When he was a child, he used to think that deaths were bloody as a general rule; all deaths, like in the movies: bodies mangled and mouths open in horror or pain or surprise. It didn't bother him, it was just something he came to understand as the way the world was. That was obviously why everyone wanted to die peacefully in the night.
Ienzo had always wanted to die as horrifically as possible.
Maybe blown to pieces, blood and internal organs splattered up against a wall. Maybe stabbed to death and cut up into pieces and left to fester in a dumpster behind some high-class restaurant to be found the next time someone took out some unwanted foie gras. Then he would be in the news, the 6 o'clock news. BODY OF TWENTY-SEVEN YEAR OLD MEDICAL STUDENT FOUND IN DUMPSTER or MEDICAL STUDENT, IENZO LAMPEL, TURNS UP IN DUMPSTER AFTER MISSING FOR THREE WEEKS. He really didn't have a preference. But maybe they'd put up that awful picture from his driver's license, or worse, they'd Google him and find that photo that his Aunt Deborah had insisted on using on her Facebook from last Thanksgiving, featuring a smiling brunette and a very distressed Ienzo with a forkful of mashed potatoes halfway to his mouth.
That would be bad.
Maybe he'd join Facebook just for that: to have a good picture on the news when he died. That might just be worth giving up his boycott of useless 'networking' websites.
He wasn't suicidal; it was just something he thought about.
A lot.
It wasn't an obsession; it was... a healthy, normal, interest and sign of an active imagination.
He just wanted people to notice him so he could mock them to their faces. Yeah. That was it. Right.
These are the things that Ienzo tells himself. Some people have a hobby of sailing, or breeding world class horses, or doing woodwork. Ienzo is a pathological liar - that is his hobby - with a PHD in denial.
This is okay, this is normal.
These are the things that Ienzo Lampel - twenty-seven, mother gone, father gone, almost living in a hospital storeroom but for the few days he spends with his aunt a week, hesitating to pass a stick-up-his-ass doctor a scalpel when he asks for a scalpel because he's debating just stabbing himself instead - tells himself every day.