That week in the hospital, Keith brought Michael piles of magazines and newspapers to read to “keep his spirits up.” Michael grew sick of Keith’s good intentions and had no choice but to rally. By Friday he was cleared to go home.
Waiting for Michael’s release forms, Keith read aloud week-old headlines. SPACE SHUTTLE SNAFU, MAIN LINE MURDER STUMPS DA, TEENAGER’S BODY WASHES UP BY SCHUYLKILL REFINERY. The last sent a chill down Michael’s spine.
The details Keith offered were imprecise: Runaway from Webster and Bambrey found drowned the morning of January second, discovered by a Blackmoore Chemicals employee. Police believed the seventeen-year-old jumped or fell from either the South Street or Walnut Street Bridge. Relatives reported no note or precipitating factor other than depression following the recent loss of close family members. The body had been lodged in the chemical company’s filtering system among plowed snow and ice dumped into the river following recent storms. The name of the minor was not released.
The Blueboy, Michael was sure. He wanted to crawl back in his hospital bed, have the nurse kick Keith out and nail shut the door, let him die in peace. The Blueboy’s face floated before him: pale hair falling across forehead, icy depths of his eyes, the kissable crook of his nose. Heart full of as much tragedy as any Michael had ever endured. And now lost. Now dead.
Back home, Michael listened patiently to Keith’s schedule of when to take what medication. Keith taped a reminder to Michael’s refrigerator, and before leaving went over the instructions for working the electronic alarm on Michael’s new pocket pillcase. When he was finally alone, Michael flushed his medicine away, dropped the plastic case in the trash, then opened every window in the house to the cold outside.
Let the grave take him. He phoned Keith’s answering machine and told his AIDS Buddy not to bother delivering meals anymore; he was feeling so well he had decided to visit his sister in Tampa, would stay through winter if the sun proved kind. Michael didn’t mention that he hadn’t spoken to his sister since his father’s funeral, that he was merely trying to buy enough time to die quietly. Hanging up, he looked around his room at all the things he wouldn’t miss and imagined Keith or the landlord finally finding him, his thin carcass beached on a tangle of bedcovers.
Fever retook him. Michael lay swirled in sweaty sheets. Half dead in dreams, he felt himself slip free of his body. All around him darkness stretched, as vast and black as space. Glints of light flickered high above like stars. But Michael was far away from them and any warmth they possessed. He felt something cold and awful clamp tight around him, surrounding him in a second skin. Michael knew it was the Blueboy’s corpse, still wet from the river, sealing over him like a wound closing.
They were together now.
Michael stared out through the boy’s dead eyes, and watched powerless as the Blueboy’s stiff limbs, now his own, stumbled against the engulfing dark. His arms and legs tried to climb to the stars, but they lay out of reach across an impossible distance. Could angels even scale such heights, wondered Michael, surrounded by the dead boy’s wet decay, feeling the leaden hope in the Blueboy’s heart.
From distant rifts light bled down. The faint penumbra illuminated faces Michael had known in life. Men who had died of the same disease from which he was dying. Their deathbeds had left them with scarecrow limbs and bodies shrunken to bone-bag forms, stretched skin a gray afterthought. Their funeral-stitched lips did not move, yet Michael heard their soft susurrant chorus building inside his head, their yearning for life and light.
With great effort, these bodies slowly pulled themselves heavenward. But such fear among them. Trembling fingers found desperate purchase in nooks willed from nothing. The stars of life shone sweet and distracting as each body struggled higher. Do not forget me, minds called. Michael felt their silent yearning seek him out. Could the Blueboy hear it too?
With sudden strain the Blueboy joined the ascent, up past starlit windows that revealed a brick row home, snowy streets, car doors opening to strangers. A flash of fists, a rush of water. Who would want to go back to that?
Hand over hand the Blueboy climbed, up a faint thread heretofore invisible. It dangled from a rift in the firmament. It disappeared inside the Blueboy’s chest. Michael felt it, silky and gossamer thin, snaking around his essence, drawing tight.
Do not forget me.
Much closer now, lit windows seared the cold blue eyes masking Michael’s own. The Blueboy’s rough hands pulled both their bodies through one blinding laceration. On the other side, wind-snapped curtains revealed a new perspective: a dark room where walls shrank toward familiar vanishing points. Where a messy bed floated in the chilled blue air. And atop a damp mattress lay the rafted figure of a dreaming man.
Michael woke, somehow finding the strength to shut his window. Then he searched the bathroom for extra medicine Keith might have squirreled away. No luck. He fished the empty pill bottles from his wastebasket and set out to refill them at the 24-hour CVS drugstore.
The clock by the phone glowed 12:15 a.m. as Michael fled his apartment. Coatless, he stumbled through Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, past a dry fountain and beneath bare branches silvered with snow. Flakes swirled around him as he reached out toward passersby, groping for handholds among the living. But strangers recoiled.
Still he managed to make it to the store at Nineteenth and Chestnut where he scattered the bottles on the counter in front of the Asian pharmacist. Her almond eyes narrowed with a mixture of pity and apprehension as she filled each prescription. Somehow Michael managed to pay with a credit card not yet maxed out. The pharmacist slid the bagged order toward his wax-paper palm, their hands never once touching.
Outside again, Michael found no comfort in the night air as he choked down his pills. Snow thickened on sidewalks and streets. He hobbled home, as graceless as in drunken days. Nearing his corner, he again wished his limbs would unlock what last bit of life they held and let him lay down in the steep snowdrifts beneath the neon blink of the E-Z Lot sign. But a silent message called out to him.
Do not forget me.
He struggled to see its source. Nothing. No one. All the lost boys had yet to climb out of the holes they crawled into.
Blood throbbed beneath Michael’s blistering skin. The grim evening was cast in a shadowed blue as cold and complete as air itself. As Michael neared his door, something in the glow of a street lamp swirled and caught his attention. By the payphone, air and light cemented into form. First, eyes glinting like glass. Then nose, brow and chin, their snowy softness packed by rough hands into accidental beauty. Michael, frightened, turned away, crossed the street’s shifting drifts, key in hand, its silver point carving a path toward his door.
Behind him, It’s me.
Could it be? Michael glanced back, turned his key, and let the blue light in the shape of a boy follow him up three flights of stairs to his cramped apartment. There, Michael sat down on his bed, and the boy of light sat down beside him. Moved closer. Blew cool breath over Michael’s flushed face as he leaned in to kiss.
*
Michael woke alone, fever broken. The Blueboy was gone, if indeed he had ever been there.
Michael felt revitalized. Could the medicine have really worked so quickly? Or was it the Blueboy’s ghost, whose tongue and mouth had cooled Michael’s body? Not with a graveyard chill but with something brought from another world—lifetimes left unused. Lost time conspired into an antidote; Michael could feel it. The Blueboy’s ghost an incubus in reverse, a life-giver.
But that was impossible. The Blueboy was obviously still alive, nothing supernatural about it. Someone else must have drowned. Yet Michael could find no evidence that anyone had truly been there the night before; when he rose from bed, his apartment was still locked from inside, the air around him still vibrating with the texture of a dream. In the bathroom, he splashed cold water on his face. Despite his body’s sudden invigoration, Michael feared his mind had pitched forward into dementia. But when he looked in the bathroom mirror, his eyes looked more lucid than in weeks.