I got off the interstate to commit suicide. I was supposed to interview a police chief in Jackson about a carjacking cold case, but my tire blew out with thirty miles to go. The delay killed the appointment, and the trouble I had swapping tires revealed my own inadequacy even more. The car rode unlevel on the spare, droning the prospect of another failed investigation into my bones. Heat pressed through the sunroof, pounding memories of my fiancée's screaming face through my sweaty scalp. Both those pillars of my life--collapsing. When I saw the next off-ramp, I put on my signal. It was one of those dead, pointless exits in rural Tennessee that serves perhaps a dozen people a day.

Left was the interstate underpass. Right was blank road. I wanted a quiet place to do it. I went right, out into the wilderness, leaving the world and all its weight behind. But the weight followed me. It was the end of April, but outside the grimy glass, the afternoon trees wore the tired green of late summer. I searched for a shady gravel patch along the shoulder. The broken driver's-side window control clicked beneath my forefinger as the rising pressure crushed open a primal place in my brain filled with flames and billowing smoke and the searing smell of raw oil.

My eyes watered. I tried to still my finger but couldn't. The clicking only stopped when I saw the sign. It leaned drunkenly among thick honeysuckle at the far edge of the highway. My vision cleared. Buried beneath many spray-painted desecration attempts lay the official black lettering: THREE SUMMERS--TWO MILES. Just beyond the sign, a mouth opened in the wall of the woods, the shrouded access point to the forgotten town. It would do.

I turned across the highway and stopped my car amid the brackish twilight. An RIA .38 Special rode in the glove box. I took it out and braced it against my temple. The movements of my jaw, clenching and unclenching, translated along its length into my hand. I could already smell the sulfur, already feel the fiery track of the bullet through my brain. The window would shatter. The flies would come through the breach and settle on my body.

Eventually, someone would happen down this road and find my car clogged up here in the throat of the forest. Word would get out, swirl across local networks, and eventually end up in Atlanta on my editor Heather's desk. My own death would be the last violent, meaningless story I provided to her. I might just as well have stepped out in traffic while changing the car tire back on the interstate. No, I did not want a violent death. I replaced the gun and picked up an orange canister from the passenger-side floorboard. Ten milligrams would buoy me up. Lift the weight.

Bring me back to the surface. But there was fire on the surface. The endless fight to stay afloat. The story I could never tell. I gripped the canister. It would take about a dozen pills to get sleepy, a dozen more to soar from my body for good. But I couldn't swallow one pill dry, let alone twenty-four. "Some water," I said aloud.

"I need a drink of water." --"The House of Dust." Southern Gothic.