The man was now leaning over me. He felt my pulse with cold fingers, and asked: “How old are you?”

“Fifty.”

I want to go back to my apartment for a moment.

What is the answer to the question “Who am I while strangers are examining my naked body in my own room?” And among them is that girl, whom I know from somewhere. What fills me with unease, and muffled shame, is not the proximity of death, but the realization that my body, at this moment, is an object conveying nothing. My corporality is asexual.

What is more, the ease with which these strangers shift my body through space creates an impression of my own weightlessness. I am what is left of me, my mortal remains, as I lie in my bathrobe, under which I am naked.

All I know about the body I know as a poet, and that is pretty selective, limited to those characteristics in which the body displays its advantages and its strength, and not its weaknesses and shortcomings.

About the diseases of the body, I actually know nothing.

The mind draws logical conclusions on the basis of data accessible to it, and when the attack happened, while I was standing under the shower in the bathroom, I immediately connected the pain in my throat and metallic taste in my mouth with an article I had read in Vanity Fair. It was an account of an attack experienced by the author (Christopher Hitchens, who was later diagnosed with cancer), and in that description he says he felt pain in his chest and neck, and something like “the slow drying of cement” in his chest. (I’m quoting this from memory, but I think those were the words he used to describe his state, which was what I was now experiencing.) And when I came out of the shower and the pain in my chest got worse, I was convinced that I had cancer.

Later, the emergency services arrived, and the girl (a doctor in a blue uniform) leaned over me and said: “Sir, you are having a heart attack!”

And my first thought had been: No, dear. This can’t be my heart. My mind was so firmly convinced that my symptoms were like those in the description of Hitchens’s attack that I favored the account from his article over the official diagnosis. In any case, at one moment I thought: This is comical! I’m dying thinking about Christopher Hitchens!

It was comical: my reality, at such a crucial moment, was being explained by a columnist in Vanity Fair, who didn’t know I existed and so couldn’t know, either, that I was, perhaps, right now ceasing to exist.

“How old are you?”

“Fifty.”

This is a dialogue that has kept being repeated today.