“No more wrestling lessons, Doug. I don’t like wrestling.” He sounded out of breath. His voice was scarcely audible. A smell was rising from him.

“All right. But in the future if you’re not going to wrestle correctly, don’t wrestle at all, because you don’t know what you’re doing and you don’t think about what you’re doing, and this is precisely what happens every time we wrestle, you don’t think, and that’s how people wind up in the hospital. Let go of my leg.”

“You’re going to put the dope in me.”

“I only want to look in the fucking doctor’s bag. Virgil! Please!”

The magic word. He let go. He tipped sideways and slumped to the floor with hands pressed between legs and his knees drawn close in a fetal ball, twitching.

I took a quick glance around the room. It would not do to be caught pilfering from the black bag. People wouldn’t understand, and I could be criticized for invasion of privacy or some equally vague infraction.

I stepped over Virgil. Brothers ranged all around. The library was busy with activity. Barry on the floor rubbed his eyes and shook his head. Jeremy on the purple divan complained loudly, “My neck, my neck.” Twins in pairs leaned over to stroke Jeremy’s face and his hands. “You’re going to be all right,” soft voices assured him. Immediately to the left of this, Siegfried, Raymond, Milton, and others watched Fielding gesture pathetically with his camera parts—the viewfinder, the battery pack, the cracked film canister—holding up these pieces for inspection, showing the damage, telling and miming his role in the conflict, building a narrative. “I didn’t mean to hurt him. I’m sorry if I hurt him. You’ve got to believe me. Do you believe me?” I looked away then, over to my right, and saw that Seth and Vidal and Gustavus and Clay had quietly turned away from Fielding, away from Jeremy, Max, Barry, and the rest, and had returned to, were preoccupied with, erotic pamphlets and broadsheets. “Have you ever used this position, Vidal?” Clay asked his older brother. Vidal peered over Clay’s shoulder at Clay’s crumbling, dated bestiality scene. “Which position? The ‘Virgin in the Manger’?”

Quickly I snuck the doctor’s bag from beneath the table. What was here? Syringes? Nothing but syringes? A little cotton, alcohol, bandages, a stethoscope, and a sampling of stoppered vials containing liquids.

Virgil twitched. I dug a hand in the bag and lifted out a fistful of loose, unwrapped, probably used needles, and also a selection of vials. I did not, in my hurry, have time to read their labels.

All these things I distributed into my inside jacket pockets.

I closed the black bag and slid it back in place under the coffee table. Then, on a lark, I brought the bag out and unzipped it, quietly, again. Stethoscopes are great amusement, I think. Who can resist a stethoscope? I hauled this one out and inserted its rubberized earpieces. That’s when I noticed that I was, in fact, watched.