To the room’s ugly orange plastic form-fitting chairs we added little gilt ballroom ones where chaperons once sat knitting while young ladies whirled through waltzes on lower Fifth. We told ourselves we were giving Robbie something to look at.

But now, I guess we partly did it to distract ourselves from the sight of him. He had always looked so unlike everybody else, handsomest boy in his time slot. Now that word “time slot” had a final ugly click to it, and we turned his music up to drown out everything but music itself.

He appeared all but identical to fourteen others Lincoln Logged along this hall. Only the eyes, still a shade of swimming-pool “aqua,” pulled him forward from the rest. But gazing into those eyes soon made us feel neutered, boring, erased. The Ouija board had all the answers; you hardly needed to ask. The less he said, the more intricate and interminable his looks became. By the end, he was transmitting through those eyes. For the first time ever I read “Bored” there. That shocked me more than his sickness. What if I was now seeing clear through to the primer coat? What if Bored had been there, basic, all along?

Marco brought in a slide projector and we settled the thing upon its own ballchair, locked on Automatic. Random. It projected continual images toward the white wall at the foot of Robert’s bed.

I included whatever jumbled images might have meaning for him. Van Gogh’s perfect bachelor-artist pad at Arles. I commandeered a paint-stained Pentax that Angie’d once used to document her work. I took slides of the stage of the concert hall where his First Symphony had been so recently heard; I got shots of the front doors of Robert’s own apartment building but, for some reason I couldn’t name, dared not venture inside, though the keys still hung heavy on my ring.

Too much had happened there. I pictured its shipboard coziness, its secret recesses. I already felt exiled from those stacks of Titanic clippings, the four windows prismatic, and that yellowest of Alabama Byrneses. At the Met Opera’s new gift shop, while acting like some high school music teacher, I bought slide portraits of his favorite composers. These got scattered throughout my media event for him.

If we had to leave Robert—and sometimes we did (late nights, we sometimes trusted him to his nurses’ care)—we made sure he had his favorite music clamped over his ears—he could rock through the Mahler Fourth, its culminating soprano solo making such a sweet and surfeited paradise promise. And he’d have the projector rattling through its catalogue—group shots from Ossorio’s, the owner and patrons waving and holding up their fingers in peace signs or devil’s horns behind Ossorio’s head. Some singular dictionary definitions I’d Xeroxed and then got blown up. Pictures of us, mugging at the round marble table under our Lady of Perpetual Help—a failure. Here were street characters we knew by sight though not always by name. Paintings he loved, Bonnards, early Alabamas, a Duchamp urinal called Fountain, corny shots of his own family, plus the composers he loved best. Godlike Schubert, dead at thirty-one, of venereal disease and then typhoid fever, after being weakened by his tendency to drink.