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Henry.
    â€œAll right, doctor.”
    He closes his eyes. The room is replaced by darkness, and that is good. Darkness has become his friend. Tomorrow he will see his other friends (three of them, anyway), and the light will once more seem good. But now . . . now . . .
    â€œDoctor?
    â€œYes, Henry.
    â€œThis is a bona fide case of same shit, different day. Do you know that?
    â€œWhat does that mean, Henry? What does that mean to you?
    â€œEverything,” he says, eyes closed, and then adds: “Nothing.” But that’s a lie. Not the first one that was ever told in here.
    He lies on the couch, eyes closed and hands folded on his chest, and after a little while he sleeps.
    The next day the four of them drive up to Hole in the Wall, and it is a great eight days. The great huntingtrips are coming to an end, only a few left, although they of course do not know this. The real darkness is still a few years away, but it is coming.
    The darkness is coming.
    2001: Jonesy’s Student-Teacher Conference
    We don’t know the days that will change our lives. Probably just as well. On the day that will change his, Jonesy is in his third-floor John Jay College office, looking out at his little slice of Boston and thinking how wrong T. S. Eliot had been to call April the cruelest month just because an itinerant carpenter from Nazareth supposedly got himself crucified then for fomenting rebellion. Anyone who lives in Boston knows that it’s March that’s the cruelest, holding out a few days of false hope and then gleefully hitting you with the shit. Today is one of the untrustworthy ones when it looks as if spring might really be coming, and he’s thinking about taking a walk when the bit of impending nastiness just ahead is over. Of course at this point, Jonesy has no idea how nasty a day can get; no idea that he is going to finish this one in a hospital room, smashed up and fighting for his goddam life.
    Same shit, different day, he thinks, but this will be different shit indeed.
    That’s when the phone rings, and he grabs it at once, filled with a hopeful premonition: it’ll be the Defuniak kid, calling to cancel his eleven-o’clock. He’s gotten a whiff of what’s in the wind, Jonesy thinks, and that is very possible. Usually it’s the students whomake appointments to see the teacher. When a kid gets a message saying that one of his teachers wants to see him  . . . well, you don’t have to be a rocket-scientist, as the saying goes.
    â€œHello, it’s Jones,” he says.
    â€œHey, Jonesy, how’s life treating you?”
    He’d know that voice anywhere. “Henry! Hey! Good, life’s good!”
    Life does not, in fact, seem all that great, not with Defuniak due in a quarter of an hour, but it’s all relative, isn’t it? Compared to where he’s going to be twelve hours from now, hooked up to all those beeping machines, one operation behind him and three more ahead of him, Jonesy is, as they say, farting through silk.
    â€œGlad to hear it.”
    Jonesy might have heard the heaviness in Henry’s voice, but more likely it’s a thing he senses.
    â€œHenry? What’s wrong?”
    Silence. Jonesy is about to ask again when Henry answers.
    â€œA patient of mine died yesterday. I happened to see the obit in the paper. Barry Newman, his name was.” Henry pauses. “He was a couch man.”
    Jonesy doesn’t know what that means, but his old friend is hurting. He knows that.
    â€œSuicide?”
    â€œHeart attack. At the age of twenty-nine. Dug his grave with his own fork and spoon.”
    â€œI’m sorry.”
    â€œHe hasn’t been my patient for almost three years.I scared him away. I had . . . one of those things. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
    Jonesy thinks he does. “Was it the line?”
    Henry sighs. It doesn’t sound like regret to Jonesy.