Toward the end of my life in New York, a decade and change I would dispense with as casually as I’d begun it, came a season of psychic misery that felt as vertiginous, as alarming and noiseless, as a winding drive along a cliff—the windows sealed shut against a danger still visible. My acupuncturist, Christina,might have been the only person who knew how truly I had wanted to stop living. Six months into treating me,a period in which my thanatotic impulses could alight on certain objects as glistering and totemic, she moved offices, taking up in an unremarkable office building on Union Square.
It was December of 2021 when I first visited her there, on a half-vacant ninth floor, and an elevator opened to reveal the most unusual door I had ever seen. Isolated at one end of the hall, it left me succored, almost beatific. On glass painted black, unsteadily at the edges, was a prim gold-leaf heading: office of the estate of samuel klein, deceased. Under that, six names were printed in the same serif—the text dec’d appended, with a baffling kind of menace, to three. I felt convinced that the knob had not been turned in recent history: whoever was responsible had declared themselves bereaved, a few times over, then vanished.
