“No lie,” said I.

It was the latest in pajama loungewear for persons both rich and richly ironic. Some designer must’ve collected, then copied cowboy patterns from the bedspreads and boys’ room draperies of the 1940s. Cacti, mesas, auburn broncos at full buck. A freckled blond sixteen-year-old cowpoke, grinning in his huge white hat, wearing spurred boots endearingly too-large, recurred, bowlegged. “These patterns arrived just yesterday. As usual, darl, you’re cutting-edge,” so she told the man she wheeled, Robert all done up now in cowboy robe and matching dude ranch jammers. (The pants were more than any of us could bear to bother with right now.)

We rolled off the elevator into a mealtime traffic jam of thirty other rolling Giacometti men. The age of mechanical reproduction seemed to have Xeroxed one skeletal spectre into these many identical chairs. Each replicant was pushed by a healthy rosy person whose own face showed a cow-catchering all-purpose smile: “Ain’t we got fun?”

The patients themselves sat stern, hair gone wiry thanks to lethal medicine and the disease’s own ferocious coarsening. Each sick boy, yellowgray-whitegraphite-colored, feeling himself uniquely beloved, being so sick it felt gravitational, ignored—with queens’ unlearnable grandeur—the sight of any others, similarly ending. Thirty Elizabeth I’s on wheels “cut each other dead.”

Meanwhile, those pushing them grinned, to compensate, emoting gratitude for two. Emerging from the elevator, Angie and I loomed. We beamed down on others’ sullen boys in passing chairs. Kids who sulked, too sick to play, their parents urging them on. I felt such claustrophobic panic and I knew Robert must.

But what seemed worse than this rush hour of the ill? Ten boys wore his same flannel cowboy pajamas! (Comes in pistachio green or beet red.) Bama had sworn that these were “hot,” unseen till now. And so they were. But other friends of others dying had rushed that same counter not two hours back.

Bama, always a speedster on her feet, old medical hand from the clinic days of our mere-VD innocence, now did such a quick reverse into the elevator with our Robert.

As we rose, he said with effort, “So much, if only I, for the fashion individuality of we … the clone-prone.” And we laughed, at least thinking we had followed his drift. We’d gotten pretty good at it, but the circuitous logic required ever more.

Returned to his room, relieved, Bama phoned out for deli fare, making quite a production of it. “Now when you say tapioca, you mean the old fashioned big pearl kind, with lots of cinnamon on top, and is it worth the cals to have a whole trough of it brought up here to us. And, honestly, Cal? ‘Cal’ was it?—Now, Cal, m’dear? Where would your own grandma rank it on a scale of one to ten?” She winked our way. Robert smiled his now feral smile and appeared, as she had planned, entranced.