Content Warning: The source text contains descriptions of anti-gay bigotry, incest, bestiality, and death by suicide.

Arenas writes the introduction as he is dying of AIDS in New York City in August 1990, four months before his death by suicide. In 1987, after learning he had AIDS, Arenas traveled to Miami to die by the sea. However, his attempt to die was unsuccessful and his friend brought him back to New York to be hospitalized.

While intubated for over three months in the hospital, Arenas continued his literary work before he finally recovered enough to leave. After discovering that in his absence someone left an envelope of rat poison on his nightstand as an encouragement to commit suicide, Arenas angrily abandoned his secret plans to end his life. He begged a photograph of his dead friend, the writer Virgilio Piñera, for additional time, for “three more years of life to finish my work, which is my vengeance against most of the human race” (32).

Arenas challenged himself to finish his quintet of novels (Pentagonia) and to rewrite his autobiography before he died (the original manuscript of which the police confiscated in Cuba). The title adopted new meaning: originally it referred to the fact that living as a fugitive in the woods, Arenas had to finish his writing for the day before night fell.