The man across the table held his leg in his hand and poured a shot of moonshine into his knee as a lone machine gun burped in the trenches. His name was Islam, and he was the local poet laureate, and the drink he was preparing was one of his not-so-subtle tests of brotherhood.

It was the spring of 1994 and I was in the Tuzla pocket, an island of Bosnian Muslim-- controlled territory surrounded on three sides by the Serbs. My traveling partner and fellow freelance war correspondent, Sebastian Junger, and I were holed up in an abandoned one-floor brick house with Islam and his buddies: a giant troubadour in ski boots named Yeti, a fourteen-year-old alcoholic armed with a Russian pistol, and two combat medics nicknamed Seal and Hell Rider. The house was a few hundred yards behind the World War I--style front line that was at the moment simmering with violence.

According to my calculations, informed by a year in the war zone, at any minute the Serbs were going to launch their spring offensive here along the northern edge of the pocket. Tanks and battalions of drunken soldiers were going to attack all up and down the line, and if they got through, the war could change completely. If we could get up to the front, it would be a big scoop, and now we were just seven hundred feet and what looked like one kneeful of moonshine away from closing the deal. We had been drinking with these guys for twenty hours straight, trying to talk them into bringing us up. It wasn't textbook, but then again this was bootstrap reporting.

Because I spoke Bosnian and Sebastian didn't, I usually fucked him over in situations like this, saying in Bosnian something like, "Oh, Sebastian would love to drink from your knee." But now he was tucked away under some blankets in another room, primarily because I had already screwed him over so many times that day. It was my turn to do the dirty work.

After Islam topped off, he handed me his prosthetic chalice with two shots of moonshine in the cavity that not more than a minute before had held his knee. A tiny slick of oil floated across the top as I brought it to my lips. It stank of sweat.

"This is it. You owe us one," I said before downing it.

Islam and the others cheered and patted me on the back as I handed back the leg. I got to my feet, steadied myself, and began to sermonize about friendship, the power of the press, and how fucking important it was that they finally escort us up to the line. I was making progress, and before long they were saying melodramatic things like "I'll die for you" and "You can have my sister." I had done good in their eyes, but it didn't matter in the end because events would soon make the trip to the trenches irrelevant.

A little later, a heavyset farm girl with a T-shirt that read EAT TO WIN stopped by, and one of the medics turned on the radio for a little mood music. That's when I heard the news: The Serbs had done an end around and attacked the southern part of the pocket. To everyone in the room, it was a great relief, because it meant they weren't going to die in the next week. But for me, it was terrible news, and not just because I missed the big scoop. In the attack, the Serbs had cut the only road in or out of the pocket. This meant two things: One, because of the size of the offensive, Sebastian and I were probably going to be marooned for several weeks, until we could run the road; and two, I was going to be without the antidepressant Zoloft.

At the time, I held the dubious title of American Most Heavily Medicated on Zoloft. I had been put on the drug about a year and a half earlier and had been munching pills like M&M's ever since. But now I would have to go cold turkey, as I was down to just a few pills--a three-day supply at most. I had a large reserve stash hidden in a sneaker in Croatia, but that was hundreds of miles and now also one very active front away. Unwittingly, I was about to become a lab rat, and the Tuzla pocket my cage.

Today I am referred to in case studies as Patient X: the person behind the anonymous success story that some heavily depressed patients are told to give them hope of what is possible after taking modern antidepressants. Implicit in this is that the medicine is solely responsible. As in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose citizens numb themselves to unpleasant thoughts with soma, the popular view of modern antidepressants is, Take a pill and all your problems will be solved: "And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts." But the truth is, rebuilding a life after a long stretch of depression is much more complicated than simply ingesting a happy pill.

Depression was once considered a psychological problem. Nowadays it is often seen as the manifestation of a neurological glitch. The reality is that the two are inextricably mixed, one feeding off and driving the other, and the longer one is depressed, the harder it is to unravel the mess. The road back often requires both neurological and psychological fixes. Little discussed is that the home stretch to "yourself" involves something else altogether. It is what Tracy Thompson in her book The Beast means when on the last page, talking about life after Prozac, she writes, "The question then became: How do I live now?" The big, unrecognized hurdle for the chronically depressed after the miracle of modern medicine is bestowed upon you is discovering your new place in the everyday world.

In order to deal with this, many people turn to the only source of guidance they know, the psychiatrist's couch. It is what is recommended. But from the beginning, I was not the best patient. The day Zoloft worked for the second time, I knew almost instantly that lying on some couch to find my way forward in life was not an option. I was certain the answers to my questions lay elsewhere. But eventually, years later, I started to wonder about that critical decision: Was it a choice, or was it chemical?

Recently I drove to a small town in eastern Massachusetts to visit Dr. John Atchley, a man I had not talked to since 1993. He was the psychiatrist who had put me on Zoloft and the one who dubbed me Patient X. I found him living in an old farmhouse.

He greeted me at the door as if I were a long-lost member of the family. Even though he is now eighty-one, Dr. Atchley still looks the same--lanky, with a long, distinguished face and a natural air of superiority mixed with a little funk. He led me into a small home office that contained two chairs, a couch, and a shelf full of dusty Freudian texts, and offered me coffee.

I first met Dr. Atchley in the summer of 1991. At that time I was in the middle of a suicidal depression. I had never appeared to be that kind of person, but the truth was that a bomb had been ticking in me for a long time.

I remember clearly the day it started. It was a morning in the fall of 1981, and I was thirteen. I woke to a world that was different from the one I had fallen asleep in. The world, so full of possibilities and optimism, was now bleak and pointless. My mind had gone from outwardly focused to suddenly, oddly obsessed with finding the answer to the most fundamental question: What is the point of life? I couldn't move until I knew the answer. It was as if some demon stole into my room that night and chained me to an iron ball of metaphysical doubt. Overnight a wall had sprung up between my world and the carefree one it seemed everyone else lived in.

I had my first thoughts of suicide, and for several days I begged God to kill me. But slowly the intense sense of alienation waned, and I worked my way around the maddening voice in my head that wanted to know at every moment what the point was in going forward. I carried on by telling myself that someday it would get better. But always there was that iron ball, and over the years it grew bigger and heavier and began to take its toll. I was becoming two people: a happy-go-lucky, athletic, clean-cut kid on the outside and a brooding, negatively self-analytical depressive on the inside. I left for college in 1986 and very quickly busted apart.

Deep down I'd always felt that once I made it that far, I would be okay. But the opposite happened. An alienation unlike anything I had experienced before washed over me. To escape, I medicated myself with what was available: booze, pot, and, most of all, action. The thrill of danger let me for brief moments escape the obsessive, all-encompassing need to examine my own existence. By the time I came home after my freshman year, I had been arrested three times, twice for fighting and once for shoplifting. No one caught me, however, at my favorite diversion, which was breaking and entering. At night, when the other kids were studying or partying, I would slip away and shimmy into frat houses, student apartments, even the local post office, just for the thrill.

On spring break that year, I made a trip to the Bahamas with a group of friends. There was a lot of drinking and drugging, but that wasn't keeping me distracted. I spent some late nights wandering around the poorer neighborhoods of Nassau, looking for trouble. When that didn't work, I upped the ante by sneaking aboard the cruise ship SS Dolphin. I hid the entire night in the disco, and in the morning I was on deck as the tugboats nudged the huge ship to sea. I was officially a stowaway with no idea where the ship was headed. But that wasn't the point. I had the constant thrill of being caught as my companion now, and that danger gave me some of the most peaceful days I had had in years--that is, until the boat pulled into port in Miami. There, I talked my way through customs, dressed head to toe in SS Dolphin--insignia clothes I had pinched from the onboard store. When I returned to the Bahamas, I told my friends I had fallen asleep on the ship and awoke when it was out at sea. I didn't know how to actually explain what I had done or why.

I managed to graduate in 1990 with decent grades and with most of the world not knowing what a nut I had become. But now it was time to move into the real world, and I had run out of gas. I sank into a suicidal depression. I withdrew from the world. I would panic whenever I set foot outside. For nearly two years, I slept the days away and lay awake at night.

It was a crisp night in August 1991 when things came to a head. I rummaged through a crawl space looking for an old shotgun. There was no triggering event. I just remembered it was there and wanted to hold it, smell it, see how it looked in my hands. It felt like a magic wand, and it gave me the release burglary used to. I put the barrel to my face and marveled at the steel-blue sheen. For some reason I put it away. Its day was in the future, but I couldn't hold out forever. I cried that night; not for myself, but for my friends and family.

The next morning I was lying on the roof. I had been up there for hours and finally crawled back in at dawn, before the neighbors left for work. I didn't want to embarrass anyone. Sometime later I went downstairs, and, trembling, I asked my mother the simplest but most difficult of favors: Please help me.

And that's how I met Dr. Atchley, who, sitting in his farmhouse, recalled my dead eyes.

"Shit, man, you were so far gone, I didn't know what we were going to do," he says. "You were really out there."

"Oh, man, I'm sorry," Sebastian said when I told him about the Zoloft. "I didn't know you were on anything."

"Nah, it's all right," I said. "I don't think anything will happen, but if I become a little down or something, that's probably the reason."

This conversation took place on a dirt road on a mountain in Posavina after we left Islam and the others and headed back to our rented apartment in the city of Tuzla to wait out the Serb offensive. I had been telling people in Bosnia for the past year that the fistful of blue pills I was taking were for my stomach, but I decided on the mountain to come clean with Sebastian. I wanted him to know that if I retrograded into some unpleasant, less personable version of myself, he shouldn't take it personally--or in some sense blame me. Truth was, I believed that I would find that I no longer needed Zoloft--that over the past eighteen months I had been successful in righting my ship--but like Dr. Jekyll locking himself in his laboratory, I decided to cover my bases.

The apartment we shared was in a complex of gray, eight-story socialist buildings near the center of town. It was comfortable but a bit dreary, with its two rooms done up in middle-class Communist chic: Bulgarian couches, Yugoslavian appliances, oil paintings of snowcapped mountains, and a cheap Korean television. This last item did little good, however, because electricity was an infrequent luxury, as were water and gas. In a sense it was stone-age living, except for the artillery barrages that cleared the streets every afternoon.

We quickly fell into a routine. Sebastian spent his days looking for slice-of-life stories while I worked on an article about Celi´c, a small town we'd visited weeks earlier. At night we ventured into Old Town for beer and to meet women before curfew at 10:00 P.M. After a year and a half on Zoloft, one would think I'd have had one eye always on my mood, but that wasn't the case. It's probably confirmation that the drug was still in my blood; I was too busy living to think about it. But after about a week, the world began to slowly, imperceptibly change.

One morning I tore up everything I had written and began again on the Celi´c piece. I wanted to pursue a new angle or something. I scribbled for hours but made little headway because I started to recognize some fundamental problems.

Why was I writing?

What difference would another article on this place make?

Who cares?

I couldn't concentrate, as these questions stood like sentries in front of any coherent thought. But I tried to push ahead. Sebastian even left me his laptop after I promised I would put it to good use.

Three days later Sebastian snuck into the living room to see how I was doing. He found me sleeping next to a pile of cigarette butts, my five o'clock shadow lit by the glow of the screen. He assumed I had written myself into exhaustion. He looked over and read my story. It said only, "Celi´c was a small town."

The following night, after a solid day of napping, I started to feel Sebastian getting on my nerves. There was no newsworthy action in the field, yet he was writing dumbass stories in the dining room, like his piece on the price of vegetables. He even had the balls to ask me to read it.

I told him, "Sebastian, no one wants to read about this stuff."

"I don't care," he said earnestly. "It's good practice."

It got so bad I wanted to toss the little Girl Scout off the balcony. The heavy taps on his keyboard pounded in my head like Morse code that read, "This is great. I can't wait until tomorrow. What are you going to do with the new day, chief?" I had no choice. I staked a heavy blanket to the beam above the doorway between the dining and living rooms. It worked like a charm. I no longer heard him gathering his nuts.

When I first met Dr. Atchley in 1991, he was nearing fifty years in psychiatry. The common wisdom in picking a shrink is to get someone whom you can relate to and who is up on the latest advances in the field. A seventy-something Wasp may not have been the natural choice for a twenty-three-year-old Irish kid from suburban Long Island, but it proved to be one of my big breaks in life.

It turned out Dr. Atchley had been in on the ground floor of the great leap forward. In the early 1970s, his brother's daughter killed herself on her twenty-first birthday after a long struggle with bulimia. She had access to the premier psychiatrists in the field and the best treatment facilities in the country. But it all failed the young woman, so in an effort to find some good in the tragedy, his brother pledged a sizable chunk of his fortune to research at McLean Hospital outside Boston. Dr. Atchley became his adviser.

What they eventually decided was that bulimia was essentially a by-product of depression. This was important because it meant that treatments for depression also could be effective with bulimics. The problem was that the treatment of depression at the time was a hit-or-miss proposition. A mix of crude psychopharmaceuticals with deleterious side effects and psychotherapy was used for the hardcore cases, but usually the patient struggled to make any headway. Then, in the mid 1980s, a pharmaceutical company approached McLean Hospital and asked them to conduct a clinical trial on a new antidepressant, fluoxetine. It was the first "rationally developed" psychopharmaceutical.

Fluoxetine is better known today as Prozac. Before Prozac, antidepressants were "found" rather than developed; that is, a drug designed for another purpose was observed as having a positive effect on mood. Thus it became an antidepressant. The problem was that these drugs acted like sledgehammers, alleviating some of the more prominent symptoms but also causing severe side effects such as anxiety or an inability to tolerate direct sunlight. In the late 1970s, scientists began to research these drugs in an effort to design a new generation that attacked depression with more precision.

One of the chief focuses of this research was a neurotransmitter called serotonin, a chemical messenger in the brain that facilitates communication between the neurons. Serotonin had been the subject of numerous studies, and often people with deficient levels had exhibited depressive traits. It works like a neurological mail truck. When the brain wants to do something like adjust an emotional level, serotonin is sent from one neuron across an open space called a synaptic crevice, and it parks in another neuron's receptor, sort of a neurological loading dock. There, a message is either passed on to another neuron or simply held at bay. Eventually the docked serotonin is either washed away down the synaptic crevice or summoned back to the home neuron by an "auto receptor" in a process called reuptaking. Depressives, it was found, often lack the proper level of serotonin in the synaptic crevice, which interferes with the normal flow of communication in the brain. Drugs like Prozac, known as selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), elegantly combat this by disabling the auto receptor's ability to reuptake.

Dr. Atchley explained all this to me at the end of my first session, assuring me that my low level of serotonin was at the root of my pain. Specifically, he diagnosed me as a dysthymic, someone with a chronic, low-grade fever of the spirit. In studies, it has been shown that dysthymics have a more realistic assessment of life than more highly functioning people. In short, the key to happiness seems to rest with the right amount of what has been termed "positive illusions" about life. Since I was thirteen, I had been leaking illusions like a car dripping oil--and by my early twenties I was all out of the lubrication of unrealistic optimism. In other words, my mind had seized up.

"Will I just be happy?" I asked Dr. Atchley as I studied the prescription he gave me.

"I've never been on it," he answered. "But, no, it's not like that. But you'll know. Trust me, John. It will just hit you."

I took the Prozac as soon as I got it and almost immediately began looking for a change, like I was searching for a sign from God. With so little to go on, I had no idea what to expect, but I knew that if it worked, it would have to be big.

For days after I staked the blanket to the beam, I tried to keep afloat by telling myself that what I was thinking was nothing more than the result of a faulty connection in my brain. But it was a losing battle, as that little rational part of me was drowned out by that old question: What's the point of all this? That question, that damn need to understand everything before I could do anything, came on like the Ice Man. It reappeared with a new strength and bitterness, focused like a laser, tearing at the illusions upon which I had rebuilt my life. Those kids you smuggled out of Sarajevo and were supporting in Italy? They hate you and are playing you for a fool. That sniper hunter you consider your friend and learned so much from? He's a desperate killer who's using you. Zoloft? A crutch, because you're pathetic and weak.

When the alienation and emptiness had become too much, I put blankets over the windows, too, and sealed all light from entering my room. I made a cave and I slept as much as I could, but fourteen hours was my limit. That left ten hours a day of consciousness with no diversion except Sebastian, who became more and more grating as the seconds ticked by. I hated him.

"You think you can take me?" I asked him one day when he returned from one of his morning jogs. Little Mary Sunshine was wearing those ridiculous satin jogging shorts Clinton used to run in. They were smug and they pissed me off.

"Yeah," he said matter-of-factly as he untied his little sneakers.

I was taken aback, as I took this not only as a personal insult but also a glaring example of elitist arrogance. He was from Massachusetts.

"How do you figure?" I asked him, truly interested.

He looked at me and smiled.

I stood before him in full psychotic regalia. I wore a blue T-shirt and jeans, the same outfit I had been wearing for two weeks. My clothes were stained with streaks of dirt, grease, and chocolate. I hadn't bathed, either, so I smelled like the bottom of a gym locker. My face was ghost-white and covered in a bushy red beard stained yellow with nicotine. My greasy hair was sticking out in all directions.

"I'm quicker than you are," he answered.

Quicker? What a strange response, I thought. But before I could ponder this any further, a fountain of venom splashed against my skull like coffee against the glass nob on top of a percolator. He's fucking with me. I wanted to rush across the room face first and take a bite out of him. Then a calm suddenly fell over me. It was time. I looked on him as a snake must eye a mouse. Perhaps he saw my eyes go dead, because he didn't say another word, just backed out and went into the bathroom.

I read once that Mike Tyson is on Zoloft but goes off it several weeks before fights. That sounds just about right. He relies on fury to win the day, and it's a primal storm that takes some weeks to form. My tame run-in with Sebastian should have been just the start, but in fact that was it for the rage portion. Rather, I was about to fall through a psychic trapdoor that I never knew was there.

It all started a day or two later, after we got an unexpected few hours of electricity and I watched The Silence of the Lambs on TV in Serbo-Croatian. I don't remember much from that night, but Sebastian says that I was scared and watched the movie under a blanket. I awoke sometime late the next morning to an empty apartment and a different brain. I was no longer obsessing over metaphysical questions, nor for that matter was I thinking very much at all. My memories of this period are fuzzy and disjointed. I'm naked and rummaging through the apartment, looking for who knows what. I come across some white sheets. I wrap myself in them and take on the look of a depraved Roman emperor. I go to the balcony, which overlooks an empty parking lot. Below me is a group of kids playing soccer with a patched-up ball. I think, That's pathetic and the little fucks don't even know it. I stare at them until one kid catches my eye and freezes.

"Time to study," I yell. "Hit the books or you'll never get out of this dump. Think for yourself for once, goddammit."

The kids take off running.

Later that afternoon, I wake up swaddled in sheets on the couch as an artillery shell screams over our apartment. It blows up the casino down the street. I'm on the balcony in my toga just in time to hear the second shell rip the air above my head. More shells follow, and I'm riding a wave of joy. Each shell flies over me and explodes nearby with great force. The building shakes. I cheer as they approach and hold out my hand and open my mouth to feel the air suck as they whiz by. I want to touch them.

I started taking Prozac in August 1991, and I continued on it for six weeks. I would lie in bed, looking for anything that would tell me I was okay, some epiphany that would answer the big questions that I was chained to. But it was not to be. I was the same on it as I was off. That fall, I was put on some new drugs. Again, nothing. Eventually, Dr. Atchley pulled the plug on the drug treatment and had me enroll in an est-like program. Anything to keep me alive until a medicine came along that worked.

For the following year, my life oscillated between weeks of mild hope and months of total despair. Dr. Atchley tried to keep me afloat with words of wisdom, but like everyone else, he was rendered mute when I was in a tailspin. Months earlier, the shotgun had been quietly removed from the house, but that wasn't the only way to flirt with death. I would sometimes take a car and race down the beach parkway toward a phalanx of tollbooths where some local kid had killed himself years earlier. What were those final seconds like?

My family was desperate to help me and during one of my milder moments convinced me to enroll in graduate school. Keep yourself busy. I was in Charlottesville, Virginia, living in a one-room apartment off student loans, when the call came in the summer of 1992 that there was a new drug, one that had shown glimmers of success with dysthymics, called Zoloft. I went on it for six weeks. I didn't attend classes (I didn't see the point) but spent my days smoking and waiting. In early October, I stopped taking it, under the assumption that it wasn't working.

Then something hit me. My sister and her husband had made a trip down to see me a few weeks earlier. Normally, this would be a living hell, because it meant I had to come out of my cocoon and force myself to engage other people. I usually had an hour, maybe two, of energy to keep up appearances before a panic attack set in. But this time I actually looked forward to seeing them, and I was sorry to see them go. It had to have been the Zoloft.

I tried to get a refill through Dr. Atchley, but he had moved up to Massachusetts that fall and told me I would have to find a doctor in Virginia. I went to the school clinic and was assigned to a woman resident, who made it immediately clear in her soft, insinuating voice that to get the Zoloft I would have to see her repeatedly. ("The goal is to become balanced," she said gently. "To become whole and healthy, and, yes, drugs can play an important role. But life-changing skills are just as important, if not more so.") I could see that to get the dope, I would be chained to this hippie for months, but now that I had seen the light, I wasn't about to delay my dash out of hell to play Mr. Wellness with Joni Mitchell. In the next week I arranged to get my hands on a sizable load without a prescription. The maximum prescribed limit was 200 milligrams, but I started with 400 and soon ventured into the 500 range. This is how I won the title of American Most Heavily Medicated on Zoloft (a title, the professionals tell me, that I hold to this day).

For weeks I munched my Zoloft, just hoping to feel better again. One day I woke, took a shower, and headed to class for the first time in weeks. I was crossing a bridge on fraternity row when it hit. First, I smelled burning wood. I stopped dead in my tracks because I had a rush of pleasant memories from childhood. I noticed the breeze through my hair felt nice, and not like something to be observed or analyzed. It was small, but it was everything. I stood on the bridge for several minutes, taking it all in: the bushes, the trees, the dirt, the sky. I watched smoke rise from a chimney, but I didn't ask myself why have a fire on a sunny morning like this. Suddenly, I had it. The epiphany. The change I had been looking for before was emotional. An uplift in my spirits, maybe even an answer to the big one: What is the point of life? But that wasn't it. Rather, the difference was essentially physical. It was like my mind's eye had had double vision and now my sight was clear. Where before I had this consciousness of floating above life like a passenger in a jet watching the patchwork of the earth slide beneath, now I was suddenly on the ground, where the patterns of life were not visible but the feeling of being part of it was once again in my bones. If you saw me that day on the bridge, with the wondrous look I had on my face, you may have thought I was seeing God.

That's not to say I was suddenly "happy" or "whole," as the doctor in the clinic would have put it. In fact, I was filled with the burning desire to make up for lost time. I felt very uneasy. It was like some cosmic force suddenly plunked me down in a strange forest, and now it was up to me to find the way home. It's where the Zoloft stopped and the rest of life began. If depressives have too realistic a view of life and happy people are deluded, what I needed then was to find a set of illusions that would give my life meaning. I needed to create my map of the world.

As I said before, many people come to this bridge and go to the couch for guidance. But to me it was crystal clear that exactly what I didn't need was more detachment and analysis. I needed to live, and since I had been removed from the currents of life for so long, I now felt the need to dive in where the current was strongest. I had ostensibly been studying Yugoslavia in graduate school, so I picked the wars there to jump into life. By day I feigned interest in job openings on Capitol Hill to appease my now-relieved family, and at night I planned my trip to the killing fields. I read up on how to work as a freelance war correspondent, forged press credentials, bought a flak jacket and helmet with my student-loan money, and stockpiled massive amounts of Zoloft, and five months after the bridge I left for Bosnia. I soon talked my way into the war, and over the ensuing year before my trip to Tuzla, I was more or less successful in realizing my goal of building a new life. Depression faded into a distant memory.

As the years passed, however, something nagged at me. When you've been on an antidepressant as long as I have, questions naturally arise about its role in your life. This is so because it operates in that netherworld of nature versus envi- ronment where genes, hormones, life experiences, and upbringing interact in a hundred billion electrically charged synapses to produce a self. Seven years later, then, the question I had for Dr. Atchley was simple: Why did I go there to start my life over? Was it the Zoloft or was it me?

"I was waiting for you to ask that question," he says. "The truth is no one knows how this stuff exactly works. But you went to Bosnia for your own reasons--that was you, not the Zoloft."

We chat for about a half hour more before I make my way to the door, but then I stop.

"I don't know if you know this, but when I was over in Bosnia, I got trapped without my Zoloft for six weeks. I went totally nuts. At first like before, but then deeper, you know?"

"Oh, sure," he answers. "We didn't know it back then, but what you probably experienced was Zoloft withdrawal. You were on so much, and you stopped so suddenly. Your brain just went haywire."

My memories of the last days in Tuzla are really indistinct. But the denouement is clear. One night, stinking and dressed in my filthy clothes, I walked barefoot into the Cafe Casablanca, a hole-in-the-wall gangster bar on our street. There was a smell of urine in the air, and after a few drinks I started to eye a tableful of thugs in track suits.

I remember the next morning waking in my swaddle of sheets. I had blood on my feet. I walked to the balcony, and the kids were playing soccer. I sermonized again, but this time they stood their ground.

"What the fuck are you doing?" Sebastian asked, suddenly appearing behind me.

It's often difficult for people to recognize mental illness because so much is hidden, but what Sebastian saw on the balcony was crystal clear. He made the decision then and there that we had to get out.

I didn't protest. In fact, I barely uttered a word. He packed up his stuff, then mine, and spent the afternoon scrounging enough gas to make the run while I napped. The next morning we started down the southern road out of the pocket. At the time, I was probably just coming out of the withdrawal phase, and I was slumped in the passenger seat as Sebastian pushed the jeep to its limits. Gone were the delusions and back came the obsessive introspection. Serb gunners were still in the dense green hills across the valley, with a perfect view of the road. About five miles to safety, things became very quiet, always a bad sign in a war zone. It means other living things have sensed something wrong and left, leaving a dead void that is palpable. Like old times, though, the pregnant danger lifted me out of myself for a moment.

"You think I'm nuts?" I asked.

"Yes," he said without hesitation.

"No, I mean really."

"Yes, really," he said, smiling. "Trust me."

I looked around at the deathtrap we were rolling through and then back at him.

"Are you?"

"No," he answered flatly.

"Look out your window, chief. This isn't a normal way to live your life, you know?"

"I didn't say I was normal. Just not nuts like you."

"What do you see here?" I asked, improvising a Rorschach test from a stain on my pants.

"Fuck you."

Nothing happened until we reached Kladanj, the last town before we exited the pocket. There we were arrested as spies.

We were taken by police to a local barracks and put in a small room with two wooden seats in front of a large metal desk. The secret-police interrogator arrived with a colleague several minutes later. The initial round of questioning lasted about thirty minutes, during which Sebastian talked and I kept quiet. But after a while the interrogator wanted to hear from me.

"What about him?" he wanted to know, pointing at me.

This guy was a rinky-dink cop, and he made my blood boil. Who the fuck did he think he was to point at me?

"What about me?"

He pulled his eyes off mine and turned to his colleague, waving his hand over me as if to state the obvious: This is no Western reporter. This savage has been spying on us from the bushes for two months.

"Who you working for?"

"A lot of people. What's that got to do with anything?"

I could feel Sebastian fidgeting in his seat, waiting to be led away to the firing squad. I didn't wait for another question.

"If you think we're spies, just do it!" I shouted.

My outburst caught them by surprise. We were ordered out into the hallway, where we listened to the murmur of conversation through the wall as the two men decided our fate. A few minutes later, we were summoned, and with very un-Balkan-like efficiency we were read our sentence: We were to be out of Kladanj by sundown or else. They confiscated our film, and we were escorted out of town. Sometimes it pays to be a little crazy.

That night, we parked outside a Swedish UN outpost for protection. The forests were filled with heavily armed, unsavory characters, and the guards in their bunkers agreed to watch over us while we slept. Sebastian rolled out his sleeping bag on the grass while I took the jeep. Then something dawned on me.

"What's the date?" I asked.

"May twenty-second."

"Hey, it's my birthday," I said.

Sebastian got up and walked over to the jeep. "Congratulations," he said. "How old are you?"

"Twenty-six."

"Twenty-six years ago today," he said, smiling. "When you were a kid, is this where you thought you'd end up, Mr. Falk? Curled up outside a UN base, covered in dirt and crazy?"

"Sure."

"Okay," he said. "If you can have one gift on your special day, what do you want?"

"Zoloft," I said. "Fresh batch. Enough for both of us."

It took another four days, a bout of pneumonia, and a visit to a Doctors Without Borders outpost before I got to my sneakerful of Zoloft. I had been off my drug for six weeks.

Ten days after that, I was as good as new. Today, I am reasonably sane.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io