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.”

One such item was read aloud at the funeral; his sister handed it directly to me after the service. On a yellow hospital scratchpad from “Billing and Insurance,” set down in script so tiny and pain-contracted it looked like a modern dance troupe of Martha Graham-trained ants, Marco Eisdorfer had written a list of over one hundred WORDS THAT RHYME WITH PAIN:

butane
Bahrain
birdbrain
cane
chilblain
cocaine
Citizen Kane
Dwane
Duane
Dusquene
deplane

And with his wit intact, the suffering surpassed even sounding like anything. He’d got clear to the S’s when death, which respects only itself and is therefore humorless, shushed our boy.

(His mom and sister gave me that list to “use,” and now I partly have, and therefore can rest easier.)

More and more, these deaths recalled my father’s, my father. “He seems to have a fair-sized chip on both his shoulders,” I’d once felt glad to overhear a neighbor say. Why did Dad feel singled out? Born poor, he got sent to work the counter as soon as he could stand and speak; he came of age during America’s worst financial rout; he’d outlived that just in time to be stuck into uniform and sent to mind the store in France. How can you perfectly corrupt one whole generation?—First you take all the money away, then you explain that money is what mattered most; then you ship them off in uniforms to ensure an even greater conformity and, once home, you give the money back. And more. More than those aproned kids could ever have imagined owning. And you’ve perfected a group totally addicted to succeeding, at their own expense, and at their loved ones’.