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procedure has taken no more than five minutes. I back out of the cubicle, Steve rises, and, while the three of us small-talk for a moment, I am struck by this tableau: Rosemary stands between us cradling in her hands the vials of his blood.
That’s a part of his body,
I think;
it has passed through his heart.
Those five finger-shaped vials must still be warm, like she’s holding his hand in hers. We say goodbye as she gingerly places each one inside a shipping container emblazoned with BIOHAZARD signs.

T HREE
    Biohazard
    PRIOR TO IDL, STEVE HAD REGULARLY HAD HIS BLOOD drawn at a SmithKline Beecham lab near his doctor’s old office. He stopped using this lab in 1994 and we didn’t give it another thought until one day five years ago when I brought in the mail, which included a special-delivery packet from the blood lab.
    “Nothing good ever comes by certified mail,” Steve muttered, frowning, as he tore open the manila envelope and pulled out a letter from SmithKline Beecham’s president, dated May 27, 1999. According to the letter, a phlebotomist who’d worked at the lab Steve frequented had reused needles from blood draws (butterfly needles, it turned out). The woman had admitted to doing this “occasionally,” thereby possibly exposing uninfected patients to HIV, hepatitis, and other illnesses. (It was unclear whether her actions were intentionally criminal or inexplicably ignorant, but a year later she would be indicted on multiple felony charges of assault with a deadly weapon—dirty needles.) Records showed that Steve might have been one of her patients, the letter suggested; she wasn’t named, so Steve wasn’t sure himself. Those who wished to get tested for possible exposure could do so and receive counseling at SmithKline Beecham’s expense.
    While the letter was addressed to Steve, it wasn’t written
to
patients such as him, I noticed. It never mentioned, for instance, that the phlebotomist, by reusing needles, could have exposed HIV-positive patients to mutated strains of the virus. It is not just HIV that can be passed on, but an infected person’s entire drug-resistance history. Through reinfection, a patient already low on treatment options could be left with none. Steve put the letter aside and dug up his SmithKline Beecham records, finding he had used the lab eighteen different times.
    The investigation of the phlebotomist became a sensational local news story. Reports focused chiefly on the possibility that uninfected patients had been exposed to HIV and hepatitis, which was neither inappropriate nor surprising. The accused had had contact with more than twelve thousand people over a period of many years, so the pool of potential victims was sizable. Even if they weren’t infected, there would be grounds for lawsuits for their emotional distress. But Steve helped me see a perspective never addressed in media accounts—that of a man whose blood could have been the source of infection for another, or even for many others, making him feel like an accessory to crimes he’d been powerless to stop.
    “The idea of someone treating my blood so carelessly . . . ,” he said to me, pausing to steady his words. His eyes narrowed. “The possibility of my infecting someone else is horrifying.”
    I’ve seen that look in Steve’s eyes one time since, late on a Saturday morning. A few moments earlier, I’d told him to sit down at our kitchen table. “Honey, I’ve gotta tell you something,” I’d said shakily. “It’s really important.”
    A lifelong insomniac, I’d been struggling through an awful week of sleeplessness, as Steve knew. I’d rolled out of bed early that morning feeling exhausted yet again. I took a look at my face in the bathroom mirror. My red-rimmed eyes were so bloodshot, I imagined they’d sucked my veins dry, left me iron-poor, a bit anemic. So, I reasoned sleepily, I would be a patient of my own Dr. Feelgood: I would give myself an injection of Steve’s B 12 .
    With the