“I don’t care who you brought in, Mother. Just get them out. I want to rot in silence.”

My own voice sounded like a stranger’s. It was a jagged, hollow rasp—the sound of a man who had been screaming into a void until his throat bled. I lay there, the hospital bed feeling less like a place of recovery and more like a satin-lined coffin. The world was a flat, impenetrable sheet of black ice. No light. No shadows. Just the crushing weight of a darkness so absolute it felt physical, like it was pressing against my eyeballs, mocking the millions of dollars I had in the bank that couldn’t...