I locked everything, then rushed to the Christopher Street station. The rain caught me. Soaked, I jumped the local just as its rubber-edged door sucked shut behind me. How efficient I’d become. It was only 12:39.

One forearm looped around the steel pole, I tried planning what to tell Robert’s naïve, judgmental parents. His father mounted a weekly pulpit, preaching the need for Christian love. The pastor hadn’t seen his son in five years. I knew it was my duty to lead these people, smiling their simulated smiles, bearing church homecoming keepsakes, into Robert’s narrow room.

“Prepare yourselves,” I’d warn these folks. They had somehow conceived, then spoiled, then offered organ lessons, then tooth-braced the former prettiest boy in New York. I loved them at least for that. I’d say, “It’s still him.” (Or is it “he,” it’s still “he?” I felt very tired. Syntax, an early casualty.) I was so tired, I could only compare today’s tiredness with last month’s, “At least I’m not that far gone.” Pearl gray I contrasted to the brindled dove gray darkening most of last fall.

I gave my days away in handfuls, partly out of superstitious gratitude that I’d somehow been spared. I helped because I could, and just hoped this equation might continue. It made me feel less guilty if I kept myself nearly as exhausted as my beloved patients. Surely I had been undercharged. Therefore, I could brutally tax myself, passing along the savings to others. My own apartment, one block from Robert’s, had recently flooded; just my luck the sublet was ninety blocks north. A beggar now hollered his spiel above the train’s din. People groaned, sick to death of being cornered by such need. “Just got out of prison, folks, an’ I don’t want to have to hurt nobody for my six babies’ food, but …”

Our hospital receptionist, Lourdes Amy Llamos, spoke mostly Spanish, but with such cheer you felt you understood it. Behind her desk—stocked with candy and Reader’s Digests—a stained-glass window burned. It showed Mary the Mother, receiving hurt children of all nations, kids wearing casts and head bandages. Three had wedged themselves under her either arm and, within robes too blue, even the Virgin stared up into yellow light as if for strength, further funding. Lourdes always greeted me like staff, never exhausting her own goodwill. Her melon-colored silk blouses became a fact I leaned toward. As I swept in daily, she’d wink and ask about the latest of my twenty-odd patient-friends: “He betterer or worserer?”

Squiring other parents into other rooms of other dying boys, I had done all this before. I could hardly remember ever doing anything else. I’d always coddled my New York men friends—like Wendy mothering the Lost Boys. (We’d all come to New York in search, natch, of Peter.)