So-and-so died in his sleep.

Isn’t that the way everyone wants to go, surrounded of course by loved ones?

There’s always a sense of peace when people who are still alive talk about dying in your sleep: of running across the Elysian Fields into the arms of your loved ones: of hair flapping in the breeze and fresh skin unblemished by life. We like to think that if you die with your dreams all the pain of the world is washed away and the dots and dashes of life have somehow come full circle to finally connect – with the ultimate questions answered once and for all.

But how could you know? How could anyone? Even if we applied our best science to the problem we would never know the dreams that take you straight unto death. Is there an ending – do we just never wake up, dreaming endlessly of life – or do we slip unknowingly away into the Big Muddy? Like so much about death these are questions we can’t possibly answer in life. But we like to think the transition from one to the other, from one life to the next, is seamless because that kind of answer would somehow erase the line between one and the other.

We want to believe that. We almost have to believe that, because if it were true then it would mean there is a next life, a better one, and that makes us feel that much better.

The truth is people who die in their sleep could be having the worst nightmares of their life – the worst night of their life – right up until the minute the cock crowed. They could be unhappy, despairing, or disconsolate for any number of reasons, with none of their discontent visible to the outside world. And you would never know. You could be standing at Grandpa’s bedside convinced that this tortured man was finally at peace, when in fact he was going through a night of hell.

Your loved ones think for some reason that because you don’t wake up you’re in heaven even if you have lived a hellish life, as if that one final night of unadulterated sleep washed away all the days and nights that came before it. No one will ever be able to tell you different because no one really knows. There is no one to come back from the dead and tell you that the final night of unconsciousness was the dark night of the soul. We the living can live on and on in the bliss of our own man-made ignorance.

We expect the same thing from dying in our sleep that we require of Hollywood movies: a happy ending.

I was dead to the world, but inside my head there was a triple-feature going on that did not start with “Gone With The Wind” or “Weekend at Bernie’s.” The movies in my imagination could have played on a bill with “Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Scream 3.” I had no sense that all of this was going on somewhere else – no idea that there was some other, outer world out there and all I had to do was wake up. In my brain I could see discernible features (Amanda’s face, my legs) but everything was chaotic, inchoate, seen from the wrong angle. This was my brain and no other, and I had some sense of that, so these were the pieces of my life seen in a hallucinogenic space-time continuum that kept changing. (My father’s face on my mother’s body as cardboard in two dimensions.) There was all kinds of stormy weather in there, hail and gusts and thunderclaps that kept on clapping like a hip-hop backbeat. (A hurricane coming in off the coast of Montauk.) But there were snippets of songs, too, and faces without names and names without faces passing by in a whisper. (Schochet. Murphy. Dows. Danforth. Venrick. Carroll. Pierce. Crodder.) And in the end there was Amanda in a Picasso painting, her eyes where her nose should have been, her mouth open and flapping silently on her forehead, her head twisted so far on her torso she had to be dead.

I don’t know when I woke up. I have no idea. All I know is that I woke up with the worst problem and the worst nightmare and the worst headache in the world. I was vaguely aware of someone in the room with me, a man with no air of the medicinal who was not dressed in white. The haze lifted enough for me to see Skip Taylor from the Aspen Free Press, looking for all the world like a houndog – or maybe the family doctor down on the Bayou, down on his luck.

“Shhh!” he said. “Don’t try to talk, Bagdikian. Just listen.”

He went to the door of the room for a moment and opened it enough to look both ways before he quietly closed it all the way.

“Here’s the deal,” he said. “Amanda Madison is alive. I can’t tell you how I know but I know she’s alive. And I know you know what the deal is. You can imagine. They already killed Sam Albright.”

Skip Taylor took a deep breath.

“And they are sure as hell going to kill Amanda Madison if you don’t kiss the O’Kell case goodbye. So I have one question. Are you in or out? That’s all I want to know. If you’re out, close your eyes and don’t open them. If you’re in, stare at me just like that in the face.”

I kept my eyes open for as long as I could.

“All right, then,” Skip Taylor said. “Game on.”

When I finally closed my eyes I was so tired it felt like I might never open them again.