With Keith’s help Michael kept his apartment cleaner—clothes put away, papers off the couch—as if expecting company. When Keith asked why, Michael revealed nothing. The Blueboy had to be kept secret, the one thing Michael could look forward to now when every doctor visit meant plummeting T-cells. Keith would ask too many questions—were they having safe sex, did they know the risks involved? Though Michael was careful, he knew Keith would consider skirting the issue a sin of omission. But surely the Blueboy knew, didn’t he? Surely he noticed Michael’s sallow cheeks, the skin growing thin on his frame.

In shame, Michael waited for nights of freezing rain or heavy snowfall. Always the Blueboy called from the payphone on the street below, always after Michael had gone to bed, the sharp ring of the old black rotary jarring away dreams unremembered.

But most nights Michael lay alone, listening to his body: neck vertebrae clicking against a pillow’s imperfect comfort. Blood pulsing in his ears. If he slept at all, it was only to dream about rising to go to the bathroom, on his way looking out his window at the corner below, the snow-sludged street empty of all but the lost boys and the lost men who fed them.

When the Blueboy came again, Michael didn’t want to undress. He didn’t want the Blueboy to see his mongrel-thin frame, elbows and ribs ready to tear through faint skin. The wind raged outside as the Blueboy insisted; he lay already naked, erect, wanting the heat of skin to warm him. But when he tugged off Michael’s shirt, the blue sky in his eyes clouded over.

Words had gotten bigger the longer left unsaid. Michael watched the Blueboy slowly roll to the side, making room for him on the bed. Michael climbed in, sagging into the mattress, reached out and cupped shrunken fingers around the boy’s crotch. He lowered his head and leaned in openmouthed. The Blueboy’s hand stopped him. You don’t have to. The kid’s erection already flagging. Let’s just hold each other.

Michael turned from the pity in the boy’s eyes. The Blueboy tried to spoon around him but Michael shrugged him off. He couldn’t stand the feel of the kid’s stare lasering his back. Michael clenched his teeth and focused his eyes on his nightstand, on the phone heavy enough to kill someone, its black plastic lipped with moonlight, the silence of the room looming louder than any bell.

*

Michael grew to hate the Blueboy, his good looks and health, the pity and shame in the boy’s blue eyes. Rage circulated through Michael’s system. It stooped his shoulders, gnawed his gut, leeched oxygen from his blood. It consumed the meat of cell after cell as it shrank his body and the size of his heart.

Keep your spirits up, Keith said every visit, bringing prepared food from an AIDS organization now. Michael ate a few mouthfuls while Keith offered health tips Michael would never heed—his pretense of hospitality wearing threadbare. After Keith left, Michael flushed the rest of his meal down the toilet, watched it swirl away with the water.

When the Blueboy called again, Michael said he was too sick to see him. It was true; he lay curled in the mess of his bed, the phone receiver a black dumbbell crushing his ear. Couldn’t even beat off anymore to the other Blueboys, dog-eared magazines stacked inside Michael’s steamer trunk. Forget someone real. No rallying himself for a kid who was only a hustler, who asked for more than money or marijuana, asked on a cold winter night to steal through walls better left in place.

On the phone, the Blueboy’s voice choked through tears. It’s snowing. I’m cold. She snuck me in the basement again, but he heard us. I think my nose got broke.

Sickness puddled in Michael’s bed, assaulting his senses. He couldn’t even walk to the window now. I can’t help you, he rasped.

You’re just like him!

The Blueboy’s words felt like blows inside Michael’s brain. With great effort Michael carefully returned the receiver to its cradle.

Outside, snow howled.

*

Keith came the following morning, cleaned the bed’s caked filth, and taxied Michael to Graduate Hospital. There, doctors probed Michael’s stick-figure frame, pumped his veins full of drugs and fluid, snaked tubes down his throat to ease air into lungs. They started him on a new combination therapy they called a cocktail, as if such a name could invent for Michael pleasant memories of Boatslip tea dances and Fire Island free-for-alls.

That week in the hospital, Keith brought Michael piles of magazines and newspapers to read to “keep his spirits up.” Michael grew sick of Keith’s good intentions and had no choice but to rally. By Friday he was cleared to go home.

Waiting for Michael’s release forms, Keith read aloud week-old headlines. SPACE SHUTTLE SNAFU, MAIN LINE MURDER STUMPS DA, TEENAGER’S BODY WASHES UP BY SCHUYLKILL REFINERY. The last sent a chill down Michael’s spine.

The details Keith offered were imprecise: Runaway from Webster and Bambrey found drowned the morning of January second, discovered by a Blackmoore Chemicals employee. Police believed the seventeen-year-old jumped or fell from either the South Street or Walnut Street Bridge. Relatives reported no note or precipitating factor other than depression following the recent loss of close family members. The body had been lodged in the chemical company’s filtering system among plowed snow and ice dumped into the river following recent storms. The name of the minor was not released.

The Blueboy, Michael was sure. He wanted to crawl back in his hospital bed, have the nurse kick Keith out and nail shut the door, let him die in peace. The Blueboy’s face floated before him: pale hair falling across forehead, icy depths of his eyes, the kissable crook of his nose. Heart full of as much tragedy as any Michael had ever endured. And now lost. Now dead.

Back home, Michael listened patiently to Keith’s schedule of when to take what medication. Keith taped a reminder to Michael’s refrigerator, and before leaving went over the instructions for working the electronic alarm on Michael’s new pocket pillcase. When he was finally alone, Michael flushed his medicine away, dropped the plastic case in the trash, then opened every window in the house to the cold outside.

Let the grave take him. He phoned Keith’s answering machine and told his AIDS Buddy not to bother delivering meals anymore; he was feeling so well he had decided to visit his sister in Tampa, would stay through winter if the sun proved kind. Michael didn’t mention that he hadn’t spoken to his sister since his father’s funeral, that he was merely trying to buy enough time to die quietly. Hanging up, he looked around his room at all the things he wouldn’t miss and imagined Keith or the landlord finally finding him, his thin carcass beached on a tangle of bedcovers.

Fever retook him. Michael lay swirled in sweaty sheets. Half dead in dreams, he felt himself slip free of his body. All around him darkness stretched, as vast and black as space. Glints of light flickered high above like stars. But Michael was far away from them and any warmth they possessed. He felt something cold and awful clamp tight around him, surrounding him in a second skin. Michael knew it was the Blueboy’s corpse, still wet from the river, sealing over him like a wound closing.

They were together now.

Michael stared out through the boy’s dead eyes, and watched powerless as the Blueboy’s stiff limbs, now his own, stumbled against the engulfing dark. His arms and legs tried to climb to the stars, but they lay out of reach across an impossible distance. Could angels even scale such heights, wondered Michael, surrounded by the dead boy’s wet decay, feeling the leaden hope in the Blueboy’s heart.