I demand their opinions on things. “Don’t you think we become other people every day?” I ask.

Or, “Don’t you think that who we are is determined by who we love?” I really want to know. “Isn’t love a form of impersonation?”

No one wants to answer.

Whenever I go for a really deep moment, I glance at the therapist’s face, watching their intensity grow with my near-breakthroughs and honesty, and it’s beautiful, almost moving. It’s like witnessing someone on the brink of orgasm. I feel like I’m doing good work, giving them the gift of doctoring, but I am getting tired. I wonder where all my games are getting me. If they are really games at all.

They say I am making great progress. They say I am on my way to recovery.

Mostly I sit in my room and stare out the window and long for an end. For release, for freedom. The final credits. My father was onto something, that’s for sure. I envy his access to a shotgun. Those were the good old days. I’ve been writing my own history, my weak attempt not to forget, to try to form a wormhole to the past, to get back to all that I’ve lost, but I fear the more I write about it the more I destroy it, the essence of it. I find my descriptions have not served my memory at all. If anything, my inadequacies as a storyteller are hastening the end, proving how far out of my hands my life has fallen. Writing it down has been like trying to capture the colors and flavors of a dream upon waking. The meaning and the body of it fade away.

I have a nice writing desk. My money has paid for a fancy room that mimics a hotel suite, except the mirror over the bureau is bendable, and the bed has tasteful, foldaway restraints. There’s plenty of space, at least. The windows in my room are large and double-paned, and I have a fabulous view. From my bed I can see water. I’ve been told that it was by my own request, before I was put into the coma, that I’d be shipped off to a hospital in California. Practical Krystal vetoed it, thinking it would be better if I stayed near her, the closest thing I had to family. And besides, California is burning, I’ve been told.

The place I’m in now is an hour’s drive away from my hometown. It faces a large lake that extends almost to the horizon, and each evening, as the sun sets, I sit and gaze out the window. The medicine kicks in. I doze. I can see Santa Monica beaches, the palm trees, the Pacific.

In the end, we all go west.

Yesterday, after lunch, a man came to see me. He was bald and thin and carried a large shopping bag, and when he said his name, he spoke so softly I didn’t hear him. When I asked him to repeat it, he said, “Ray.”