The boat drifted beneath the Golden Gate into the mist of the open sea. Bill looked up at the massive girders with a chill that had nothing to do with the weather. He remembered—now so long ago—the first time he had seen it, when it had seemed like a graceful gesture welcoming those who sailed beneath it into the magical city it enclosed. Now it seemed to him the bridge was the boundary of life while the sea represented the deep and unknown reaches beyond the living. He held in his hands the ceramic urn where Waldo’s ashes were mixed with sequins, glitter, confetti and grape Kool-Aid. The last and most loyal of Waldo’s friends were gathered around him, waiting for Bill to open the urn and spill the contents into the sea. Someone at yet another memorial for another friend had read a poem and now the words came back to him: Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell.

Waldo had wanted this party, had provided in his will the money for the charter, for food and for drink and music, but it was a miserable, gray day and the mourners, bundled in heavy clothes, had little appetite for the food and drink and the music went unplayed. Nick put his hand on Bill’s shoulder.

“How far out are we going?”

“A little farther. I want to clear the bridge.”

“Are you going to say anything?”

Bill shook his head.

“Someone should.”

“Waldo was always the one who made the speeches,” Bill said. He glanced over his shoulder at the pale faces of Waldo’s other friends. “Maybe one of them will have something to say.”

Bill had never revealed to Nick or to anyone else Waldo’s last words to him—were right. God hates fags. You’re next.—but he had thought of little else in the weeks since Waldo’s last gasping breaths. He wanted to believe they were the ramblings of dementia but he had not detected any confusion in Waldo’s staring eyes when he spoke the words. At first, he was furious at Waldo who in those few words had negated all the positive assertions he had made over the years about being gay, assertions that Bill had clung to when he struggled with his own uncertainties and shame. Waldo, he believed, had lied to him. But then he thought, no, Waldo had not lied, Waldo had believed his own claims, had had to believe them in order to get up in the morning and confront a world in which, if being gay was not at least morally neutral, he would have been a freak, a mistake, or worse. It was only on his deathbed, stricken by the horror of AIDS, that his deception was revealed to him—They were right. God hates fags—and faithful to their friendship to the end, he had shared the revelation with Bill.