I know that I loved them for how they protected me, without knowing that they did, how guarded I felt as I most guarded them. I always felt safest when they were both within a four-feet reach of me (or due shortly, as one or the other of us sat facing the restaurant entrance: “Are we all here yet?”).

I was between, I, pressed quite snug against two flanking sets of ribs as good as their ribs were. Celebrity Father, Notorious Mother, invisible li’l ghostwriter me, a triplet, a fit.

Oh but, all along, we had thought that we were really something!

And now so did the New York Times. At least them!

Back there on the floor at Robert’s, I would have taken sloppy seconds, on either one of them, thirds.

There’s the final closeness that two people can have, with nothing at all between them, having gone as far into another body as your own will fit. But, getting shut out of it, knowing you’re just extra and aside, that kind of isolation can do many things to you. Including save your life.

Post-Op

ven with liquids running from my eyes and nose and mouth, it was their health that I fixed upon the most now. You know I never hated either of them, not even when I’d just caught them at it, I never hated them enough to wish either of them hurt. Much less dead. She, at least, would now need better guarding. That alone helped resurrect me out of the spittle sewer where I swam. She’d sure need me now.

If I had warned him of the spot, would he then have been more cautious? Did Robert go near the members of his traveling string quartet? How could anyone so beautiful have become so difficult, dangerous? “Careless” was a word to now upgrade. And if I had been braver and louder, might not my dear ones have waited? might might might … ? me me me.

After ten days, extinction lessons, carbon monoxide intake, blue-gray dustballs gathering in a kitchen bathtub unused, it was in exactly ten days I understood I was, as an addict addicted to both of them—“my name is Hartley and I crave …”—was in no position to do without the two of them at once. Maybe one at time, maybe him, but at some slow-boil wean, please. Give me a placebo to suck on, or sit on, or talk to three hours per night by phone?

But don’t make me go cold turkey, quitting them both. It would be killing, considering the scale of chemical dependency, to give up both my gods at once.

Who else believed in me? Surely that’s the control substance most needed by most people. I had written nothing in this time. The sight of my own handwriting was like studying the traces of my filth spread across the finest paper and left piled, defilement sandwich, on someone’s desk.