Aimlessly walking the streets of London that wet winter's morning, I surrendered to my dark depression. The past months of business calamities coupled with personal betrayals had finally beaten me. Why did this cycle keep haunting me? Why did I consistently make such disastrous choices? Just wanting the world to go away I sought the refuge of my bed. Unfortunately there was no escaping the voices in my head urging me.daring me to my own personal apocalypse. Silently pleading with the universe, I prayed to be rescued from this bottomless pit of despair. I was about to learn that the heavens do listen to our sincere cries ; in their infinite wisdom, they answer us not with the saviors we want, but the ones we need. Heroes don't always manifest themselves in stereotypical ways. .
I was staying at my dear friends' mansion in the middle of Belgravia (the most exclusive residential address in London). The Kornfeld's had generously offered me their palatial nine-story townhouse while they wintered at their home in Florida. It was around one p.m. on February 3rd, 1996, when Francis, the housekeeper, called up to my room to bid me farewell for the weekend. I continued to stare blankly at the movie First Knight on the television screen. It was during a noisy fight scene that I heard some muffled sounds on the landing below. Assuming it was Francis, I called out asking what she had forgotten. Suddenly two ominous figures appeared in the doorway of my .
room. They were dressed from head to toe in black; I couldn't discern one identifying feature, even their eyes were covered with dark glasses. Against their shadowed .
silhouettes I immediately recognized one terrifying detail: the sharp, shimmering metallic gleam of knives.
Before I could react, they were on top of me; covering my mouth with gloved hands and securing me down to the bed. Terrified, my heart stood still and the room went into a drunken spin as I felt the piercing edge of a blade against my neck.