"Warren Clark couldn’t have picked a better day to kill himself."

No one starts a novel like Robert Bloch:

"Warren Clark couldn't have picked a better day to kill himself."

[The Cunning by Robert Bloch (1979)]

....He'd been fifty-six when they moved into Eden, two years before. That wasn't so old. For some people, yes; the poor devils who lose their jobs and find they're unemployable, living in the twilight zone between forty-five and the coming of social security benefits, with nowhere to go. But he didn't need a job. Voluntary retirement, assured income, and only fifty-eight last month. Didn't look it, either, not when he took off his glasses.

     Appearances don't matter. Fit Napoleon with a pair of horn-rims and he'd look like a dentist.

     Warren frowned. At fifty-eight he'd lived longer than Napoleon. Longer than Lincoln, Shakespeare or Columbus. And what had he to show for it? He'd achieved nothing except his longevity. And the sea tortoise lives for two-hundred years.

     Soon the problems would begin. The little brown liver-spots on the backs of the hands. Out, damned spot. Cover it with something you get at the drugstore when you go there to buy the stuff that holds your dentures in place. Stay with it, let your sideburns grow so that you look like an elderly raccoon, a mandrill, an aging orangutan. The world is full of long-haired old men—grandfathers trying to look like grandmothers.

     Dye your hair, buy a toupee, have your face lifted. But you aren't fooling anyone. One sure way to know you're over the hill: when the insurance salesmen stop calling.

     When you're young, so few of your contemporaries die that death is only a rumor, at worst an accident occurring in the distance. But as you grow older, death grows too, until it's omnipresent, omnipotent. Death becomes a fact of life.

     And how do you fight it? Youth has so many allies—parents, brothers and sisters, relatives and friends, teachers, employers. But as time goes on, you lose them one by one until you face the big fight, the big crises, utterly alone.

     The perils of age. Prostatic pain gnawing your genitals. Glaucoma blotting out the light. Arthritis paralyzing the once skillful hands, hobbling the nimble feet; cardiac cripplings; the stroke that turns animal to vegetable, artificially irrigated. Senility contracts the world—to an apartment, then a single room, finally to a hospital bed.

     Of course, at fifty-eight, that was all in the future. But did it have to be? This slow crawl into oblivion? The weary, wracking journey to still one more country from which no traveler returns?

     Not when there was a better trip.

     Warren couldn't remember when he'd first begun to think about it. Last week, last month, last year? It seemed to have come in bits and pieces. First, the thought of going; then the reasons why he might like to go. Finally, planning how to travel. There were so many ways available, particularly to a first-class citizen.

     You could travel fast, with the sleek, streamlined speed of a high-powered bullet. You could travel slow, lying in the tub and watching the thin red threads of life unravel from your wrists. You could travel on a variety of fuels—alcohol was one, and narcotics offered a fashionable trip.

     Warren had found his way and now he was committed. No more planning. No fussing with passports, no tickets to buy, no itinerary to plan. His desk was clear, his will was made. And the only thing he had to do now was get through the next few hours.

     He wondered how he'd say goodbye to Sylvia when the time came. Or if he would even bother. How do you say goodbye to a mask?

     Warren turned away, glancing at the clock on the nightstand. Somewhere in the recesses behind the clock-face (it was a mask too, a mask of Time with the real processes controlling movement hidden away) a mechanical crisis arose. A sprocket caught, a lever was depressed.

     The alarm rang. And its sound caught another sprocket, depressed another lever, so that Warren Clark's body rose mechanically to begin the last day of his life.

Jay

5 April 2021