“Honestly, no. We just cried about the past together?” Gabriel nodded. “Isn’t that what depressed people do?”

“No, David, it’s what real people do.”

“Well, another thing real people do is patch. I know you keep hoping your family’s going to change, but they’re not. It’s been three years since you heard from them. You’ve got to stop picking at those scabs. Come on,” David said, placing his hand on Gabriel’s heart. “It’s time to get your memories filled.”

It sounded so easy. And the truth was, Gabriel chewed on bad memories daily and they festered within him, filling even good times with despair. Like his final Christmas at home, the snowstorm, his brother’s grip against his head as he’d held his face in the snow. How he’d walked all the way to an open Denny’s where he’d called a boy he knew from college, who drove two hours to bring him to the safety of a warm apartment that holiday season.

“I’m glad you feel happier,” Gabriel finally said, “and I wouldn’t wish your pain on anyone, but I don’t want to be patch-happy.”

David removed his hand from Gabriel’s heart. He sat up in bed, inhaling slowly, trying to find a good breath. “Wow,” he said, reaching for his clothes. “I think I finally get it. You liked that I was suffering.”

“What?”

David put on his boxers. “As long as I didn’t heal, you never had to. That’s why you want me to cry with you. But I’m sorry, I don’t want to do that, it’s not who I am anymore. I’m healed and you’re bringing me down.”

“You’re not healed, you’re lying to yourself.”

“Actually,” David said, and the word had never sounded so ugly, “I’m lying every time I say I love you.” Then he rose from Gabriel’s reach, and Gabriel didn’t try to hold him back. Instead, he rolled over and listened to the apartment door shutting as David left for another club, a place where a fellow partyer, who’d had every neural pathway filled except his self-hatred, opened fire on the crowd before turning the gun on himself.

A surgeon in Beijing had said he could fill the memories of David for five thousand yuan. He wasn’t a party neurosurgeon, just an old man with a dingy office near Tiananmen Square. The surgeon could keep their first kiss and David’s warm touch, but all their Beijing life—their fights, and the memory of identifying David’s body—those, the surgeon would fill like cavities. Gabriel had the man’s card back at the apartment. What would be so wrong with patching the memories of how David had wasted all their money and broken his heart, Gabriel wondered, as he walked toward his brother’s hotel.