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since I’d felt a tongue in my ear, but this wasn’t the tongue I would have chosen.
    When I reached the backyard, I unlatched the gate and set the dog inside on the grass, where it squatted ladylike and took a long pee, revealing its gender. After that, with the dog following, I climbed back up the steps, which seemed twice as steep, my exhaustion was so deep. In the kitchen, I found an old Tupperware bowl whose lid had been lost to the ages, filled it with water, set it on the floor. While the dog lapped at it, I inspected three metal tags clustered in a jangle on her collar. One was a county registration tag. Another was stamped with Charlotte Preston’s address and phone number. The third, shaped like a heart, told me the dog’s name was Mei-Ling. It also bore these words: For Charlotte, with love, Marty.
    When the dog was finished drinking, I turned off the light and flopped down on the bed fully dressed. A moment later, she was up and sitting on my chest, fixing me with her dark, bulging eyes.
    “Be a good girl, Mei-Ling, and go to sleep.”
    She leaped forward and licked me on the mouth. Then she settled down beside me on the spread, curled up in a furry ball, and went to sleep.
    As usual, I didn’t. I lay awake, waiting for the suicide tapes to start playing. I had no immediate plans to end my life, nothing so dramatic as that, but the tapes gave me a sense of calm and order in the midst of the chaos that constantly swirled and banged around inside my skull. If things went badly, horribly, as they had for so many of my friends, I figured I would always have one of the suicide scenarios to fall back on as a way out. Maybe the way Charlotte Preston had made her exit, if that’s what had actually happened.
    Tonight, though, before the tapes began running, a stunning new thought struck me out of the early morning darkness. Once again, I’d turned one of those unexpected cerebral corners and found another monster lurking: Now that I was infected with the virus, I would never father a child. I was forty-one and had not seriously considered the desire to be a father, but now that it was an impossibility, now that the option had been taken from me, the finality of the loss caused a silent wail to reverberate inside me.
    There was always something new about the disease that sprang out of nowhere and clutched at you, then ate away at you if you gave it half a chance. Dependence on medications, their side effects and insane cost, destitution, physical deterioration, hospitals, pain, helplessness. There was always something.
    Tonight it was the irrefutable fact that I would never father a child, now that my semen was poisoned with HIV: That was what I thought about that night, hour after hour, while Charlotte Preston’s little dog slept beside me.

Chapter Three
     
    I drifted off to sleep just before dawn and was awakened a few hours later by a tiny pink tongue scrubbing my face.
    As Mei-Ling lathered my stubble with canine saliva, I was reminded that Charlotte Preston was dead and that her dog was illegally in my possession. The troubling swirl of events from the day before came back all at once, including the image of Charlotte’s corpse on the bed with its frozen grimace and amber eyes stunned with the horror of her final moments. Seconds after that, the powerful urge to void my bowels sent me fleeing to the bathroom. It had become a habit upon waking, a sudden rumbling of the stomach and a flash of diarrhea as regular as a morning train pulling in.
    Mei-Ling sat outside the open door, whining and watching me with plaintive, froggy eyes. After I’d flushed, she trotted beside me into the kitchen and started leaping with excitement when she saw my refrigerator. Apparently, to a dog, every refrigerator is similar and recognizable, no matter how old, battered, or rusted. She began to bark as I pulled open the door—short, sharp, unrelenting demands for food that made fingernails dragging across a blackboard seem like