Chapter 1MirrorsHow horribly does a guy have to die that his ghost keeps on suffering even after he leaves his sick body behind?
François had lived across the hall from Mark and me. He was our friend, the first friend we shared in the city. He was a little older than us and would cook us roast chicken and potatoes. He was short, elfish, delicate looking, but he had a real pervert’s mustache and one motherf***er of an attitude. He liked to introduce himself at parties as a failed artist, a manqué. He used to be an art teacher at a private school for precocious Upper West Side children, passing off his French accent and sense of style as the equivalent of a teaching degree. His walls were filled with his students’ drawings, all crayon and primary colors. “They’re better than any shit at the gallery on the corner,” he’d say. “Any child can scribble on a wall. Of course, I am not jealous.” Springtime of last year, once he really started looking sick, the school board asked him to resign because, they said, his face was “scaring the children.” He had been taking such care to cover his KS with makeup that I actually think he convinced himself that no one else noticed.
“I’m so angry,” he told me, “I broke two of my hand mirrors.”
I asked him how many hand mirrors he had, and he waved the question away, as if it were impossible to count that high.
He tore down every construction paper drawing, every last series of lopsided paper dolls holding hands. I suggested we plot ways to curse the backstabbing school board and the parents who worried for their precious little angels, right after we figured out what he’d do without health insurance, which, for a French person, was an inconceivable problem. It’s not possible, he kept saying. A thing about François is he liked to say things were a catastrophe. Missing the train, spilling his coffee, coming down with a cold before a hot date. But when he got really sick, he didn’t call it a catastrophe. He just said, “It’s not possible” over and over, like he could ward off the worst with it. So we burned the art in the slop sink in the hall, along with a caricature of his enemies he drew with a red marker. After that, he stopped with the makeup, having realized that it was his anger more than his face that scared people. The sicker he got, the more he embraced that anger. At first, he said his anger made him feel better, and later he said it kept him alive.
It upset Mark, though. He said that watching François get worse felt like getting pulled away from the edge of a platform when a train was screaming toward you. Even if you were glad to be spared, you couldn’t help but picture your body crushed.
François’s decline came in waves: KS on his gums, stroke, brain lesions, blindness, dementia. His death was the first to really shock me with how ghastly someone could go out. The first guys I knew who died of AIDS didn’t die so much as vanish into whispers and rumors—in hospitals where we couldn’t visit, or with families who wouldn’t return our calls. If they came back after they died, they tended to be confused about what exactly had killed them but were pretty f***ing sure they had been done wrong—not by luck, per se, but by the people who were supposed to take care of them. They were the ones with houses on Fire Island, with memberships at the Saint. Guys with money and jobs who expected more out of life. We had friends who thought those clones would be the only guys who could get it, the profligate rich whores who only lived for themselves. It’s not like the people I was close with did fewer drugs and had less sex, so I guess it was less a lifestyle judgment and more of a class resentment or, I realize now, a fantasy of being able to contain something scary. The guys who died first weren’t my close friends, but I lived in the world and they did too, and I was sorry it was happening, to them, to everybody.
François, however, thought everyone would get it eventually, that all it took was a little bad luck, that it would rip through the gays and then the straights, and then maybe the whole rotten planet would die out.
“Even the lesbians?” I asked.
“Perhaps not,” he said. “Unless they are very bad girls who inject themselves with needles. The good ones can take care of the children who remain.”
“F*** off,” I said. “Absolutely not.”
He had been bitter about those who would survive. “Everyone who lives longer than me,” he said, scowling, “will think it is because they are stronger. Or more virtuous. They didn’t visit the bathhouses, they didn’t have too many partners. They were good, and I am so bad.”
He wanted to go home to France for treatment because, he was sure, they wouldn’t treat him like garbage like they did here. His boyfriend, Leon, said, “Don’t be silly, baby. In this country, garbage gets taken care of.”
“It’s a good line,” Mark said. “But the garbagemen do go on strike every couple of years.”
“As is their right,” François said with a hiss.
“New York’s strongest,” I added. “Maybe we need to get the teamsters on it, then we’ll have a cure by the end of the year.”
“If you had an organized Left in your country—”
Leon rested his chin in his hand and batted his eyelashes. “Oh, darling, were you part of May ’68? You’ve never mentioned it. Why don’t you enthrall us?”
François went to meetings at the Community Health Center at seven in the morning, answered calls on the hotline, went to the fundraisers, went to the GMHC meetings where, he said, doctors and social workers told him what it was like to have AIDS while he had shingles zipping up his torso. If you called him a victim, he’d throw something at you. As he got sicker, he got angrier, angrier, somehow more himself in his anger, and as a year passed with no response from anyone with power, and the groups he organized with fought and fractured, and as his anger got stronger, his mind got cloudier until the anger swallowed him and he lost all control, dribbling shit as he walked down the hall, screaming, spitting at the people in the hospital who were too afraid to touch him. He slumped into a coma the day the government announced that AIDS was caused by a virus and they’d have a vaccine in two years. Leon whispered the news into François’s ear, but if he understood, he didn’t wake up happy. I bet he wouldn’t have believed it. I still don’t.
I think what frightened me more than anything was knowing that someone could go on that way, that even after you were dead, you could still feel the hell of being left to die. His anger outlived him.
After François vanished from my apartment, I still felt him with me. The air was stuffy again, but staticky, the way it is when it storms but the humidity isn’t burned off by lightning. I thought of getting back into the tub, but the water felt stale, like a dog bowl. I staggered to bed, wrapped myself in every blanket I had over my damp towel, and didn’t move until dawn, when the light, I hoped, would make me feel safe enough to get up.
Copyright © 2026 by Natalie Adler. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
