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himself called Moyers and indicated that any communication with Gary was unlikely. I didn’t bring up the subject the next day, Friday, but Gary did. “Schiller won’t let me see your friend. He wants to guard his ‘exclusivity.’ Sometimes that son of a bitch acts like he owns me, like he can run my life. He did this to me once before, when I asked him to recover some of my private letters to Nicole. I didn’t like seeing that shit in print; the drawings didn’t bother me so much, but the letters were nobody’s business. And, contrary to my wishes, Schiller read them. I felt like firing him right then, and I probably still should, but it’s too late to find anybody else. What I should do, though, is revoke his invitation to the execution.” I didn’t offer any opinion. I didn’t want to get caught up in a feud between Gary and Schiller.

I told Gary that I should leave that night, to go back home and spend the rest of the weekend with Mother.

“Can’t you stay one more day?” he asked. “I’d like to see you again, and I have this book Johnny Cash sent me; I want you to give it to Mom.”

I agreed to return the next day—Saturday—but before I left he wanted to tell me one more thing. “You know I’ve said a lot of stuff about how I don’t care what people think about me, but that’s not completely true. I don’t like it when they say I’m jittery and stuff. I’ve never told anybody this before, but I don’t know what Monday’s going to be like. Maybe that’s why I need Schiller there, so I’ll keep cool… I know you don’t believe this, but I didn’t mean for this to become such a big thing. I never expected the books or movies, maybe a few articles.”

We pressed our hands against the glass between us and said good-bye.

IMAGINE THE IMPOSSIBLE LEAPS AND BORDERS your heart must cross when you’re arguing with a man about his own death. There was a logic, a congruity to Gary’s choice, I had to admit, but none of that changed my desire for him to stay alive. But just as you try to convince the lover who no longer loves you to love you nonetheless—because you cannot imagine going on in your life, living it, without the presence or thing that you need and love most—in the same moment that you make your argument, and try to convince the person to stay and love you all over again, you also know that your argument is already lost, and along with it, a version of your future.

When you are arguing with somebody who is hell-bent on dying, you realize that if you lose the argument, there is no more chance for further argument, that you will have seen that person for the last time. I could not believe that I was in that place in my life, that I could possibly be caught up in such an argument. Death is one thing we almost never get to argue with. You can’t argue with the disease that takes your loved one or yourself, or the car accident or the killer that snuffs out a life without warning. But a man who wants to die … When I argued with Gary, I was arguing with death itself—he was death, wanting itself as its only possible fulfillment—and I learned that you cannot win, that this thing which will ruin your heart the most cannot be resisted or stopped, that you will lose this person, and you will have to live with that loss forever. And you will not have lost them to cancer or to the cruelty of another’s actions; you will have lost them to the abyss of their own soul, and you will be afraid that maybe their surrender to that abyss is, after all, the only act that makes sense. But mainly, you know that you will never see them again—that you pleaded with them to stay and that there was nothing you could do—it was too late to do anything that would make a difference. Maybe in that moment, you will want to go where they’re going, because it can’t possibly hurt so much or look so goddamn fucking eternal as the prospect of spending the rest of your life accommodating a loss that no sane heart could ever possibly afford or hope to accommodate without letting ruin so deep inside that it becomes an ineradicable part of your deepest self.

I SPOKE WITH GIAUQUE THE SAME DAY and