From distant rifts light bled down. The faint penumbra illuminated faces Michael had known in life. Men who had died of the same disease from which he was dying. Their deathbeds had left them with scarecrow limbs and bodies shrunken to bone-bag forms, stretched skin a gray afterthought. Their funeral-stitched lips did not move, yet Michael heard their soft susurrant chorus building inside his head, their yearning for life and light.

With great effort, these bodies slowly pulled themselves heavenward. But such fear among them. Trembling fingers found desperate purchase in nooks willed from nothing. The stars of life shone sweet and distracting as each body struggled higher. Do not forget me, minds called. Michael felt their silent yearning seek him out. Could the Blueboy hear it too?

With sudden strain the Blueboy joined the ascent, up past starlit windows that revealed a brick row home, snowy streets, car doors opening to strangers. A flash of fists, a rush of water. Who would want to go back to that?

Hand over hand the Blueboy climbed, up a faint thread heretofore invisible. It dangled from a rift in the firmament. It disappeared inside the Blueboy’s chest. Michael felt it, silky and gossamer thin, snaking around his essence, drawing tight.

Do not forget me.

Much closer now, lit windows seared the cold blue eyes masking Michael’s own. The Blueboy’s rough hands pulled both their bodies through one blinding laceration. On the other side, wind-snapped curtains revealed a new perspective: a dark room where walls shrank toward familiar vanishing points. Where a messy bed floated in the chilled blue air. And atop a damp mattress lay the rafted figure of a dreaming man.

Michael woke, somehow finding the strength to shut his window. Then he searched the bathroom for extra medicine Keith might have squirreled away. No luck. He fished the empty pill bottles from his wastebasket and set out to refill them at the 24-hour CVS drugstore.

The clock by the phone glowed 12:15 a.m. as Michael fled his apartment. Coatless, he stumbled through Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, past a dry fountain and beneath bare branches silvered with snow. Flakes swirled around him as he reached out toward passersby, groping for handholds among the living. But strangers recoiled.

Still he managed to make it to the store at Nineteenth and Chestnut where he scattered the bottles on the counter in front of the Asian pharmacist. Her almond eyes narrowed with a mixture of pity and apprehension as she filled each prescription. Somehow Michael managed to pay with a credit card not yet maxed out. The pharmacist slid the bagged order toward his wax-paper palm, their hands never once touching.

Outside again, Michael found no comfort in the night air as he choked down his pills. Snow thickened on sidewalks and streets. He hobbled home, as graceless as in drunken days. Nearing his corner, he again wished his limbs would unlock what last bit of life they held and let him lay down in the steep snowdrifts beneath the neon blink of the E-Z Lot sign. But a silent message called out to him.

Do not forget me.

He struggled to see its source. Nothing. No one. All the lost boys had yet to climb out of the holes they crawled into.

Blood throbbed beneath Michael’s blistering skin. The grim evening was cast in a shadowed blue as cold and complete as air itself. As Michael neared his door, something in the glow of a street lamp swirled and caught his attention. By the payphone, air and light cemented into form. First, eyes glinting like glass. Then nose, brow and chin, their snowy softness packed by rough hands into accidental beauty. Michael, frightened, turned away, crossed the street’s shifting drifts, key in hand, its silver point carving a path toward his door.

Behind him, It’s me.

Could it be? Michael glanced back, turned his key, and let the blue light in the shape of a boy follow him up three flights of stairs to his cramped apartment. There, Michael sat down on his bed, and the boy of light sat down beside him. Moved closer. Blew cool breath over Michael’s flushed face as he leaned in to kiss.

*

Michael woke alone, fever broken. The Blueboy was gone, if indeed he had ever been there.

Michael felt revitalized. Could the medicine have really worked so quickly? Or was it the Blueboy’s ghost, whose tongue and mouth had cooled Michael’s body? Not with a graveyard chill but with something brought from another world—lifetimes left unused. Lost time conspired into an antidote; Michael could feel it. The Blueboy’s ghost an incubus in reverse, a life-giver.

But that was impossible. The Blueboy was obviously still alive, nothing supernatural about it. Someone else must have drowned. Yet Michael could find no evidence that anyone had truly been there the night before; when he rose from bed, his apartment was still locked from inside, the air around him still vibrating with the texture of a dream. In the bathroom, he splashed cold water on his face. Despite his body’s sudden invigoration, Michael feared his mind had pitched forward into dementia. But when he looked in the bathroom mirror, his eyes looked more lucid than in weeks.

Cleaning up his place, he called Keith, told him he had not gone to Florida after all, but wanted to meet for a walk. Keith enthusiastically agreed to the unexpected invitation.

Hanging up, Michael spied the number he had written on the wall above the nightstand—the corner payphone. He considered dialing it, but the idea seemed crazy.

When Keith came, they walked uptown, Michael secretly searching for the Blueboy among the winter-wrapped pedestrians. But the young man was not to be found panhandling among shoppers or bumming smokes from office workers on breaks.

As they traipsed down to South Street, Keith complimented Michael’s newfound energy. Michael said nothing as he led them along the northern edge of Gray’s Ferry. Still no sign of the Blueboy.

Soon they came to the South Street Bridge, where the kid had jumped. Hadn’t he? Michael stopped halfway across, ignoring Keith’s puzzled expression as he scanned the river winding southward. In the distance behind scraggly trees, refinery smokestacks trailed charcoal wisps. Michael studied the riverside, trying to X-ray with his eyes the abandoned Navy Home in a vain effort to spy the house in Devil’s Pocket where the Blueboy had grown up. Where his brother had beaten him. Where he had become convinced life wasn’t worth living.

Your spirits are certainly up today, Keith remarked.

Michael snapped around. Behind his companion, the spires of the city rose up—all glass and metallic blue in the afternoon light. The river ran alongside, flashing bright slivers against murky indigo. The colors hurt Michael’s eyes. The wind blew sudden cold back into his bones and he found himself shivering.

*

A few days later, Michael’s phone rang in the middle of the night as it had long ago. At first he couldn’t believe the faint whisper of the voice in his ear. He crossed to the window and looked down at the street corner. The Blueboy stood by the payphone, face upturned toward Michael’s window.

Soon the boy was at his door. Ushered in, cold and damp, his skin so pale it showed the lace of blue veins beneath.

You’re frozen, Michael said, removing their clothes until his naked form lay atop the Blueboy’s goose-bumped skin. Michael tried to warm the Blueboy with hands and mouth. He drew the kid’s cock past his lips, glanced up, saw the Blueboy’s eyes roll back and shudder in their sockets.

So much coldness to fire, Michael thought. He reached to the nightstand for a condom, started to roll it on when he felt the chill of the Blueboy’s hand close around him. That’s not needed anymore, he said, guiding Michael in.