I held Robert, nothing horrified me now, because it was him I had here. All the protection that his beauty had once offered him and us, that was now lost. And yet, the lowering of its spangled curtain, let me in, in closer, and right up against him. He now appeared as interchangeable with others on this hall as white eggs in a single carton. And yet he still smelled like Robert: Now he looked green but smelled golden. I could feel him looking up at me, dry lips forming half a name, whispered. It sounded like “Tension.” Or “Tennyson?” It couldn’t be. He kept staring. I got a better grip on him. If he was messy, I would be. And his long hollow look itself let me know what a construction it’d all been. My Robert—the altarboy who was both boy and altar. I had needed that, needed both. Now, him naked in my arms, we were finally equals. If what had first moved me toward him had been his looks that finally surrendered to his gift, what held me here now was simply what outlasted admiration. I still loved. He could be dead but never ugly. Because I could still love whatever of him was left. He saw that. He saw that what the nurses cleaned up out of duty or union obligation, I cleaned because it was him and his. And therefore, ours.

If loving him haphazardly had been misguided, masochistic, then this part finally, it at last felt proper, reciprocal.

His meanness and fitful coldness to me, his making me a mascot-hobby-gopher, even his exposing Angie and the others to latent harm, none of that could lessen what he’d given us. Love had always helplessly left him. I’d left him helpless. He dispensed it like monoxide and we gathered it, his archivists, his orbiting bees and jagged minor moons.

I patted one side of his face, I looked up at the wall, read part of the definition.

“Robert Robert Robert. Still charming after all these years. How do you do it? Can we bottle it? I could drink you like honey and Ensure, forever. What a strange pair we’ve made, hunh?”

And he? He said that last part of a word, “ension”—I got it.

“‘Potential’? That still your nickname for me? Potential what? But thanks, love.”

And, no longer angry at the inept nurses who had not looked in on him, had not kept him covered; no longer worried how many days he’d have or if I dared go South as planned; feeling nothing but how immense this attraction still was and how much of my gratitude still held, held both of us, I cradled him. Now, as he looked up at me from far out of nowhere, I could freely rock rock rock him, singing in my only voice, the froggy and untrained one,