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staff.  They did not insist he sign in.  Instead a chubby nurse's aide stood in front of him with a clipboard taking down the pertinent information, leaving him to deal with his nose, replacing the half-full Zip-loc bag with a succession of pink plastic kidney-shaped vomit bowls but otherwise treating him as though it were ninety-nine per-cent certain he had AIDS.
    He didn't mind.  As long as the pink plastic bowls kept coming and the tissues were handy.
    He was beginning to feel light-headed.  He supposed it was loss of blood.  He couldn't remember Annie's address though he'd written her from his New York apartment countless times in the past four years since she'd moved away and knew her address--quite literally--by heart.  He couldn't remember his social security number, either.  The nurse's aide had to dig into his back pocket to get his wallet.  The card was in there along with his insurance card.  He couldn't do it for her because his hands, now covered with brown dried blood, were occupied trying to stop fresh red blood from flowing.
    The ER doctor was also half his age, oriental, handsome and built like a swimmer with wide shoulders and a narrow waist, like the rest of the staff quite friendly and cheerful at this ungodly hour but unlike them seemingly unafraid to touch him even after, having swallowed so much of his own blood, he vomited much of it back into one of the pink plastic bowls.  He asked Alan if he was taking any drugs.  And that was when he learned about the blood-thinning properties of ibupro f en.  He thought that at least he was probably not going to have a heart attack.  He supposed it was something.
    The doctor used a kind of suction device to suck blood from each of his nostrils into a tube trying to clear them but that didn't work which Alan could have told him, there was far too much to replace it with, so he packed him with what he called pledgets, which looked like a pair of tampons mounted on sticks, shoved them high and deep into the nasal cavities and told him to wait and see if they managed to stop the bleeding.
    Miraculously, they did.
    Half an hour later they released him.  He phoned Annie and she drove him back to the condo and he washed his hands and face and changed his clothes and they each went back to bed.
    *****
    He woke needing to use the toilet and found that both his shit and piss had turned black.  A tiny black droplet clung to his penis.  He shook it off.  He supposed he'd learned something--a vampire's shit and urine would always be black.  He wondered if Anne Rice could find a way to make this glamorous.
    *****
    The second time he woke he was bleeding again.  He squeezed at the pledgets as he'd been told to do should this occur but the bleeding wouldn't stop.  He roused Ann and this time she insisted on driving him to the hospital herself, handing him her own newly opened box of Puffs to place in his lap.  Upstairs David continued to sleep his heavy adolescent sleep.  It was just as well.  The boy was only fond of blood in horror movies.
    The chubby nurse's aide was gone when he arrived but the pink plastic bowls were there and he used them, sat in the same room he'd left only hours before while his doctor, the swimmer, summoned an Ear Nose and Throat man who arrived shortly after he'd sent Annie back home.
    By now he felt weak as a newborn colt, rubber-legged and woozy.  It seemed he needed to grow a new pair of hands to juggle his kidney-shaped-pan, eyeglasses, tissues and tissue boxes, all the while holding his nose and spitting, vomiting, dripping and swallowing blood at intervals.
    He felt vaguely ridiculous, amused.  A bloody nose for chrissake.
    What he felt next was pain that lasted quite a while as the ENT man--another healthy Florida specimen, a young Irishman who arrived in pleated shorts and polo shirt --withdrew the pledgets and peered into his nose with a long thin tubular lighted microscope, determined that it was only from the right