What a thing to find upon opening one’s computer: SF author Thomas M. Disch has committed suicide. I hardly know the man’s work– I only own his The Prisoner novelizations– but, at one point, we lived in the same building. Ages ago. Very occasionally, I’d see Disch in the elevator, but a more frequent sight was that of his mail laying about the lobby, and on those moments when I’d sneak to the upper floors with various accomplices, gathered in piles and piles before his apartment. I never spoke with Disch, because, well, what would we talk about, really?

But I always found it enormously comforting that a genre writer could be living at the top of Union Square– and I have thought of it often in the years that have passed. His presence in the building was one of the very things that alerted me to the potential of life in New York. How sad that the apartment itself appears to be one of the contributors to his suicide.