Let's see, Elwin calculated, at four flights up, that's at least 48 feet from here to the ground.

"Dammit," he muttered aloud, "that would take all of two seconds." Nowhere near enough time to reach the required velocity, he realized. He'd be lucky to break a leg.

Elwin leaned heavily against the metal railing, the horizontal support bracing him at each of his wide-spaced, protruding hipbones. His gaze froze on the ground far below the neatly stacked balconies, an unflowered expanse of thick dark grass surrounding the walkway that guided tenants from parking to building. The dew on the section below still glistened from the past night's dampness.

He leaned out a bit further, twisting his neck to look up at the balconies above him. Six more. He read that ten stories is really an ideal minimum, almost guaranteed to do the job, especially if you can manage to land on concrete. But Elwin wasn't exactly on speaking terms with anyone else in the building, not even a maintenance worker he might try to bribe into letting him up on the roof.

For a moment, squinting his eyes against the morning sun, he visualized himself knocking on the door of some tenant on the top floor. "Excuse me, I'm Elwin from the fourth floor," he would say, "I noticed something hanging from your balcony and I …" No, wouldn't work. "…Your balcony railing looks like it's cracked on the outside; I've come to take a look …" Maybe. But a maintenance uniform would surely be necessary. "… My helium balloon just got stuck on the underside edge of your balcony; mind if I go out and fetch it?" Yeah, that might work.

So then he would purposefully step out onto the neighbor's balcony, maybe even pretend to actually be trying to extricate something from the lower edge of the balcony, then climb over the railing on pretext of getting a stronger hold on it.

Before the neighbor could finish his or her "Be careful!" Elwin would "fall," maybe even waving good-bye as he disappeared from the view of his stunned neighbor.

Still, there was the soft grass to deal with. Even at ten stories up, Elwin considered, the damn grass might just cushion his impact enough to save his pathetic life.

Wasn't worth the jump, he decided, if it wouldn't do the job, guaranteed. If he was serious about this, he knew he surely did not want to just end up in some hospital, tubes crammed in every orifice of his body, with family he'd not seen in eight Christmases or so floating around the white-sheeted bed and, not realizing he could hear them, wondering aloud whatever possessed him to try and take his own life… could they have done something to prevent it… should they have returned more of his phone calls… might things have been different if he'd never left home… if he'd just gotten married… if if if if. No way, that sort of scene seemed utterly intolerable, quite a fate worse than death.

He had to be sure. And four flights up was no insurance.

He could pray for an earthquake, a seven-pointer. He lived near enough to a fault line to do adequate damage. But he had no clue how to pray and felt certain that whoever was "up there" wouldn't give him the time of day anyway, much less a little reverse-mercy on request. He certainly hadn't been what the neighborhood priest would call an upstanding guy. His Richter-scale ratings for women weren't exactly virtuous, he knew, though he swore by their usefulness, the comfort of measurement and comparison.

Re-entering his apartment, Elwin slammed the sliding door so hard that the glass instantly splintered in one corner. He reached up and ran a finger over the three-inch crack in the glass and wondered how much it might cost to replace a door like this. Surely his cheapskate landlady would expect him to foot the bill, but he supposed it would be his rightful responsibility to cover it.

***

Elwin took great pride in taking on his rightful responsibilities. Which is at least part of why he found himself outside at the edge of his balcony contemplating his own end on a cool May Monday morning.

It wasn't just the women; it was the work thing too. Elwin felt strongly that it was better to leave a job than to not do justice to it. Problem was, he had no clue what else to do–had not, as was his usual way, calculated the next step, another option, a Plan B. And ultimately, Elwin realized there was nothing else he really knew how to do.

He had worked for the government wildlands mapping office since he finished his drafting classes six years ago. No need to get some fancy degree, his pal Frank had assured him, when he could put his drafting skills to use immediately. So Elwin put any thought of finishing college out of his mind and went to work for Frank's father. Mr. Eglin took him under his wing like a son, tutoring him on the simple but complex beauty of map-making.

Mr. Eglin seemed to Elwin like something of the father Elwin never had. Well, to be fair, Elwin would admit, it's not that he never had a father. He did, of course, technically speaking. Stephen James Johnson–according to Elwin's mother–a carpenter and wayfarer, she said. He had picked up his wandering bag and took off again when Elwin was just two and hasn't been heard from since. But Charlotte, Elwin's mother, assured him that he didn't need a father, that one good mother was more than most kids got.

So Mr. Eglin taught Elwin to cultivate his natural love of boundaries and the shapes of a land's markings–the long flatlands, ragged hills, and tiny bodies of water that formed the intricate quilt of a map. Elwin worked hard with the pens and stencils and soon-familiar instruments for measuring acreage, and he became an artist.

Then came computers. Gone was the meticulous care of setting borders by hand, the tiresome but indulgent pleasure of cleaning the pens. Even the aggravation of perfectly stenciling the names of townships, lakes, roads, counties–all of it was an art sadly lost as far as Elwin was concerned. Computer cartography was an oxymoron to Elwin, who longed to keep a close artistic hold on map-making, longed to keep its masterpieces in hand-drawn poetic precision.

Mr. Eglin's boss thought Elwin too resistant to the changing times, too "anti-computer," as Mr. Eglin said he put it. It was not, as Elwin tried to explain, that he could not work with the computers; it was just that he felt spiritually opposed to them, averse to the notion of a machine doing his measuring for him.

Whatever the truth, his attitude didn't set well with management and, somewhat by mutual agreement, Elwin soon found himself out of a job that seemed to pass him by like the speeding geography seen from the window of a train.

So while Elwin began updating his resume on his IBM Selectric and perusing want ads, he had tried to focus on the more positive aspects, or aspect, of his life. Lorraine.

***

Like Elwin, Lorraine was an artist. She had worked in the cubicle next to Elwin's. Hardworking, bright, and young–twenty-four–she took to computers like a baby takes to its mother's nipple. In the fast couple days before Elwin left, he watched Lorraine's nimble fingers click and key and press and drag computer lines and letters into magnificent cartographic works of art.

Strangely, Elwin felt no jealousy for Lorraine's grasp of what he could not, even though it was the very reason he had walked away from the strange transmorphing of map-making. His farewell–much less ceremonious than his arrival–was just six days after he realized he was fully in love with Lorraine.

Elwin had been unable to summon the nerve to ask Lorraine out until he was on his way out the door with only the personal effects from his desk–the lavender pens, his ceramic frog pencil holder, his weights & measures poster. He was pleasantly stunned when she agreed to coffee after work.

That was six weeks ago. Shy and plain, Lorraine had seemed receptive to his corny humor and sympathetic to his sad reminiscences for his paper and pens and hand-held tools for transcribing the lines of land and water. He thought he had found his bliss at last. Now–this dreary sunny Monday morning–Elwin was trying to sort through the past week, find some logical order to the ambiguous events that had rushed past him like Alice's rabbit.

Lorraine. A Richter-scale 6.5. The last one he had rated only a 3, hardly worth mussing his hair for. But Lorraine wasn't the highest recorded. There was Suzie, at least a 7; she was vocal and appreciative. She even left thin red scratches down his pale back. And she kept her hands off his hair, actually seemed to prefer–when she wasn't running her nails over his skin–to keep her fingers wrapped tightly around the edge of the headboard. Only problem was, she didn't seem to want anything but sex from Elwin. And much as Elwin enjoyed sex, he had to admit he needed more. When he mentioned these feelings late in the night of the fourth time they ended an evening early to race off to bed, Suzie became quiet, stayed quiet, and after that night, stopped returning his calls.

But at least he'd had a 7. He had penned the number in red next to Suzie's name in the tiny blue notebook he kept in the back of his T-shirt drawer. The book, titled "Female Earthquake Ratings" in hand-printed black calligraphy on the cover, listed all of the eighteen women that Elwin had been with in his 41 years. He began keeping records after the second one–he was 19–a wild girl, with crooked teeth and dark eyes, who called herself Charlie. In stark contrast to the quiet, virginal Beth–his first, at 17-and-a-half–Charlie was no mere girl, but pure feral woman.

***

He had been–just before encountering Charlie–reading up on volcanoes and earthquakes, and found himself fascinated to the brink of obsession with the loud and hard reality of the earth–the breathing, hissing, burning, cracking, shifting, flowing hard and soft aliveness of it all.

He began comparing much of the action in his life to the impacts of earthquakes–not just the gratification factor, but how much damage could be done. His father running off he rated only a 4. His mother would probably have rated at least a 6, but she never completely left. His miserable shyness was a 7, but he swore to Pele the volcano goddess that he would get over that.

His ratings soon began to focus on just one type of experience: sex. Just after each entry–by first name only–Elwin had neatly printed the numeric rating in red. Most up to now were 4's and 5's, a couple 6's, and one 2.5–Anne; she winced through it all as if in pain–and then Suzie's 7, the highest. So far. Then there was Lorraine, a beautiful 6.5.

He'd read that a 6.5 earthquake could be felt throughout four large counties, that buildings would tremble, dishes would break, windows would crack, and anything small and not tacked down would roll or tumble and basically the whole world in the vicinity would seem pretty much shaken upside down.

That was Lorraine.

To Elwin, Lorraine was a wild angel. Her sweet, glowing face surrounded by thin but shining golden hair… she glimmered like a neon sign. Elwin fell hard. And soon they fell into bed. The first time with Lorraine was sweet, really too sweet, Elwin judged, for the 6.5 rating she eventually attained. Apparently overcome with a genuine shyness that enchanted Elwin, he excused her this, and their second time together proved worth the faith. Through it all, Lorraine stroked his too-soft pale skin–his back, his arms, his face–with her delicate fingertips, then slowed and hastened their rhythm so perfectly, like she was playing a musical instrument.

It wasn't until their third time together that Lorraine stretched her delicate arms up to sift her fingers through his hair.

Maybe, he thought in retrospect, he should have told her early on about his hair. It's not like he hadn't been through this before; he knew he should have known better. But a part of Elwin actually believed Lorraine knew somehow already, that she noticed and decided to love him anyway. He had known that he would someday meet a woman so lacking in shallow judgments that nothing like this would matter to her. He believed that was Lorraine.

***

That night–just last week–began so like every time before. Together in the center of his sofa, sipping red wine, talking about her latest maps, the slowness of his job seeking, the unpredictable weather. More wine, Lorraine's kisses, then the predictable move to the bedroom. There, he stared down into her open eyes and watched them gently close as he sank into her. He felt the light softness of her fingertips again sliding across the skin of his back, his bony hips, up his sides tracing the edges of his ribs, her fingers coming to pause at his neck, then fluttering lightly up the sides of his face and floating slowly over the angular shapes of his cheekbones, sliding smoothly into his hair. And then Lorraine's smoothly sliding fingers came to an abrupt halt as fingertips met the hard edge of something about halfway up each side of his head.

A shocked gasp escaped her lips and her hands–like her whole body–suddenly froze. After a few wordless seconds that seemed like an eternity to Elwin, Lorraine gently withdrew her fingers from Elwin's hair and, in one slow, controlled movement, placed her hands lightly but purposefully on Elwin's back.

He waited for her to speak. He could have sworn she knew about his hair, could tell he wore a piece, but here she was so obviously surprised as her unknowing fingers ran into the immovable edge of it.

"You okay?" he finally asked. "Sure," she said, smiling her sweet Lorraine smile.

And he had to admit to himself that it wasn't the first time a woman's final moans seemed slightly less than genuine. Lorraine suddenly seemed so reserved, almost afraid. Just before he rolled off her, it occurred to him that he might need to change the Richter rating for Lorraine now; things just weren't the same now.

He began to wrap his arms around her cool slender body when she rolled away and sat up. With her back to him, she said, "I need to go. Early morning."

"Well," Elwin said, trying to think of the right words to ask if it was his hair–the piece–to ask why…. "I'll call you tomorrow."

"Actually, I'm going to be pretty busy over the next week or so," she said as she sank to the floor patting her hands on the carpet in search of her panties and bra and socks and…. "I'll call you."

"Here, I'll get the light," Elwin said as he leaned toward the bedside lamp on her side. "No!" Her hand shot up, colliding with his elbow and quickly withdrawing. "I found everything. Really, I'm fine."

As Elwin watched the shadow of her form in the darkened bedroom, he thought of firemen and how Lorraine dressed faster than anyone he thought would who had just been told they had to race to a burning building.

She was out the door before he could find his Jockeys.

Elwin called her an hour later, waiting an appropriate amount of time for her to drive home, even brush her teeth and climb into a nightgown and bed. He hung up on her answering machine, tried back in ten minutes, hung up again.

Thirty minutes later, he spoke to her machine: "Lorraine, it's Elwin. You left so quickly. I just wanted to know if anything's wrong. Call me. Please."

He fell asleep waiting for a call that did not come that night. He tried her office first thing the next morning, then an hour later, then that afternoon. Always, the message was the same: Lorraine's in a meeting.

***

By yesterday, Elwin's unanswered calls totaled 14. He kept count, and with each unanswered call, he sank further into the same foreboding that had started when she began to dress that last time in his bedroom. Lorraine was his angel, Elwin believed; now what was he to think? That she was no different from the other shallow women who refused to take him seriously just because of his hair?

He remembered Brenda–a brightly dressed girl he met during an office happy hour at Peabody's–who actually laughed when he asked her out. Laughed, as she reached up and, with thumb and middle finger, flicked the front of his hair where Elwin had combed it neatly forward and around the hard front edge. Laughed… and just walked away.

Then Stacy–like so many–made it to his bed before noticing that his hair was not his own. She was working at a 5.5 rating, Elwin remembered, nicely enthusiastic… except, halfway into things, when her fingers wandered onto the edge of his piece as Lorraine's had too recently, only more aggressively. And more aggressively startled.

"What the hell is that?" Stacy had shouted, as she pulled her fingers back from his head, shaking her hands as if someone had just stuck them inside a cadaver.

"It's just my hairpiece," Elwin said.

"My god, I had no idea."

"Really? I guess that's good then, right?"

"My god," she said again, "Jeez, I just never knew anyone with one of those. I don't understand it. What's wrong with your own head?"

"Well, would you want to be seen without hair on your head?"

"Of course not. But women don't go bald. It's okay for men."

"No it's not," Elwin said. "Hair's important to men too."

But it was too late. Stacy had already begun to dress.

"Why are you leaving?" he asked her.

"I can't be with someone who has fake hair!" She said this with an indignity that revealed so much more than Elwin could bear to hear.

Then came Lorraine, and he grew hopeful again …for awhile.

The heaviness that overtook Elwin after each breakup, or chain of unreturned calls, seemed to amass this past week in one great black ball of despair. His head pounded, his eyes burned, he stopped caring about calling Lorraine.

***

All of this is what brought him to the edge of his balcony this Monday morning contemplating the velocity of a 165-pound body.

Elwin absentmindedly ran his fingers around the edge of the tape strip just under the hairpiece, the thin piece of adhesive that held the hair tight to his head.

I should write a note, Elwin thought. He decided he wanted no doubt left as to whether his death is determined to be accidental or self-inflicted. A suicide note. To all the superficial females who have walked out on him. He might even list all their ratings, let them know where they stood with that and see that it didn't matter. Their shallow ways overshadowed all of that.

Then Elwin realized he should probably figure out the method first, have a plan. He did not want to write a note just to have it around for several days while he figured his way out. What if he got hit by a bus, something not even his own doing? It disturbed Elwin's sense of order to have such a note written too long before it was needed.

He could overdose on Tylenol, he knew. He had read that Tylenol was pretty reliable–something to do with the way it coats the stomach–although it might take a week or so in a coma before death finally comes, and if he happened to survive it, the liver damage could be pretty miserable.

He thought of stealing nitrous oxide from his dentist, but he wasn't sure how to work the tanks and tubes once he managed to get them home, and a perfect fatal dosage is anyone's guess. Just not enough information on this one.

Too bad he had no prescriptions except for his asthma, no painkillers or tranquilizers. Those surely would do him in nicely, especially with a bottle of gin.

He did not own a gun and realized he didn't know the first thing about acquiring one. The idea of drowning was deplorable to him, too likely to cause him to panic and back out at the last minute.

He could jump in front of a subway train, but that required much too much good timing and grace.

He knew of no bridge nearby that was quite high enough.

He picked up a notepad, pondering the last words he might use once he arrived at a final plan. He scribbled a couple notes and then, pacing his apartment, paused at the bathroom door, his reflection on the mirrored cabinet catching his attention. The bathroom ceiling was pretty high and he remembered the metal hook attached in the middle of the plastered ceiling, placed there, he guessed, by the previous tenant who used it to string a line for hanging drying laundry. Elwin eyed the hook, wondering if it, and the ceiling, were strong enough to resist caving in with his weight. And then he didn't feel sure he'd have the nerve to go in such a dramatically participatory and painful manner.

As he pondered this, he caught his half-profiled reflection in the mirror and noticed that his hair needed re-taping.

***

Elwin set his notepad down on the edge of the sink and began working the fresh strips into just the right discreet angles and adjusted the piece neatly in place again. Suddenly he was hungry. His watch told him it was a quarter to noon, and he had not even eaten breakfast.

Daylight was the key, perhaps. At least that's what Elwin pondered as he slipped on a pair of pressed green slacks and a clean polo shirt. Yellow. The color always seemed to lift his spirits.

His hair looked good. He would try lunch. Peabody's was always busy and if he met someone, afterward he would suggest a walk. In broad daylight, any woman would know what she was getting into, certainly.

Elwin picked up the pad of paper on which he had begun to scribble out the beginnings of his suicide note. It was really poorly written, he decided. He ripped off the sheet of paper, tore it into thin strips and tossed them into the wastebasket in the corner of the bathroom. He put the pad of paper back squarely on the corner of his desk after making a note on the fresh top sheet to call a glass repair shop. He quickly polished his shoes, slipped them on, patted his hair down in front, and left for lunch, double-checking both door locks on his way out.

As he waited for the elevator, Elwin thought maybe tomorrow he would find a new job; maybe today he'd find another 6.5.