Louis and Marc tried to have another party for me, but I absolutely put my foot down. I’d called them to come pick me up from the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai that night and drive me back to Le Mondrian. It was nearly midnight and I was exhausted and a little disoriented. I had jammed several fingers and dislocated one. Remarkably, none were broken. They wrapped my hands in ace bandages and gave me a shot of Demerol.

“Are you sure you can drive like that?” Marc asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Why don’t you drive Noah’s car for him,” Louis suggested.

“Yeah, I think I’d better.”

“I’m fine,” I said, then semi-passed out in the backseat of the Infiniti.

Thursday night we had a quiet dinner with Leon and I told them all everything that had happened.

“I can’t believe you went to their hotel,” Marc said. “That’s so brave.”

“No, it isn’t. Not really. Actually, it has been pointed out to me that it was kind of stupid.”

“Well, you had a much more interesting evening than I did,” Leon said. “I watched Doogie Howser and fell asleep before the end. Now I’ll never know whether he decided to cure cancer or teenage acne. He was struggling with the decision when I nodded off.”

Louis had made pasta tossed in lemon and oil with roasted vegetables. It was delicious when I managed to get a bite. Handling a fork with my fingers taped together was a challenge. As was picking up a wine glass.

“Should one of us feed you?”

“Oh, please no. I’m actually not that hungry.” And the thing is, I wasn’t. The easiest food for me to eat with my hands messed up was cookies. So I’d eaten half a bag of Oreos that afternoon while watching Bette Davis in Now, Voyager. The story of an ugly-duckling spinster who falls in love with a married man was exactly what I needed after nearly being killed. “I could use a straw, though.” That way I didn’t have to pick up the wine glass.

Louis jumped up and ran into the apartment. It was nice to have friends with a fully stocked kitchen. He was back moments later dropping a cocktail straw into my wine glass.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Well,” Leon said. “I think it’s something of a coincidence that the two murders were not connected.”

“But they were connected,” I said. “If Guy hadn’t killed Gaines and set fire to the store his family would never have come here. If they hadn’t come here they wouldn’t have found the money, so there’d have been no reason for his sister to kill him.”

“Do you really think she killed him for the money?” Leon asked.

“I think there was a big dose of sibling rivalry in there, too.”

“And…” added Marc. “If Ted Bain had never witnessed the Pachuk murder none of it would have happened.”

“I don’t know about that,” Louis said. “Guy would have found someone else to blackmail. He was doomed to end up a murder victim sooner or later.”

“But that would have been a different story,” I pointed out.

Louis brought out dessert, a blueberry pie he’d made from scratch with vanilla Häagen-Dazs.

“I thought you didn’t make fancy things on school nights,” I said.

“Well, this is a special occasion. Our favorite upstairs neighbor is alive and well.” Then, as he was serving me a piece, Louis looked behind me and under his breath said, “Don’t look now, but Detective Tall, Dark and Menacing is here.”

I turned around and saw O’Shea standing in the courtyard. It was a disconcerting sight. I got up and went over to him.

“What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to see how you are.”

I held up my bandaged and bruised hands and said, “I’m fine. I have a little trouble with cutlery and a lot of trouble with glasses. I’ve been providing my friends with a comedy show.”

“Look. I want to say I’m sorry about yelling at you yesterday.”

I shrugged. “You were right about most of it.”

“I know. But I didn’t have to be so pissy saying it.”

“Well, thanks.”

“And I wouldn’t have arrested you if you didn’t get in the ambulance.”

“I figured.”

“I mean, if you ever interfere again I might have to…”

“That’s good to know.”

“I should really stop talking about arresting you. Kind of strikes the wrong tone.”

“The wrong tone for what?”

“Oh, um, well… I was wondering if you’d like to go see a movie sometime next week?”

“I own a video store. I usually wait for video.”

“Oh, okay, well how about dinner?”

“You mean like a date?”

“Yes, like a date.”

“I didn’t know—I didn’t realize you were gay.”

“It’s kind of a new thing. Well, not new. It’s just… I haven’t told too many people. My sister. That’s about it.”

Now I felt bad given what I had to say, “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Can you tell me why?”

“No.”

* * *

My doctor’s office was Beverly Hills adjacent, on Robertson just below Burton Way. Becker-Morse Medical Group was on the second floor of a pink granite office building, which was only partially occupied. The clean white hallways had an otherworldly feel after driving through the grit of L.A. traffic. I walked through the varnished wood double doors and told the receptionist I was there.

The waiting room was done in mauve and a kind of turquoise that someone convinced them went with the mauve, but it really didn’t. I took a seat and picked up Rolling Stone. Def Leopard was on the cover. Their story was all about the tragedies that had befallen the band. Drug overdoses, car accidents, the mumps. I knew their name but couldn’t think of a single song of theirs. I skipped over an article about the music industry and AIDS, and went right to one about the governor of Arkansas running for president. I was struggling to figure out if the writer was pro or con when the nurse opened the door and called my name.

He was a stocky, possibly Italian-American guy in a loose-fitting pair of light blue scrubs. He had my file in one hand. It was a half-inch thick already. On the way to the exam room we stopped at a scale. I got on. He moved the weights back and forth until he got a number he liked. He wrote it down.

“You’ve lost some weight. Are you eating?”

“Yes,” I said, though honesty I didn’t think about it much.

“Well, try to keep your weight up.”

Silly me, I thought, here I’d been trying not to get killed.

We went into exam room five. He took my blood pressure, my temperature, my pulse. He wrote each down but didn’t comment. I hoped that meant I passed.

“Anything specific I should mention to the doctor?”

I held up my hands.

“Did you take a fall?”

“Sort of.”

“And you went to the emergency room?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, Dr. Morse will look over everything.” The nurse got up. “He’ll be in shortly.” He smiled and left.

On the wall in front of me was a magazine rack. Time had a cover about the riots. Somehow they seemed to have happened a very long time ago. Had it only been two weeks? Two and a half? I suppose I’d seen a few boarded up businesses on the drive from Silver Lake but hadn’t given them much thought. I imagined things were much worse in South Central, but for most of Los Angeles it was a wound that had opened and then almost immediately begun to close. I couldn’t tell whether that was a good thing or a bad thing; a strength or a weakness.

Dr. Samuel Morse came into the exam room. He was blond and even-featured, good-looking enough to sail through life. I imagine some of his patients got “sick” just to come see him—just like people had taken Guy Peterson’s photography class to see him. It didn’t hurt that Dr. Morse asked everyone to call him Dr. Sam.

He said hello and asked, “What happened to your hands?”

“I had a sort of accident.”

He took my hands in his and looked them over. “Did they give you any pain meds?”

“Tylenol with codeine.”

“That’s all I’m offering you.”

I shrugged. “They don’t hurt as much as they did.”

“If the pain gets worse, call me. Otherwise you should be better every day.”

He stepped over to the counter, opened my file, then read a few things and said, “Hmmmph.”

“What?”

“Four-seventy.”

“Oh, I see.”

I’d known for a while that if my T-cells went below 500 I’d have to go on AZT. I didn’t know how I felt about it. Certainly, my doctor was telling me it was a wise decision. But, was it? Jeffer had been on AZT and it hadn’t helped. He’d waited so long to confirm that he had AIDS, though. And then there were things I’d been reading—

“Noah?”

Dr. Sam held out a couple of prescriptions.

“Oh, sorry.” I took them, folded them, and put them into my shirt pocket.

“One is for AZT three times a day and the other is for Bactrim which is just once a day.”

“Thank you.”

We were quiet for a moment. Then he said, “It doesn’t mean anything specific. You’re at the beginning of what will probably be a very long road.”

“It doesn’t feel that way.”

“I know. But things are happening more quickly now. I’m sure there will be a cure in a couple of years. We’ll get you there, don’t worry.”

Then we were done. I went back to the front and paid my co-pay. Walked out into the pristine hallway and pressed the elevator button. How did I get here? I wondered. Even though I knew, it still didn’t really make sense.

When I met Jeffer we were okay. I mean, we thought we were okay. I thought we were okay. We were monogamous so we didn’t bother with safe sex. Except Jeffer said he was okay, when he wasn’t.

Sometime late in eighty-nine I remember we were getting dressed, after sex I think, though I don’t really remember. I noticed a quarter-sized purple stain on the back of his right calf.

“What is that? I’ve never noticed it before.”

“You haven’t? It’s a birthmark. It’s always been there.”

“It has?”

“Yes. You’re usually paying attention to things a bit further up.”

I should have known, though, should have recognized the stain for what it was. Especially when there was another and another. Less than a year later it was obvious he was sick. And it was obvious why.

I finally got him to admit, in a brief moment of honesty, that he’d known. That he’d had it all along; and that he’d known. Though to be fair, he’d barely admitted it to himself. I left him. Though, never completely. I couldn’t let him die alone, but I couldn’t forgive him.

On the way home, I stopped at a Rite-Aid and filled the prescriptions. The pharmacist seemed frightened when I handed her a ten-dollar bill for my co-pay. I imagine she went and washed her hands in scalding water as soon as I left.

I went home and put the pills in the medicine cabinet and left them there. I wasn’t ready to take them. The next day I looked at them. And then the next. I was looking at them when the phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Did you ever get your taxes done?” my mother asked.

“I’m working on them.”

“Don’t wait until the last minute, Noah. An extension’s not forever; they only give you six months.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You have to learn time management. Now that you’re alone, you’ll need to learn to do things on your own. Believe me, it was hard on me when your father died. I had no idea he did as much as he did. Honestly, I thought he just sat in his chair and drank beer. That sounds horrible, I know. I hope you don’t think I’m speaking ill of your father, but it’s true, he did just sit—”

I kept thinking about the pills. As soon as I took the first one that was it. I’d be taking them the rest of my life. However long that might be. It was an ending and a beginning all at once. And I’d gone through so many of those. I knew I had to try whether I really wanted to or not.

I went back to the medicine cabinet, cradled the phone between my neck and shoulder, and shook out a pill. One pill, three times a day. And one of the other. I poured a glass of water and took the first pill. And then the other.

“Noah!”

“What?” I asked, swallowing.

“I asked you a question.”

“Sorry, what did you ask?”

“How was your week?”

“Oh, you know, same old same old.”