“I wish you could get a prescription for a suicide pill.” He depressed the gas pedal slightly, and we inched forward, a foot or so closer to the drive thru order box. While he spoke, I squinted at the illuminated board, trying to make out the list of combo meals. In front of us were two cars and a pickup with six exuberant teens in varsity uniforms in the bed.

“I mean, I know the pharmaceutical companies still need to make their money,” he continued. “That’s fine. You just need to do some gate-keeping. Like, don’t just give it to anyone; make the person jump through all the hoops first. Have them see a Rothschild-approved psychiatrist and do talking therapy, or behavioral therapy, or whatever. Make them try at least six different colors of pills. Adjust their dosage a few dozen times. I don’t care. But there has to be a moment when they sit you down and say, ‘Hey buddy, we’ve tried it all. How about we discuss an exit strategy? I can give you a referral.’”

He paused as we pulled up to the order box. In front of us, the pickup had reached the window. The truck’s rear window slid open and three large paper bags were passed into the bed. One boy tried to pitch a container of fries to another and missed. I watched the box arc towards us, and I thought it might hit our windshield, but the pitch came up short, and the red box fell through the beam from our headlights and landed out of sight.

He ordered four hamburgers. “I’m going to eat them all in my bed, slip into a diabetic coma, and sleep on top of the wrappers,” he had told me earlier. I ordered a chicken sandwich—“Lettuce, tomato, no condiments,” I stipulated—and a strawberry shake. When we got to the window, we were told they needed a couple of minutes to prepare the chicken sandwich—they didn’t keep any ready on the grill after ten—and if we waited in the parking lot, someone would run our order out to us.

“It’s the culture of hope that’s the worst thing,” I told him, picking up the conversation. “It’s bad enough to feel like shit, but it’s worse to constantly be told that you will get better, that you can get better, when, really, you can’t.  Some people just don’t. You know how much of a relief it would be to be told, ‘Sorry, but there’s nothing more we can do. You’re too sick, too old, and you’re not going to get better.’”

“‘—But here,’” he interrupted, “‘let me write you a prescription. Take this and it’ll be over. Just make sure you’re all paid up first.’ And people would do it, too. People would take the zoloft and the abilify and go to all the sessions and gain three hundred pounds and shit purple and green, if they knew at the end of it all they could get a script for something that would put them down. I know I would. I know I’m fucked. The Nazis had it figured out: lebensunwertes leben, life unworthy of life.”

He had an encyclopedic knowledge of Nazi terminology. He regularly had at least three or four tabs open to Third Reich themed Wikipedia pages. Earlier that day, after watching a promo for Veep, he had said, “I wish there was a show like that, but set in Germany in 1942. You know, with the whole Nazi High Command being dicks to each other, screwing up, and exchanging barbs or whatever. Lots of ‘oops!’ shit. They find out that a concentration camp officer didn’t use enough Zyklon B in the gas chamber and all the jews and gypsies were just left standing there, waiting to be de-loused. Hitler calls Rudolf Hess a dipshit. Eichmann makes a dramatic entrance and everyone rolls their eyes.”

I slid down in the passenger seat and propped my feet against the glovebox. “The problem is that there’s no such thing as palliative care for depression. The expectation is always that someday, somehow, you will get better. No one will admit that the condition is terminal, no matter how intractable the symptoms, so it’s never just about relieving the pain.”

“Right,” he said, “that’s right.” He didn’t have to say it. We had known each other for long enough, and had these discussions so many times, that there was no need for affirmation. We had the same subtly bitter, pseudo-psychic connection shared by old married couples, and just as much hope of escape and a new life. Sometimes I would lose track of which of us was talking, and would have to listen to the sound of the voice to see if it was his or my own.

“And I am so tired of people telling me to ‘focus on getting healthy,’” I added. “It’s always ‘just worry about getting healthy.’ Getting healthy is the bodyguard blocking all the doors. Want a girlfriend? Get healthy first. Sick of being unemployed? Don’t worry about it. Get healthy and then someone will want to hire you. How the hell are you ever supposed to get healthy alone, in a vacuum, with nothing, feeling worthless? How are you supposed to get healthy at all?”

A thin hand knocked on the window. A teenage girl, petite, bespectacled, small hoops in her ears, pink stars on her fingernails, was standing next to the car, holding a white paper bag and a plastic cup. He rolled down the window and took the food from her. I dropped my shoes from the dash and thanked her without looking at her face.

I sipped my shake as we pulled out of the parking lot. “You know that those hamburgers are probably mostly cellulose, right? They’re like 40% wood pulp.”

“I don’t care,” he said, as he accelerated. “I am going to eat all of these tonight, and I’m going to roll around in the wrappers like a pig.”