I soon prove calm—I am calm, strangely so, as if I have quite forgotten my hair—and am released from the leather restraints which hold my hands down to the bedframe. My friend Bill from drama class comes to bring me some books I ask for; I’m still half in my radiant state and he looks wonderful to me, delightfully funny, and I babble away while he looks at me with raised eyebrows and not-too-well-concealed amusement. Bill’s brought my sketchpad, full of the comic strips I like to draw, which are silly little sketches influenced by R. Crumb and the new underground “comix.” My nurse asks to take a look. He holds the book away from him, his big hairy arms poking out from his green hospital shirt. He scans the pages and pronounces them revelatory. “These say a lot about you,” he says. “Are you homosexual?”

In my post-Dionysian bliss I’m unrufflable, so I just say, “Yes.”

“I could tell by these drawings,” he says. Even in my blur I don’t get how my comics reveal me, so he explains that all my male characters have noticeable nipples. (Maybe it seems a stupid explanation because it isn’t the explanation, but of course he doesn’t say anything to me about the “pass,” which maybe happened, maybe didn’t. And perhaps I’m just part of a regular night’s work; how many gay kids who tried to kill themselves wound up in that hospital ward?)

He says something that’s supposed to indicate he’s my friend, someone I can trust. He asks if my parents know and I say no. He says, “You can have a decent enough life, you know. Not a normal life, with a family, but you can have a life.”

I’m still coming down to earth from the free-floating realm of the sleeping pills, but this is sobering me quickly. I’ve never talked about this before, not with anyone; I don’t know what to say. He wants me to confide in him but I don’t feel quite safe; something about his offer of friendship feels deliberate, or professional? Or maybe it’s because he keeps mentioning his wife.

Then he tells me there’s a homosexual man who works in the hospital, another nurse. “He keeps it quiet,” he says, but he’ll ask him to come and see me.

Which he does, that evening, a neat blond man in his twenties, in his hospital scrubs, so clean as to be self-effacing. Memory preserves this scene as though it had been filmed through a lens smeared with Vaseline: soft focus, blurry at the edges, all its gestures ambiguous. He stands at the foot of my bed and fiddles with my chart, playing with the chain which holds it to the footboard. He says, “Hi.” He seems about as awkward as I am.

I say, “Hi.”

We don’t know where to go from there.