People ask me what it was like to write the prologue. The real answer is that I didn't write it once. I wrote it for years. Through most of my fifties I kept ending up at the kitchen table at four in the morning, going back over that bathroom floor, trying to get it into words. I kept thinking that if I wrote it the right way, I'd finally understand it, and maybe somebody else would too. I never did understand it. What you're reading now is just the version where I stopped pretending I could.

The hardest part of writing that night isn't the pain. It's the hole. Part of that night is simply missing from me, a blank between the last ordinary moment and waking on the tile, and no amount of sitting with it has ever brought it back. Whatever happened inside that blank happened without my say-so. A writer is supposed to fill a hole like that. It's the first instinct you have, to smooth it over so the reader doesn't stumble. My early drafts tried to fill it. Every one of them was a lie. The night has a hole in it, so the chapter has a hole in it. It took me years to let that stand.

Same with the bottle. Readers notice that I never say what the label said, and that I never answer the question people most want answered. That wasn't a slip, and it wasn't me being coy. I decided it early and I've held to it. If I give you one answer, some of you in dark water might rank your worst night against mine and decide things based on that math. If I give you the other answer, some of you might run the same broken math the other direction. The label was never the story. What my hand did, and what it didn't do, is the story, and the only answer that matters is that I'm alive and writing this.

Then there's the part I still can't explain, the part my sister later called divine intervention. I didn't argue with her when she said it, and that surprised me as much as it surprised the people who know me. I was raised Catholic. I went to Saint Rose in Santa Rosa, made my Communions, served as an altar boy. Then life moved in, work and marriages and kids, and faith faded into the background without any dramatic break. By fifty I trusted what could be measured. If you'd asked me the day before my birthday, I'd have told you there's usually an explanation for everything. We just don't know it yet.

Then came the floor. No light, no tunnel, no voice. What there was, at the bottom of the worst night of my life, was an unexplainable vastness, and a sense of safety inside that vastness, the sense of being held when no one was holding me. And there was that smell. I knew it instantly. Not something similar, not a memory playing tricks. Rose and talcum. It was Nonie, my grandmother, who'd been gone for years, and who was the safest person I ever knew. I've debated with myself whether the smell was in the room or only in whatever state I was in. I've never once debated the certainty. In my mind, it was her.