artist, and maybe you will be too.” If it was a girl, letting her paint his nails. If it was a boy, taking him to ball games. You could take a girl to ball games too.
* * *
—
Dr. Cheng said, “You’re young and you’re strong, and you’re going to take excellent care of yourself.”
* * *
—
Good, thick, Turkish coffee. Sanka with too much cream after a long dinner. Sad, weak office coffee.
* * *
—
The year 2000. The last party of 1999.
* * *
—
Red wine. Beer. Vodka tonics on a summer day.
* * *
—
Christmas, which he’d just really started to love.
* * *
—
Getting to Australia someday. Sweden. Japan.
* * *
—
Dr. Cheng said, “I know the last thing you feel like right now is having more blood drawn, but we’re going to get your T-cell count today. Since we know this is a brand-new infection, I expect your count to be very strong. So we’ll have some good news on top of the bad. We’ll do the draw right here.”
* * *
—
Arthritis. Gray hair. Bushy eyebrows, like his father’s. Dentures, canes, prostate issues.
* * *
—
His twenty-fifth high school reunion. He might really have gone, despite everything.
* * *
—
A dog he could walk by the lake.
* * *
—
Dr. Cheng said, “You might not feel like talking at first, but I’m writing down the info for the Test Positive Aware Network support group. It’s on the bottom of the first page here.”
* * *
—
The brutal wind on the El platform. Fifty people huddled under the heating lamp. Pigeons crowding at their feet.
* * *
—
Owning a house. Painting the door, so he could tell his friends to look for the purple door.
* * *
—
The foods that hadn’t yet made their way to America. The things he hadn’t tasted that everyone would be crazy for in ten years.
* * *
—
The way Chicago looked from an airplane window, flying in from the east. The only time you could really see the city’s face.
* * *
—
Dr. Cheng said, “We have no idea what advances are down the road. In my opinion it’s a waiting game. Because better medicine is out there. Some flower in the Amazon, who knows. It could be tomorrow, it could be next year. There’s no reason not to believe that at some point there will be survivors.”
* * *
—
The cement beach up by Bryn Mawr, the psychedelic foot someone had painted there.
* * *
—
The next Harvey Milk. The first gay senator, the first gay governor, the first woman president, the last bigoted congressman.
* * *
—
Dancing till the floor was an optional landing place. Dancing elbows out, dancing with arms up, dancing in a pool of sweat.
* * *
—
All the books he hadn’t started.
* * *
—
The man at Wax Trax! Records with the beautiful eyelashes. The man who sat every Saturday at Nookies, reading the Economist and eating eggs, his ears always strangely red. The ways his own life might have intersected with theirs, given enough time, enough energy, a better universe.
* * *
—
The love of his life. Wasn’t there supposed to be a love of his life?
* * *
—
Dr. Cheng said, “Our counselor is here today, and I’m going to have Gretchen walk you down the hall and wait with you till he’s available.”
* * *
—
His body, his own stupid, slow, hairy body, its ridiculous desires, its aversions, its fears. The way his left knee cracked in the cold.
* * *
—
The sun, the moon, the sky, the stars.
* * *
—
The end of every story.
* * *
—
Oak trees.
* * *
—
Music.
* * *
—
Breath.
* * *
—
Dr. Cheng said, “Whoa, there, let’s lie down. Let’s get you lying down.”
2015
Serge said the phone signals were jammed all over the city. Which was possibly why Fiona hadn’t heard from Claire, and likely why she hadn’t heard from Cecily, who’d been gone all afternoon.
Fiona had become, throughout the day, simultaneously more and less panicked. Less, because many names of the dead had been released, and Claire’s and Nicolette’s were not among them. More, because she still hadn’t heard anything. Less, again, when she realized the problem with the phones. More, every time she stopped to think about it.
At six o’clock, Cecily finally buzzed up from the street. “He’s with me,” she said.
It was hard to tell how much, if at all, Cecily and Kurt had reconciled in that time. The fact that he came with her certainly meant something. But they wore matching looks of concern, and the vibe Fiona got was more of two people assisting each other through