Susie and a thin man found me in the park. I was walking slowly round the pond, making the bones in my nose tickle by hooting. Susie said my mother had tipped her off, after hearing my voice while throwing stones at the ducks. I had been there a day and a half. "It's because of my job," I explained, "batch testing New Age CD's." "But Hal said he didn't hire you in the end," she said. "That would explain why he hasn't paid me." The thin man with Susie coughed up a small laugh, and spat it onto the ground. "You'd better come to dinner on Saturday," Susie said. "Clive will be there too." She squeezed the man's arm. "Clive is the suicide journalist." He was ghostly pale, with black hair and a sad wit in his eyes. I'd say he looked like John Cusack, if I could remember who the hell John Cusack was. As he gazed moodily at the pond, Susie explained that Clive had announced in his weekly column that he had six months to live. On April the fifteenth, he would be committing suicide, and until then he would write about how it felt to be staring death in the face. Clive took aout a notebook and muttered something about the blackness of a moorhen. "Do you know what month it is now?" she asked. I thought it might be Martober. Susie dabbed a damp eye, and said that the suicide column was the saddest, funniest, most tragic and uplifting thing she'd ever read. "He has just twelve weeks to go." I looked across the pond and started honking again.