“Where have the bananas gone? Long time ago,” the snowshoer sang back to her. It wasn’t funny anymore. No more bananas.

Dr. Dave had a transgender patient, Diane, who was dying at St. Vincent’s when Dave, at his own request, was sent there to die as well. As if that weren’t confusing enough, after Diane died, Dave spoke of her as if he were still treating her.

The estrogen Diane had been taking caused side effects in her liver. Dr. Dave told the snowshoer and me that estrogen can cause a kind of hepatitis; the bile stagnates and builds. The itching that occurred with this condition was driving Diane crazy, Dave told us. Diane had to stop taking her hormones; then her beard grew back. It seemed unfair to Dr. Dave that Diane, who’d worked so hard to feminize herself, was not only dying of AIDS, but was dying as a man. “It doesn’t help that the nurses shave her,” Dave said to the snowshoer and me. Dr. Dave only meant that Diane was spared seeing her beard, but she could feel it.

In the end, when Dave was dying at St. Vincent’s, he looked like he was starving. By then, the snowshoer and I knew what the Hickman catheter in Dave’s skeletal birdcage of a chest was for. They’d had him on a breathing machine, Mr. Barlow told me, but Dave was off it—“for now,” Elliot said. Dave would have been in his late fifties—he was only a little older than Elliot Barlow.

“You know doctors—they like experimenting,” Dave’s most candid nurse told Mr. Barlow and me. They’d been experimenting on Dr. Dave with sublingual morphine, versus morphine elixir, Dave’s candid nurse had informed us. “At this point, the suction is very important—to help clear secretions,” she said. I had no idea what she was talking about, and the snowshoer never explained the suction or the secretions to me, but we liked Dr. Dave’s most candid nurse; she clearly knew what lay in store for Dave.

The snowshoer sensed that all of Dave’s nurses were wary of his parents—“not wary enough,” the candid nurse would later tell us. Dr. Dave’s parents had instructed his nurses not to allow other visitors to see Dave—not when his parents were with him. When the snowshoer and I were seeing Dave, the nurses warned Dave’s parents that we were there. The parents waited in their limousine until we were gone. “They have a Russian chauffeur—she’s a woman driver,” Dave’s candid nurse told Elliot and me.

“Why don’t your parents want to meet us, or your other friends?” the snowshoer had asked Dr. Dave.