“I rolled onto my back. The sky had never been so blue. I thought of my pager pocketed in my scrubs on the floor and felt the brief panic that comes each time it goes off. Carol and I had become friendly strangers by then and I’d taken to masturbating in the locker room shower. I couldn’t help it. The urgency of it was strongest after the cases when someone came close to dying. I felt a kind of wildness that wasn’t so much victory as escape, thrilling escape from near death. I was a beast and I daily walked up to the brink and jumped in, ripping and tearing and slashing and screaming, always crawling out the other side reaping air and worshipping the weight of my bones. I was alive, I was well, I was strong.”

—Bud Shaw