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onset of fullblown infection, but the word has just the right edge, chilling and paranormal, like the breakthrough of alien life out of John Hurt's belly.
    I knew all the warning signals now, rote as the seven danger signs of cancer that I carried on a card in my wallet in high school. Did I think I'd forget them? Night sweats, fevers, weight loss, diarrhea, tongue sores, bruises that didn't heal. None of the above. But I'd run through them every day, examining my body inch by inch as cowering people must have done in medieval plague cities, when X's were chalked on afflicted houses. I didn't even want to eat Asian food anymore, because it shot my bowels for a day after.
    Any change, any slight modification... even a bruise you remembered the impact of, you'd watch like an x-ray till it started turning yellow around the purple. KS lesions do not go yellow. They also do not go white if you press them hard with your thumb. A whole gibberish of phrases and clues was beginning to gain currency. A canker sore in the mouth would ruin a day, for fear it was thrush—patches of white on the gums or the tongue. I read my tongue like a palmist before I went to bed at night.
    In none of this paranoid fantasy did I have the slightest worry that Roger was at risk. I hadn't forgotten the flu in '81, or the assault of the wrongheaded drugs for amoebas. There were shakes and fevers that winter, and for a week or two Roger would break out at night in hives the size of silver dollars. It had been an awful siege, but that was all three years ago now. Never a complainer about his health, he didn't mention losing weight till the end of November, and even then it was only a couple of pounds. He was tired at night, but a wholesome kind of tired, with a long untroubled slumber from twelve to seven-thirty like clockwork—what the French call le sommeil du juste . And his cough was still such a minor two-note matter. He'd be putting on his pajamas, and I'd turn from Nightline and tease him: "What are you coughing for? Stop it." That was how ordinary it sounded.
    Is that denial? If it was, it was warring in me with a doomed acceptance, as I struggled to figure how I would bear the sentence myself. Late at night I'd walk in the canyon and think about Roger watching me suffer. I was already riddled with guilt: None of this would be happening if I'd never had sex with strangers. I suppose I felt there was something innately shameful about dying of a venereal disease. All the self-hating years in the closet were not so far behind me. And any brand of shame lays one open to the smug triage of the moralists, whose vision of AIDS as a final closet is clean and efficient as Buchenwald. Of course we didn't deserve this thing, but how do you go up against them when you're suddenly feeling wasted by every lost half hour in bed? After all, the very qualities that used to recommend such aimless sport were its junk-food suddenness and its meaning nothing.
    My therapist, Sam Dubreville, reeled in every tortuous loop of self-flagellation. All right, so I couldn't deny the dread. The menace was real as the man with the .38, swinging it wildly back and forth between my head and the gray Mercedes. It might be true that all of us were trapped by the careless time before we heard the first siren. But the disease wasn't drawn to obsessive sex or meaningless sex. Sex itself, pure and simple, was the medium, and the world out there was ravenous for it. Straight and gay alike, they wailed like Patsy Cline, rubbing up against their home screens. Don't personalize the illness, Sam said, don't embrace it with obsession. Live now, in other words, sobered and alert. Relish the time Roger and I are whole, because something is going to beat the door down someday. Live now sounds simple enough to be carved on the temple at Delphi, except they preferred to chisel instead: Know yourself.
    I did what I could with my panic, riding the energy like body surfing, turning its intensity to