how little I regretted the things that were gone. Slowly but surely, I discovered that I was capable of going very far, much farther than I would have thought possible.
    After I paid the tuition for my final semester, I was down to less than six hundred dollars. A dozen boxes remained, as well as the autograph collection and the clarinet. To keep myself company, I would sometimes put the instrument together and blow into it, filling the apartment with weird ejaculations of sound, a hurly-burly of squeaks and moans, of laughter and plaintive snarls. In March, I sold the autographs to a collector named Milo Flax, an odd little man with a nimbus of curly blond hair who advertised in the back pages of
The Sporting News.
When Flax saw the array of Cub signatures in the box, he was awe-struck. Studying the papers