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Hayward came in as I was laboriously dressing. He stood at the doorway and watched me clumsily attempt to button my shirt. After a moment, he entered the room, gently moved my hands aside and delicately looped the buttons into the buttonholes, applying the same single-minded attention with which I imagined he performed heart surgery.
    “Top button, too?” he asked. His warm breath glanced my cheek, smelling of coffee and peppermint.
    “No,” I said. “I’m not a geek.”
    He stepped back as if to admire his handiwork. “How do you feel?”
    “Like nothing happened,” I replied. “And like nothing will ever be the same.”
    He dug out a tube of breath mints from his white jacket and peeled two. “Mint?”
    I accepted. He sat down lightly at the edge of the bed. I now realized he perched on beds not to create rapport with his bedridden patients, but because he was always tired and took every opportunity he could to rest. Like most good people I had known, he was seriously overworked, a condition that did not lend itself to treacly saintliness. He was unsentimental, direct and caustic, but acted out of such palpable kindness that I could not take offense.
    “Everyone dies of something, Henry. What you now know is that the probabilities are you’ll die of heart disease. Even if you follow the treatment plan I gave you and do it all perfectly, given the severity of your heart attack, your lifespan has still been shortened by probably ten years. If you don’t follow my treatment plan, you could be in serious trouble a lot sooner.”
    “You’re telling me this to scare me into taking my niacin?”
    He crunched his mint. “To a point. I’m also telling you this because now is the time for you to start thinking about doing whatever it is in life that you’ve been putting off till your old age.”
    “I don’t have any secret fantasies, Doc,” I said.
    “I can give you a regimen to keep you alive,” he replied. “I can’t give you a reason for living.”
    “Has Elena been talking to you again?”
    “No,” he said. He slid off the bed and put his hand on my shoulder. “I’ve been doing this a long time. Most of the time when people survive a heart attack as serious as yours, along with everything else they feel exhilarated, euphoric. You seem disappointed.”
    “You pushing antidepressants again?”
    “If I thought they would help.” He gave my shoulder a friendly squeeze. “You’re still a relatively young man. You’ll be around for a while. Make the best of it, Henry. Live every moment as fully as you can, even if all you’re doing is eating a bowl of soup.” He moved toward the door. “I’ll see you next week. You have my number if there’s an emergency.”
    “On automatic dial,” I said. “Doc, I appreciate everything you’ve done for me. Even the bromides.”
    “Remember that when you start getting the bills,” he said, and was gone. A few minutes later, Elena arrived with the wheelchair that she had gone off to fetch just before Hayward had turned up. I settled into it and we left.
    My house was built atop a canyon on a dead-end street in the hills above Franklin Boulevard, east of Hollywood. Gray-green undergrowth filled the canyon; the views from my deck were of the Santa Monica Mountains to the west and, on clear days, the San Gabriels to the east. These brown, craggy mountains were a reminder that, although its boosters like to claim Los Angeles was the gateway to the Pacific Rim, it was essentially a western city. However crowded the city got, it was still pervaded by that western sense of unlimited space, vast emptiness and hidden wilds. The isolation that was so much a part of the city’s psyche, the feeling that its ten million people were all living parallel lives that never intersected was, in part, a function of this landscape in which we were all like pioneers engaged in solitary struggle over the mountains to some distant valley of repose. I had lived in the city now for