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whittled-down toothbrush handle, but like so many others went cross-instead of lengthwise and succeeded only in winning himself a week at the county hospital cuffed to the bed and in adding another layer to a decade of stains on the mattress in his cell.
    Next six months, Danny Boy got it together, or so everyone thought. Stayed out of the way of the bulls and badgers, which is ninety percent of doing good time, spent days in the library, volunteered for work details. Worked his way up from KP to library cart to cleaning crew. Then just after dawn one Saturday morning Danny Boy drank a quart or so of stuff he'd mixed up: cleaners, solvents, bleach, who knows what else.
    The caustic chemicals ate through his esophagus then on into his trachea before burning out most of his stomach; what they didn't get on the first pass, they got a second chance at on the reflux.
    He spent eight days dying. They didn't bother to export him this time, since the prison doctor said there was nothing anyone could do, they might as well keep him in the infirmary. He'd be gone within twenty-four hours, the doctor said. Then stood there shaking his head all week saying, The young ones, the healthy ones, they always go the hardest.
    They had him on a breathing machine that, with its two pressure gauges and flattened, triangular shape, looked like an insect's head. And he was pumped full of painkillers, of course. A lot of us went up there to see him. Some because it was different, it was a new thing, and anything that broke through the crust of our days was desirable; some to be relieved it wasn't them; probably others to wish, in some poorly lit corner of their heart, that it were. I went because I didn't understand how someone could want to die. I'd been through a lot by then, the war, the streets, nineteen months of prison, but that, someone wanting to die, was unimaginable to me. I wanted to understand. And I guess I must have thought that looking down at what was left of Danny Boy somehow would help me understand.
    That was the beginning. Fast forward, zero to sixty in, oh, about six years, and I'm sitting in an office in Memphis listening to Charley Call-Me-CC Cooper. The curtains at the open window are not moving, and it's an early fall day so humid that you could wring water out of them. Even the walls seem to be sweating.
    "Before I was dead, before I came here," CC is saying, "I was an enthusiast, a supporter. I voted. I mowed, and kept the grass trimmed away from the curb at streetside. I kept my appointments. My garbage went out on the morning the truck came. My coffeemaker was cleaned daily." He pauses, as though to replay it in his mind. "You, the living, are so endlessly fascinating. Your habits, about which you never think, your cattle calls as you crowd together for warmth, the way you stare into darkness all your lives and never see it."
    CC believed himself to be a machine. Not the first of my patients with such a belief—I'd had two or three others—but the first to verbalize it. This was in the days before they became clients, back when we still called them patients, back before everything, the news, education, art of every sort, got turned into mere consumer goods. And truth to tell (though it would be some time before I realized this), the therapeutic tools we were given to treat them more or less took the patients as machines as well, simple mechanisms to be repaired: install the right switch, talk out a bad connection, find the proper solvent, and they'd take off across the floor again, bells and whistles fully functional.
    I never knew what became of CC. He was a referral from a friend of Cy's who was giving up his practice to teach, and among the earliest of the deeply troubled patients who would become my mainstay. We had half a dozen sessions, he called to cancel the next one, pulled a no-show two weeks running, and that was it. Nothing unusual there; the attrition rate is understandably high. You always wonder if and how