Interstate 280 is the other highway on the peninsula leading to San Francisco, exchanging the urban sprawl and traffic of Highway 101 for rolling hills and high speeds. It’s also built on the San Andreas fault, which presumably means that the Big One occurring at any moment will seriously screw the commute, personally ironic considering the earlier appointment from which I was speeding home.

    “I want you to put this pill under your tongue and lie back down,” the doctor said.

    “Okay,” I replied. “What is it?”

    “Nitroglycerine,” she answered quickly, before leaving the room with my EKG printout, a nurse coming in to do a second one. There was some disagreement as to whether the hardware problem related to me or the machine, but I blamed Larry Ellison.

    Oracle Open World came to town last week, closing down streets around Moscone Center so tall, white males in blue, button-down shirts and khaki pants could pump $60 million into San Francisco’s economy and cause interminable congestion. Or possibly terminal. Instead of being smart and posting an ad in the paper for a “Farmers Market” along Howard Street with a hefty senior citizen discount, then just waiting for an octogenarian to mistake the accelerator for the brake and clear the street of the Future Ken Lay of America Club, I got upset.

    “STUPID FUCKING BASTARDS!” I screamed, as I tried in vain to navigate the blocked streets of the Financial District.

    “You’re upsetting me,” my wife said in rote, not even looking up from her Blackberry.

    “It’s not me—it’s them, stupid, fucking, bastards—I wish they would all DIE—no, wait, I wish they would all be forced to deploy Oracle Fusion 1.0 on mission critical—”

    “I’m taking BART until this is over,” my wife interjected, cutting my rant off at the knees.

    “You can’t take BART,” I countered. “It’s loud and full of subhumans, and will give you a migraine.”

    “How is that different from this car ride?”

    I shut up, but in the same way debris and ash may shut up the magma from a volcano, sooner or later something gives. Lying in a bed in the Emergency Room over the weekend, I tried to figure out when that happened. There was a good argument for the toaster in 1998, the one that kept sliding out of my grasp while cleaning the kitchen, mockingly depositing more crumbs on the counter. I beat it to death with a hammer, one of many acts of serial appliance killing I have committed in my life. Going back further, it could have been my mother, who once had a screaming fit over whether the tinsel went on the Christmas Tree before the ornaments. Or it could go all the way back to Cain, who once—not having the benefit of modern appliances—brained his brother with a rock because God wasn’t a vegetarian.

    That was the other thing I thought about between tests, God, not the tiny one nailed to the forlorn Crucifix above the door, but the Sprinkler God. An extraterrestrial graduate student in xenoarcheology digging up a dead Earth an eon from now could hardly be blamed for concluding the articulated nozzle represented an all-seeing eye watching over the sick bipeds. After all, it was the last thing many of those bipeds would have seen, cerebral anoxia blurring the nozzle like the fades in a highly popular television series about a bunch of people that survive a plane crash on a tropical island—wait! The flashback “sound” is a whining jet engine—I had to tell my wife—they’re all dead! Except I was alone because hospitals are noisy and, not surprisingly, my wife already had a migraine that was getting worse, so I sent her out to the car to rest as best she could. Quickly, I wrestled my phone out to text her a potential message from beyond the grave.

    I love you. Just in case. Not that I didn't love you before I thought I might die and just figured it out—that I love you, not that I was dying. I got that part laying on this gurney praying to the Sprinkler. About the dying thing, I don't know what to say, but I feel like I should say something else, like I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox, or enjoy every sandwich, or that you can't do a little, 'cause you can't do enough. I know I’m not supposed to quote the H.R. Pufnstuf song that sticks in your head on pain of death, but—

    And she walked back into the room, her eyes sunken and red. She had called her mother from the car in the parking lot and had just returned.

    “They’re all dead,” I said.

    Her eyes went wide.

    “On Lost, think about it—”

    And she burst into tears and hugged me, because she knew that incessant rambling meant I was okay, probably.

    “You’re not allowed to die, not ever,” she whispered.

    You would think that after eleven years of being incredibly patient, she would at least be open to the idea of a little peace and quiet, but apparently not. So I stroked her hair and said the only thing I could for putting her through something like this.

    “I’m sorry.”