"I remember Eddie bit my lip so hard it bled, and when he saw it, he made me bite him so our blood would mix, and that way we'd be a part of each other until we were together again. That seems pretty freaky to me now, but at the time it didn't at all, and I did it. And I'm not sorry. Eddie is the first person in my life who made me stop feeling like some kind of weird, dead robot and turned me into a human being with feelings I understood and wasn't ashamed of—or shouldn't have been ashamed of. Back then I didn't know I didn't have to be ashamed. No one told me. Everyone said the opposite. I suppose it would have happened anyway, the gay revolution. So many people were ready. But still—God bless the Stonewall queens!"

In lieu of a drink he raised another cigarette and lit it.

Now I understood—most of it. It was a story most gay men would understand. At Rutgers twenty years earlier I'd been in love with my best friend. He was straight, or so I assumed. And I'd been too frightened to open up to him, to declare my true feelings; the boy meant everything to me, and I was terrified that my revelation would end the friendship.

We parted after graduation, and at some point I moved and stopped answering his letters. Eight years later I thought I saw him—Jake, his name was—in a gay bar in Washington, D.C. The man turned out not to be Jake, though the resemblance was powerful; and the look-alike was an agreeable young man nonetheless, with a personality sufficiently bland and pliant that I could go home with him and seem to fulfill one of the great, unending erotic fantasies of my adult life. Afterward the Jake look-alike told me he'd never met a man with a sexual hunger as great as mine. I told him the truth of the matter, a mistake, maybe, and he was hurt. I never saw him after that.

I said to Billy Blount, "Frank Zimka is Eddie's look-alike, isn't he? You used Zimka. Regularly."

"Yes."

"And Zimka knew it and went along with it because he was in love with you and was willing to accept the humiliation in order not to lose you."

"Yes. I hadn't planned on telling him. I still don't know which would have been worse, telling him or not telling him. But I called him Eddie one night in bed. He asked me who Eddie was. And I told him. Not about the forced separation and Sewickley Oaks—that's always been very painful for me to talk about—but about Eddie's being my first great true love, who had left me and disappeared from my life. And then it began. Whenever I was with Frank, he became Eddie."

Blount had only dragged twice on his cigarette, and now he stubbed it out. He said, "I first saw Frank in the Terminal one night. I thought he was Eddie, and I nearly went crazy. When he wasn't—well, you know." I knew. "I didn't really plan on seeing him after that night, but—well, he went for me and gave me his phone number, and—one thing led to another."

I said, "Where is Eddie now?"

"I don't know. After Elwell, I was put in Sewickley Oaks, where I met Chris, and we became friends. She was in for the same 'abnormality' as mine. Margarita had been her lover, and when Chris was committed by her parents, Margarita ran away from home and made it out to L.A., where a year later she heard about the FFF. They rescued us and took us to L.A., where we stayed for six months until I called my parents, and they promised that if I came back to Albany, they'd get off my back. I came home, naively thinking I might find Eddie or at least find out where he was, but my parents would never tell me. They'd only say he was being 'rehabilitated,' as they put it, someplace out in the Midwest.

"I finished high school at Albany High, then went to SUNY, and for all those years I never heard from Eddie or a word about him. For a while, I'd thumb or bum rides out to the Storrs' place in Loudonville and try to talk to Eddie's parents, but they finally sicked the cops on me and I had to give up."

I said, "Read the letter."

"From Frank? I don't know whether I can handle that right now."

"No, the one from your parents."

"I can handle that one even less."

"I've read it," I said. "You'll be interested."

He looked at the letter warily, then at me. I nodded. He reached to the foot of the bed where the letter lay, picked it up, opened it, and read. He lay back and stared at the ceiling, the letter still in his hand. "They win the prize, Stuart and Jane," he said. "They win the fucking grand prize." He dropped the letter on the bed beside him.

Throughout our two-hour conversation—or rather Blount's extended monologs—the pieces had been arranging themselves and falling into place. There was one to go. I said, "Did Eddie Storrs ever hurt anyone? On purpose?"

Blount sat up straight and gazed hard at me. He said, "No—I mean, yes. Not after we'd become lovers. With me, Eddie really calmed down. But before that, yes. 'Eddie had a reputation for getting into playful kinds of fights—dorm scuffles and all—and then doing things that really hurt or were dangerous. Once he had a kid down and kicked him in the neck. Another time Eddie grabbed a nail file and—stuck a kid in the thigh with it."

We looked at each other.

"Was Eddie Storrs ever jealous of your friendships with other guys? Or didn't you have any?"

"Not after, but before, yes. When Eddie and I were just becoming friends, but before we'd figured out what was really going on, he always gave me a hard time about other guys I hung around with, and he'd act pretty rotten toward those people. In fact, one kid I sort of felt comfortable with sometimes—I think now that he was probably gay—he was the one Eddie stabbed with the nail file." Blount's eyes got big, and he said, "No"

"Yes. Probably yes."

My mind went back to Albany. Huey Brownlee was at my place. Margarita Mayes was staying with a friend. Mark Deslonde was, as far as I knew, with Phil.

I said, "The phone."

Blount handed it to me across the bed. I dialed Timmy's number. It was 12:40 a.m. in Denver, 2:40 in Albany. He answered on the second ring.

"It's Don. I want you to go see Frank Zimka right away and

get him over to your place for the night, no matter what it takes. Are you awake enough?"

"Listen, I haven't slept at all. Where the fuck have you been? I've been calling your motel every ten minutes since midnight. A bad, bad thing has happened."

I said, "Zimka is dead."

A silence. Then, "How did you know? It just happened earlier tonight."

I said, "Wait a minute." I asked Blount for a cigarette, and he lit one for me. My hands were shaking, and the first drag on the Marlboro was like inhaling a medicated Brillo pad. I handed it back to Blount. I said, "Was he stabbed?"

Timmy said, "Yes. It happened at his place around eleven. Calvin was heading over to the park and saw the cops and commotion and checked it out and called me. They think it happened in the apartment, but Zimka managed to crawl out onto Lexington before he died. He must have been spaced out. He told the old woman who found him that a ghost had done it—the ghost of his own youth, or some crazy shit."

I said, "That's what he must have looked like to Zimka. Christ."

"Who must have looked like?"

"Eddie Storrs."

I summed it up for Timmy, then got Sergeant Ned Bowman's home number from Albany Directory Assistance. The operator said, "Have a nice evening." I woke Bowman up and told him where I was and who I was with. He said I was under arrest. Then I summed it up for him, and he replied that my story was pure fantasy and he wanted to see me first thing in the morning. I told him maybe later in the day, or century.