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given. You have to open your mouth and ask .”
    â€œI’m an enlightened person.” Seeing her trace of a smile, he adds, “Not like a Zen Buddhist! Enlightened as in the Enlightenment. Rational. Open-minded. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in religion. Ritual and tradition go a long way toward resigning you to a lousy prognosis. I spent half my life studying shamanism, and I’ve been asking every spirit I know for help, believe me. But until they get off their butts and help me out, maybe you could scare up some kind of painkiller for this crick in my neck.”
    â€œWe have a volunteer massage therapist on staff who’s very good.”
    â€œIs it tantric massage? That might really help.”
    â€œI beg of you, Mr. Baker, please take your situation seriously. Tell me what form you want your care to take.”
    â€œMa’am, I am not catching your drift. I have no idea what it is you want to hear!”
    She lacks legal authorization to tell him what she wants to hear—that he would like to be knocked out cold, and dead in a week—or that this moment, the one he drowned in morbid lightheartedness, now already past (she dares not harp on her theme), was the moment when he could have asked to sleep soundly through his last days on earth.
    The request would have been honored. But general anesthesia isn’t a menu item, because the hospice is run like one of those brothels that are nominally strip clubs. The license affords no protection to the dancers, who must turn tricks as furtively and nervously as hospice staff dispensing painless deaths.
    And Norm does not want to die. Not yet. He wants to say good-bye to his sons. He craves the good-byes. Knowing all that he knows, he thinks it is worth greeting death with open eyes and intact senses if it means he can see his sons one more time. He is an emotional man. He can’t turn it off.
    â€œI’m dying, and I’m terribly depressed about it,” he insists, tryingto reassure the doctor that his feelings do justice to his surroundings. “I’ll be grateful for anything you can do for me.” He sees that she is still disappointed. He frowns and faces forward again. “Is Jeopardy on yet?”
    At his request, she turns on the TV. Alex Trebek descends from his orbiting satellite into the box, bearing images of certainty and fair play.
    Norm relaxes. The doctor places the remote, with its built-in speaker, in his curled right hand and leaves the room.
    THE NEXT MORNING AT TEN-THIRTY, Penny arrives at the hospice in Norm’s Mercedes S-Class, not forgetting the laptop.
    He says he is in too much pain to do anything but train the dictation software. She says she is a fast typist and could take dictation while he speaks. He laughs and says that would take a stenotype machine. He reads a list of words aloud to the computer. She suggests recording an oral history on audio or video. She says her phone has voice recognition software that works without training. He asks to be left alone.
    He feels too poorly, he says, to speak anymore at all, because the pain in his neck and shoulder is spreading. “It’s like a crick in my neck that reaches all the way around my rib cage and into my back,” he tells her. “Like being twisted too far.”
    Penny fetches a nurse, who tells her to tell him to try to sleep. He agrees to try. She goes to the common room to drink coffee and read the hospice literature. When she comes back, he is awake. He asks to hear Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.
    EARLY IN THE MORNING, TWO days later.
    Another doctor stands at Norm’s feet, a sixtyish woman with elegant platinum jewelry. A laminated plastic tag identifies her as thehospice director. She wears a peach lab coat over taupe gabardine slacks and carries a clipboard.
    â€œHow are we doing?” she asks.
    â€œNot so good,” Norm says. “My neck hurts like hell.”
    â€œOn a scale from one