“He described it as a kind of supreme intimacy,” he said, “allowing another man to forever alter you, on a molecular level. The fuck that would change your life. Like impregnation. I realize most people would find this abhorrent. I did at first, I admit,” he said, anticipating Clyde’s interjection. “And yet I thought, isn’t the eroticism that drives someone to fetishize HIV infection the same eroticism that teenage girls have for vampires or werewolves? You know?” Clyde started to laugh. “But I’m serious,” he continued. “Like the submission to an ultimate intimacy, to allow another to possess and forever alter your body, a genetic knitting together of fates. I mean, look at the success of Twilight! It’s the libidinal death drive of adolescent girls writ large! And I suppose because vampires and werewolves are fictional it’s more permissible, right? It comes in below the socially acceptable cut-off on your spectrum,” he said, nodding at me. “Whereas I’d reckon the fetishism of HIV transmission places we-heeell above.”

When we reached the Ponte Garibaldi, with its white stone and distinctive circle over the central arch, Giacomo hugged us both goodnight and began crossing the bridge in the direction of his apartment.

After a few paces he turned back and shouted, “Don’t keep partying on without me now.”

“Love you, friend,” Clyde called in reply.

“Love you too, old man,” Giacomo said, before turning back around and disappearing into the half-light.

As Clyde and I walked on towards Trastevere, the night was an impressionist canvas, blotches of distant couples dashing across the street, the rushing river, the fuzzed auras of street lights. I studied the interplay of colour on the wet cobblestone — Had it rained while we were in the club? Had a street sweeper just passed by? — before I noticed Clyde and I had been walking for the better part of five minutes in silence. As if sensing my coming-to, he said that, before passing, Wole had spent several years working on a research paper, but never finished it. Between Wole’s teaching commitments and his medical treatments he’d always found it hard to find time for his own research. His paper was focused on a cache of ceramics from eighth-century Peru. Three of the vessels in the cache depicted acts of necrophilia and the masturbation of male skeletons by living women.

“And the images are — genuinely erotic,” Clyde said, with a chuckle, before mentioning sex with the dead was also explicitly permitted by Hittite law from the sixteenth to thirteenth centuries BCE.