When I met Ameya in ninth grade French, it never occurred to me that he would become a bona fide doctor some day. Thin, gawky, and far from arrogant, all I saw in him was a clear and unmistakable appreciation for the sublime, particularly with respect to J.J. Johnson,Star Wars, Plymouth Diner pizza bagels, Mahler, and Mystery Science Theater 3000. My inability to reconcile these qualities with my adolescent stereotype of doctors explains my disbelief the day he quietly proclaimed, “I’m going to medical school.”

As I watched Ameya transform into Dr. Srivastava over the next ten years, it came as no surprise that his propensity for compassion towards strangers was matched only by his love of his friends. That said, his love and compassion were never as apparent as they were on the night when I called to ask whether he was qualified to refer me to a doctor of philosophy who could offer me a second opinion about life—or at least clarify whether the bottle of aspirin I was busy devouring was half empty or half full.

Ameya was waiting for me outside Hudson Episcopal's sliding glass doors. After speeding me through intake, he brought me into the emergency room, sat me down and, looking at me with the utmost concern, said “You know what this is about, don’t you?” To this day, I’m ashamed to admit I have no idea what he meant, and yet he asked with such solemnity that I felt compelled to nod.

If he knew how hopelessly perplexed I was by his question, he didn’t let on. Instead, he hooked me up to an intravenous drip and calmly instructed me to drink a chalky black substance he called "charcoal." Charcoal tasted a bit like Swiss Miss hot cocoa mixed with talcum powder, and though it was administered to neutralize the aspirin, I could have just as easily mistaken it for a conditioning agent (like the meat powder used on Pavlov's dog) designed to nauseate anyone considering another suicide attempt. Drinking it, I felt like Alex might have felt in A Clockwork Orange if his mouth rather than his eyes had been propped open and he had been subjected to a river of fudge-flavored chalk rather than a private screening of Enemy at the Gates.

It gets better. Apparently, someone on my treatment team decided it would be more efficient (or at least more fun) to use a plastic tube to pipe the charcoal down my nose as I continued to drink it, thereby doubling the theoretical rate of ingestion. Of course, since it is nearly impossible to imbibe with a giant Twizzler dangling from your nostril, it is not clear to me that this technique increased anything besides the amount of plastic shoved up my nose. This did not seem to faze my doctors, whose collective attitude with respect to my proposal that perhaps a new tack should be tried was plainly “we’ve got all the time in the world.”

And yet we didn’t. Tinnitus was setting in, and the doctors and nurses treating me were soon competing with a sustained monotone that permeated my consciousness like a test of the emergency broadcast system. Not that I cared. In fact, the monotony of the treatment was such that I was almost less distraught by the specter of my imminent demise than by the lack of internet access. And while it would be easy to attribute this general apathy to the fact that my former outpatient psychiatrist, Dr. Hŏetäard, began to reduce my antidepressant dose in the months preceding my suicide attempt (a decision made over my strong objections), the reality was more complex. For years before the exhaustion of the assets I inherited from my mother, I had been toying with the notion of waiting until the cusp of their depletion to buy the farm. My overwhelming aversion to any form of real work brought about my Madoffian fate: by compulsively living beyond my means, I managed to keep my mind off the reality of my impending ruin.

And though, according to the adage, “it’s the thought that counts,” thought could not deliver me from the irony of my dilemma: namely, that any incentive I might have felt to strive for either prospective outcome of this life-or-death scenario would vanish upon considering the probability they’d be equally dismal.

Ultimately, the decision was made for me: after the treatment team alleviated my physiological symptoms by attenuating the level of aspirin in my blood, they transferred me to Hudson's ICU where I had time to reflect on both my stupidity and what inspired me to act on it. And if wrapping my head around the reasons for my self-destructive acts would be hard, explaining whatever rationale emerged from this soul-searching exercise would be harder. There was only one way I could think to account for the pathetic change of heart I succumbed to: pleading the second.

Allow me to explain. In the lexicon shared by my group of friends, "the second" referred not to the Constitutional right to bear arms but rather to the sequel (hence "the second") to Arnold Schwarzenegger's 1984 science-fiction blockbuster, The Terminator. In the Terminator universe, when a race of disgruntled machines gains artificial intelligence and wages war on its creators, humans send a robot (Schwarzenegger) back in time to foil the dreaded T-1000’s attempts to assassinate the young man destined to become the leader of the human resistance. Upon the demise of his robot rival, Schwarzenegger faces a quandary: on the one hand, in order to prevent himself from inadvertently precipitating the future war, he must commit android hari kari; on the other hand (and herein lies the origin of "pleading the second"), while Arnold looks down over the molten steel that has just consumed his enemy, the robot left standing declares "my programming won't allow me to self-terminate" (whereupon Linda Hamilton lowers him into a veritable cauldron of robot fondue in a heart-rending moment of cyborg euthanasia).

"The second" attained something of a catch-all status within my circle of friends. It was routinely cited it to justify decisions as disparate as abstaining from fast-food or sticking it out in a hopeless game of Pictionary. Would it be possible to spin cowardice into street cred in the eyes of my friends by pleading the second? Could I get them to overlook the fact that it had never been invoked quite so literally before?

***

Eugene: Wait, let me see if I’ve got this right: you’re pleading the second ‘cause you’re embarrassed you’re still alive after you went pharmikaze?

As Eugene singlehandedly dashed my hopes of saving face in front of the five women in this world I most revered, I wondered wistfully whether he and all the other visitors crammed into my room of the ICU came down there to seek clarification on this point. My close circle of friends consisted mainly of women, and while each contributed to the group’s dynamic in her own way, each was similarly boundless in her loyalty, intellect, and compassion. This knowledge still did not leave me entirely at ease given the circumstances. The women stood nervously at my bedside in the ICU while Eugene, token male and self-appointed group spokesman, assumed a position of prominence near the hand sanitizer.

Me: N-Never mind.

I don't recall who broke the silence that followed, but a wave of nausea came over me as awkwardness gave way to affected banter and I remembered how isolated I'd felt in the preceding days. How desperate was I? And for what? Was I just fishing for the kind of attention I lost upon my mother's death by making a spectacle of myself, like a toddler who throws his bottles along with his tantrums? With infants, I thought, restoration of the former invariably brings about cessation of the latter. As I lay there trying to put my finger on the relevance of this fact, my friends took pains to keep the conversation from drifting more than two degrees from Super MarioKart. "No," I thought. "This is not what I had in mind."