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it was pressed against my cheek, my body curled around my knees. I remained more or less in that position until the next morning, when they summoned me to court.
     
    L.A. had sweated out a whole year without a celebrity murder trial. I was neither a household name nor, as far as I knew, a killer, but the forces of the market had converged to make me both. Opening arguments had started sixty days from the second arraignment, time enough for me to lose weight, grow sallow and shaggy, and look otherwise convictable.
    A few minutes into the trial, I knew that my lawyers were right and that it would end disastrously. As promised, the rising-star prosecutor—sharply dressed Katherine Harriman accessorized with sensible low-heel slingbacks and a father who’d jetted in from Chicago to beam proudly from the front row—Swiffered the floor with me, the jury sailing to their verdict after only an eight-day trial and an hour’s deliberation.
    I’d been convicted. The only question now was if I’d slide off with a not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. Through the beginning of the sanity phase, the only way I could slow the quiet breakdown I was undergoing was to detach. I quickly learned that—like the other players—I had to devote my attention not to the ingredients of the trial but to its sugar glaze.
    And I had the support of my friends, who, my lawyers were pleased to note, comprised a nice demographic skew. Chic tapped his chest with a fist whenever I caught his eyes. From time to time, Preston would glance up from whatever manuscript he was editing and offer a supportive nod. He had a stack of pages that went with him everywhere like a King Charles spaniel, under his arm, peeking out from his bag, perching on his thighs when he sat—more than once when the courtroom hushed, I could make out the distinctive sound of his scribbling. And April, bless her, had shown up that morning as promised, even enduring the requisite walk of shame along an appointed stretch of public sidewalk while reporters mobbed her. It was clear we no longer had a future together, but I was deeply grateful she’d done me this final turn.
    More than anyone else, though, Katherine Harriman commanded the court’s attention. She played to the jury now, doing her best to ignore my brain tumor, which Donnie had ingeniously left floating in a jar on the defense table. It looked menacing in the brackish waters, an unexploded hand grenade. I’d suffered the humiliation of sitting before it for opening arguments and more. I pictured it inside my head, latched onto my brain, operating me like a subservient robot. I was, I’m embarrassed to report, scared of a wad of brown tissue.
    And why not? The expert witness for the home team, a white-haired neurologist with a dignified bearing, had just identified it as a left anterior temporal ganglioglioma. There was much discussion of ventricles and glands, designed, I assumed, to cow the jurors with Medical Science. Ganglioglioma? Even the repetitive syllable seems tacked on to intimidate. Despite the malignant look of the word, gangliogliomas are okay as far as brain tumors go. After resection, patients enjoy a survival rate that approaches 100 percent, and we don’t have to smell colors or taste music. The temporal lobe, the court learned, is involved in our processing of memory, thus my inconvenient blackout. Conditions like mine have been known to lead to schizophrenia-like psychosis, delusion, and episodic aggressive behavior.
    “And what causes this impressive constellation of symptoms to kick in?” Harriman asked midway into the cross, angling a bright cheek toward the carefully selected men who constituted Jurors Three through Seven.
    “Of course the tumor must reach a—if you’ll pardon the expression—critical mass, where it’s begun encroaching on essential structures,” our neurologist said. “But as for the tipping point? The addition of a few more cells. A constriction of blood vessels.