Dying wasn’t so bad until I woke up and saw the lights. They bored into my eyes and beat up my brain and my skull was throbbing. I wondered if heaven was bright like this, but then I thought because of what I’d done I was down in the other place where the fires were white-hot. The air came through my nostrils and it smelled like rubbing alcohol and blankets. I saw a pink ball in the corner that unfolded into fingers. They moved and I was moving them, so they were mine and I hadn’t died. I felt like crying but I was too tired. My eyes closed and I could see my heart beating against them on the inside and then I was gone. 

I woke up again and they brought me food and adjusted my pillows. A doctor came in later and spoke but her mouth was a butterfly and it flew away. 

Are you listening, she said. I just looked at her and she sighed and told me that I was lucky the patrol found me. She wished me goodnight and left. The nurse turned on the TV and

The TV is on and he is eating ice cream in bed. He is laughing because they are baking a cake on the TV but it has crumbled and they have three minutes to make another one. I am washing my hands outside the bathroom and I look at him in the mirror. Our eyes meet and he is smiling. I look down at my hands. 

“Well?” I ask him after a moment. 

His knees are drawn up beneath the blankets, two triangular outlines that look like white mountains. There is a map spread between them, marked with black circles and torn in one corner. He glances at it and shrugs. 

“I don’t know,” he says. 

I walk over to the bed and sit on the other side of it. I look over his shoulder at the map. A patchwork of our scribbles covers the city.  

“Okay,” I say. “So where do we go next?”

His eyes are fixed on the TV again and he doesn’t respond. The muscles of his mouth are pinched into the imitation of a grin. 

“Where do we go next?”

He digs his spoon into the ice cream and it curls into a spiral. He lifts it up and leans forward, lips reaching toward the spoon like a bursting flower. The ball of ice cream goes tumbling onto the bed, and he yells. Then he is laughing again, shoulders rising and falling as if pulled by invisible strings. He falls across my lap and his hand encircles my waist. 

“You’re right,” he says after a while. “It couldn’t last long.” 

“So where next?”

I feel him sigh beneath me. “We can’t keep moving forever.” 

I shift my weight on the bed. It creaks. “There’s money left,” I say. “If we’re careful about how we can spend it we can keep going for a while.”

“I’m too tired.” 

“We’ll wait until the morning, then. Get some rest and we can decide later.” 

“No.” His face goes limp and his eyes are shining. He points to the nightstand. “It’s time,” he says. 

The words have been ripped from my stomach so I can’t say anything. The TV is still going and the cooks are yelling at each other. One of them is scooping up clumps of cake scattered across the table and putting them on a plate. 

“We can stay here for a while,” I hear myself saying. My mouth is moving and the words come out but my tongue is numb. 

His hand leaves the bed and touches mine. It is soft and cold. 

“You promised you wouldn’t argue,” he says. “You promised you’d let me decide.” I see him open the drawer of the nightstand where the pills are. He takes the controller and pushes a button and the noise from the TV stops. 

My eyes are dry but my chest is heaving so that it feels like my lungs will collapse

Your lung collapsed, you broke your back, and you shattered your leg, the nurse said when I asked. You were lucky. You got a second chance. 

By then the pain was coming back and I grimaced because I didn’t feel very lucky. 

How much longer will I be here, I asked. 

You should pay attention to the doctor, he said. Not long, though. You’ll be home in a few days. 

Do you think I’m crazy, I said. 

He replaced the bag above me. No, he said. Just sick. 

Do you get a lot of people like me in here, I asked. 

The nurse shrugged. Sometimes. 

Do you think it’s worth saving people who try to kill themselves, I said. 

He didn’t respond. I could tell I’d made him angry. 

Sorry, I said. 

It’s fine, he replied. It’s just, a friend of mine. Has cancer. He’d do anything for another year on earth. You should be grateful. 

I’m sorry, I repeated. I almost told him that a friend of mine had cancer too, but I didn’t. 

It’s fine, he said again. He grabbed a bottle from his cart and shook a pill into his hand

The pills are colorful against the sheets. I wonder if the reds and blues and yellows are supposed to be one final plea for us to stay, and I wonder if that’s ever worked. 

He is slouched back on the pillows, one hand covering his eyes. His mouth is contorted upward because of the fire in his abdomen. I am disturbed by the dark furrows in his cheeks and the deep caverns of his eye sockets. A year ago, I wouldn’t have recognized who he is now. 

I was the first person he told after he found out. He called me, and I remember the silence that fell like a curtain between our two voices. The only thing I could think to ask was when the treatment would start. He told me it wasn’t ever going to start. There wasn’t money, and it was too advanced and it wouldn’t be worth it anyway. His words were calm and clear, as if he was on trial defending himself. I don’t remember the rest of our conversation, but I remember sitting on the kitchen floor for an hour after we hung up, staring at the wall while my brain floated outside of my body. 

We made our plan a week later. He had about two months left, so we would hit the road and drive until the disease caught up with him. He wanted the end to come on his own terms, before he had been reduced to an agonized shadow of himself. When I told him that I wanted to join him when the time came, he gave me a stern look and told me that I couldn’t. My world shouldn’t end with his. But I knew it would anyway, and he stopped fighting me after a while. 

The two months were up half a year ago, but if I squint I can pretend he’s been misdiagnosed. His laugh is still the same, and the way his rubs his nose when he’s angry. I had noticed when the pills first started to disappear, but I hadn’t said anything. If they kept the pain at bay a while longer, maybe he would change his mind.  

His water bottle is full and I unscrew it for him. He holds the colors in his palm. I want to knock them to the floor but I can’t betray him now. My throat is stuck. He winks at me. Maybe he knows. 

“Cheers,” he says, and the end begins. 

Are you awake, I heard someone say. My eyes were still closed but I nodded. 

We’re going to discharge you tomorrow, the voice continued. It was the doctor. 

I opened my eyes. Okay, I said.

How are you feeling, she asked. 

I tried to shrug. Okay. 

You’ll have to be careful, she said. You’re still healing. You’ve got to take care of yourself. And you have to finish your physical therapy. 

She told me a series of long names that had too many x’s in them. Pills. She started telling me what I couldn’t do when I got out, until it sounded like I would have to keep lying in bed until I started to decompose. I shifted my legs and felt a heavy weight in my bladder. I interrupted her and she went and got the nurse. He came in and slid me out of bed. I winced when my feet touched the floor, and each vertebra protested. I pictured the bones ripping through the flesh of my back like some caged red animal. I leaned on the nurse, and then we were in the bathroom

I go into the bathroom and gather up my things in a bag. There is a pile of clothes by the side of my bed and I shove those in too. I check him once more before I leave. His eyes are closed. I put my fingers on his neck but it is still.

The hotel is quiet, as if the world is taking a moment of silence for him. The worker behind the desk is staring at his computer screen. He doesn’t see me pass. I want to jump over the counter and knock over his chair and tell him to go out and get drunk and sing karaoke and stand outside and howl at the moon and cry and call his family to say he loves them. But I don’t. 

There weren’t enough pills for both of us. I know I could get more, but I can’t stand the thought of going into a store and seeing strange faces drowning under fluorescent lights. I walk for a while instead. The night is cold and the sky is a whirlpool of lost dreams. I can hear the river in the distance, slithering through the city like a pulse. I have an idea, and I change course. 

There is no one else on the pier when I arrive. The water is growling below, as if offering a challenge. It is obsidian-black, blacker than midnight. On the other bank, there are lights on in offices and apartment buildings and nightclubs and all-night convenience stores. I feel the railing slip into my hand. It is cool and metallic. Like a gun, though I’ve never held a gun before. And then I wish I had, because there’s so much I haven’t done and time has abandoned me to eternity. 

I remember reading that water is like concrete if you fall from high enough, and I wonder if the pier is too close. But I climb up anyway. I stand there for a moment, suspended at the fulcrum of the universe. Then the lights are wrapped around my shoulders like I’m a Christmas tree, and the air is lacerating my face. I remember that he was alive this morning. And the lights go out and get brighter and I wake up in a hospital bed

And I wake up and I’m not in a hospital bed anymore. It’s 3:44 in the morning and there is a pair of crutches in the corner. They let me out a week ago, but I stayed in the city because there is no home to return to anymore. I’m at a different hotel this time. I worried that if I went back I’d have to answer some questions. 

In the dream he had been curled and shivering on the top of a tower. There were no walls, no railings to protect him from the edge. All I could see below were clouds. The wind was raging and he was scrabbling for a grip on the stone floor beneath him. He turned up toward the sky, where I was, and there were dead leaves where his eyes should have been. 

I try to dislodge the image from my head, but I am choked by the shadows around me and a vast impression of emptiness. I know I won’t be able to fall asleep again, so I heave myself up. The brace creaks and I think that my spine will collapse, but it doesn’t. I’m still wearing shorts and a t-shirt because it’s too much effort to get out of my clothes every night. I reach for the crutches and, after a few false starts, I’m up. I hope my neighbors can’t hear my groans. 

I have a vague impression of stairs and a cold lobby. I’m sitting in the back of a cab in silence, and then I am smelling the river and watching the lights on the other side. They’re not as bright as I remembered. The water rushing underneath me sounds like the blind roar of forever, and my back aches with memory. I go up to the railing. It doesn’t seem as far above now, but I can’t help imagining how easy it would be to carry out my promise. I came so close last time. But the prospect of survival is terrifying. 

I pull up the crutches and gasp as a spasm of pain electrocutes my spine. My hands open involuntarily and the crutches slip over the side. The water embraces them and seals them underneath like an envelope. I am laughing but there is wetness on my cheeks from the water or from my eyes and then there is no thought but oblivion my leg goes up and hugs the rails and it is tearing ripping screaming and there is more water on my face now on my forehead and i cant hold it up any farther and the other leg goes out from underneath me and i am falling on the wrong side of the railing onto concrete hitting my chest and my head and now there is more water but it is red and i am laughing. The other water on the ground goes red then too and blue and i look up and there is a car at the other end with blue red flash going and wailing and there is a man in the dark running towards me and another one shouts but i am laughing too hard and i cant hear him asking questions i am laughing too hard and there are more lights soon i am laughing too hard they pick me up and slide me to the ambulance i am laughing too hard laughing and the world disappears behind the laughing white doors but i cant hear it because i am laughing too hard.