And this is what they want of him anyway, isn’t it, what he deserves? At the core he thinks nobody sees, at the root of him, where no air ever reaches, what he is is something to be ashamed of.

Even a full bottle of Sominex, it turns out, doesn’t kill, but it makes you thoroughly crazy. (Or maybe, in fact, the pills didn’t have that much to do with it. Sominex is mostly aspirin, and perhaps I was just ready to go a little crazy, maybe I didn’t need that much help.) I’m told my parents heard me moaning and babbling in the night, and could not wake me, and then tried to take me to the hospital, though I held on to the refrigerator door and called them every filthy name my chemically enhanced imagination could come up with. They thought I was having a bad trip, the sort of thing they’d read about, and the hospital strapped me down to a bed and put me in the care of a burly male nurse—an aide big enough to restrain a psychotic, hallucinating six-foot-tall kid—who wasn’t to leave me alone for a second, not even after I woke the next morning. Everything was glowing, strangely pretty, the walls and curtains and hospital bedding luminous, ultraviolet, as though I were seeing colors outside the normal range.

I couldn’t remember a thing after I lay down in my room, my hands crossed on my chest, ready to throw my body away. Nothing of my apparently Herculean thrashing and my wild tongue. My father waited thirty years to tell me I made a pass, under the influence, at the nurse. Or the nurse said I did; my father doesn’t question the claim, though to me it doesn’t seem likely; I wanted to die (or, more precisely, to disappear, which isn’t exactly the same thing) more than I wanted to have sex, which I had not yet been able even to fully imagine. But who knows how will and libido flare, self-control shut down by sleeping pills? Maybe I came close enough to the end of my life to know what I wanted most: another body, that consolation for the grief of having lived which resides in the skin of another. Maybe I didn’t want to die without touching a man first. In my own experience, it seems that coming close to death—our own or someone else’s—brings us just a hairsbreadth from desire.