So I at least got Gideon on record. For a mere two hundred and fifty-nine dollars, he finally arrived into the Times. Though below, of course, and in smaller print. It didn’t seem right, Gideon’s only staying down in the Personals. He’d never graduated, never became—above, free—News.

—Gideon, we still talk about you all the time.

But here’s the question … here’s the question once you multiply our darling pal Gideon by ten, by Robert, by Marco, then four times ten … toward the two million. Here’s the question. What to DO with a decade and a half of their phone numbers and street lore? What’s to become of this now-pointless information?

I must decide: Shall I leave these loyal dead in my address book? Of course, I want them there. But bumping into them daily, each hooked to his final comet trail of medical 800 numbers, still stops me cold.

It’s a minor yet momentous choice. There are memories that cannot be refiled, cannot be surpassed by contact with new people. I want to send a petition somewhere, to get my circle back, to settle them around that table for one more cafe latte, one typical, ordinary between-things day. A partly cloudy Tuesday might be good. I would send this petition direct to Management, were there one.

Do I sound bitter? Do I care? Well, yeah, as it happens. But, one problem with surviving: you risk seeming either self-congratulatory or somehow, your own lucky self, very wronged. Instead of being left here grateful, you’re stuck with a brittle sort of veteran’s pride. It’s like those folks who did not name names to the House UnAmerican Committee; it makes you recast yourself as Joan of Arc and all the rest of them—cans of lighter fluid.

Cleaning out Marco’s apartment felt strange. Both because it was right over Ossorio’s, the site of so much action, and because not one of us had ever been invited in. It was almost scary, finally barging in to pack him up. Happily some of the guys who worked with Ossorio volunteered to help me purge. They acted more superstitious than I. Looking back, I see they feared … contagion. But, thing is, they forced themselves. That’s all that you can really ask of anybody.

By then I needed extra pairs of hands. Gideon was gone, Robert so seriously down with it, and now Marco dead. Marco had been a birdwatcher. His place was covered with reproductions of the big Audubon prints. And dozens of bicycles being taken apart and reassembled. If I didn’t know him better, I’d have considered this a chop shop. I later found the list of names of friends, and phone numbers where these bikes should be returned. But there were just gears, loose wheels all over. His mother and sister arrived, articulate warm people—not quite what I expected. In organizing, they found a hundred lists tucked everywhere. Marco had remained so clear and annotated to the end. I recalled his sixteen foreign words for “angel.”