centerpieces
After Peter    by Alexander Chee

In memoriam, Peter David Kelloran
17 December 1961-10 May 1994

I slept but my heart was awake.
-Song of Songs 5:2

His name was Peter David Kelloran, Peter D. Kelloran, as he liked to appear in print, and he was a painter. He died in his bed at the Maitri Hospice in San Francisco at the age of thirty-three on the afternoon of May 10, after he decided he could no longer care for himself in his apartment at the edge of town, where he had lived until then. There was a solar eclipse that day, and his passing occurred during it. He had spoken with his mother that morning on the phone. His dementia had parted enough for him to tell her he loved her. "And then he started to go," his friend Laura Lister says. The room was full of women friends of Peter's and they laid hands on him in a circle. Laura recalls the phone ringing, and she took her hands off him to answer it. "He lunged up off the bed." He went slowly. "I begged him to go, begged him to let go at that point. He needed to go. He wouldn't go, though," Laura says. "And then one of the male volunteers came in and he took Peter's hand in his. You could see the change. Like a light came over him. And he was gone."

"All the people there with him at the end, I can never thank them enough. They were all so beautiful, so strong," his mother, Jill Kelloran, says from her home in Chicago. "They did what I physically could not do. Peter's death was tearing me apart and I literally could not be there. They cared for him to the end. And I will always be grateful to them, for that."

"We were there until he grew cold," Peggy Sue, a friend who was present, says. "Maitri being a Buddhist place, you lie in state. So we sat with him."

I am a minor character in Peter's story. I first saw Peter when I worked in the Castro at a bookstore, A Different Light, a gay and lesbian bookstore that in those days doubled as a reference library and community center. The store was the first to have a section devoted entirely to AIDS/HIV issues; it was located at the front of the store, beside the register. I supposed, the first day I saw him, he'd either seroconverted recently, or had recently decided to do something about it. I saw many people in this way, on their first few days, and I was forever inventing some story about them, never mentioned to anyone, simply to fill the hours. I was often the first person they had to deal with, a bookstore clerk who would show them the short shelf of books, expanding weekly, but, still short.

I was twenty-two years old then. Peter was twenty-eight, tall and broad shouldered and thin; he had a wide, Irish frame and usually wore leather: a motorcycle jacket, leather boots. A dyed-blue tuft of hair glowed across his forehead. I'd seen him walking through the Castro, and I'd see him at demonstrations. A year would pass before I'd hear his voice, speaking to me. Today he simply ran through the books and selected a few on strengthening the immune system, and he paid when someone else was at the register. I saw him leave. His blue eyes had a searchlight intensity, and it seemed clear what he saw and what he didn't. He didn't see me. I saw that my mission would be to be seen by him. I felt called and commanded by him immediately and to this day I cannot say why it was, only that it was immediate, and thorough.

That day in the store he didn't look at me, moving quickly instead back out into the hurrying sidewalk, the afternoon sunlight making long crowded shadows. I didn't know his name then, or anything about him, except that he was beautiful, and he was hurrying and possibly, probably, positive.

Peter, in fact, at the time that I first saw him, had been positive for three years. "He wrote to me from Morocco," Laura says, of a trip he'd taken in 1986. "And he could only write about how sick he had been. And after he got back and he tested positive, that was when we figured out, that was his onset."

He would keep it a secret for years, not telling anyone besides Laura, who kept his secret as well. "A lot of people were angry at me for that," she says, about her keeping his secret. "But people thinking about your death, that'll put you in the grave. And besides," she adds, "if you didn't get your business dealt with when someone dies, that's your own fault. You had every day before then to deal."

When I arrived in San Francisco, there was no way to find the Castro on any maps. People were forever calling the bookstore for directions to the neighborhood. I remember that in my group of friends there was the sense that we were a wave arriving on this coastal city from farther inland: postcollegiate young men and women arriving to find cheap apartments, thrift stores bursting with the old athletic T-shirts and jeans and flannel we all prized. I remember when I put the empty clothes together with the empty apartments, on an ordinary sunny afternoon walking down a sidewalk to work: there on a blanket stood a pair of black leather steel-toed boots, twelve-hole lace-ups. They gleamed, freshly polished, in the light of the morning. As I approached them, feeling the pull of the hill, I drew up short to examine the rest of the sidewalk sale. Some old albums, Queen and Sylvester; three pairs of jeans; two leather wristbands; a box of old T-shirts; a worn watch, the hands still moving; a pressed-leather belt, Western style; and cowboy boots, the same size as the steel-toes. I tried the steel-toes on and took a long look at the salesman as I stood up, to feel at that moment that they were exactly my size.

This man was thin. He was thin in a way that was immediately familiar. Hollowing from the inside out. His skin reddened, and his brown eyes looked over me as if lightning might fall on me out of that clear afternoon sky. And I knew then, as I paid twenty dollars for the boots, that they'd been recently emptied. That he was watching me walk off in the shoes of the new dead. And that all of this had been happening for some time now.

I lived in San Francisco for two years right after leaving college in 1989. When I say I was part of a group, I mean I was part of a group of activists who divided our time and energies between a number of organizations and affinity groups: ACT UP and Queer Nation were the seeds for a great deal of what happened there and what happens there to this day. We engaged in direct-action protests, spent free time discussing new protests and the way in which past protests had been perceived, and thought about politics and its relationship to our personal lives to the point that our lives inverted entirely into this realm: the personal as political because that was all there was. We had bitter feuds and disputes, we had angry meetings. We had raucous celebrations. We had vigils and parties, we made mistakes and made amends. The average member was twenty-three, HIV-negative, white and college educated, usually gay or lesbian and from another part of the country.

At the time, I was twenty-two, HIV-negative, Amerasian, college educated, and from another part of the country. Pictures of me at the time show a thin dark-haired young man who seems inordinately happy for someone who spent a good deal of his time wanting to be dead. Every picture of me from this time shows me smiling. This young man I was drove a motorcycle, worked at a bookstore, hung out with drag queens who didn't attend meetings of any kind, and was known to dance on a bar or two. He was a member of ACT UP/SF before the bitter split of the group, a member of Queer Nation, and a somewhat pesky intern at Out/Look, a queer academic journal of the time. He was on the media committee of ACT UP and had a reputation at first for dating no one, and then, for having dated everyone. He hollowed his desire to die with the knowledge that other people were dying who wanted to live, and this was the single strongest motive for his participation in direct-action AIDS activism. Being an activist meant, among other things, never being alone, and being alone was where he got into trouble. And so he made sure he was never alone.

At this time in San Francisco, the world seemed like it might either go up in fire or be restored in a healing past imagining. The world seemed ripe for fixing and rescue. Those of us in ACT UP and Queer Nation were accused at one point of a gay Zionism, and it was true only in that, in a way similar to Jewish thought, we believed we could fix the world and do it by staying together, working together. Why am I telling this story? As a minor character, out of place here in this narration, this is what has happened, since AIDS, for me at least: the major characters have left, in these stories from the first ten years of the epidemic. The men I wanted to follow are dead: David Wojnarowicz, Derek Jarman, Peter. Finding them had made me want to live, and I did, do. The world is not fixed and the healing is still just past my imagining, though, perhaps, closer. The minor characters are now left, to introduce themselves and take the story forward.

Electric blue Mohawk. Blue eyes carrying the light like a filament. Something energy would force its way through. Blue. Peter.

I saw him next on Market Street at five in the morning under the giant Safeway sign there in the middle of the city, where our ACT UP activist affinity group had gathered in the parking lot for a "non-ACT-UP-related action," which was to say, all the same members, different team for the occasion. I was a participant in a handful of these sorts of actions. This morning, we were going to wrap false newspaper fronts over a thousand copies of the San Francisco Chronicle. 9000 DEAD IN THE CITY, read the headline on the false newspaper front we'd created for the occasion. Clever group members had imitated the font and layout, and the false front wore the name San Francisco Chronic Liar. Readers reading closely would read that this was the number of people who had died thus far in the AIDS epidemic, but the cover photograph, a shot of the city from the sky, was meant to evoke a natural disaster or terrorist news story, which, to us, the AIDS death story was. The action's purpose was to increase the accurate coverage of AIDS in the media.

About thirty or forty of us were gathered there, and we split the bales of false fronts up into groups. Each team had a neighborhood. The plan was to wrap the false fronts over the papers after sneaking them into the car. Each car had a squad of three. One of us had coins, to get the paper box open, one of us drove, one of us was on lookout. As we split the bales of papers from the box, what we were doing felt dangerous. But when we wrapped the fronts it was only tedious, or silly, or funny, and my team, after we wrapped the last one up, sat and waited for twenty minutes for a pedestrian to come up to the paper box, open it, and read the headline. This person puzzled over the paper and walked off, to catch the train.

I did not meet Peter that morning. Instead, I ached as he walked the parking lot, oblivious to me, his leathers shiny in the dark, his hair flashing occasionally above the perfect white of his scalp. I asked my friend Choire about him. Peter Kelloran, he said. Dreamboat. Jason's boyfriend. I didn't mention my memory of him, from the store, afraid of violating his privacy.

As I wrapped the papers in the dark, as we went from box to box, I tried to tell myself, There's nothing you can do, other than what you are doing. I felt then a very personal responsibility to end the AIDS crisis. I was a literalist and remain a literalist. When someone had said to me, shortly after I arrived, you need to help end the AIDS crisis, I thought, okay, and this is what happened: I became an AIDS activist, a fairly direct outgrowth of my college activism for gay and lesbian causes. My Korean forebears, in previous times, when asked directions, would take their questioners all the way to their destinations, sometimes traveling miles out of their way. I took this new destination, the end of the AIDS crisis, as my own; this seemed ordinary. That someone wouldn't do this seemed extraordinary to me. But there in the dark morning Peter's face, so like the future, merged with this mythic end to become a private horizon line, hidden inside every view I had of my days afterward in San Francisco. The immanent hidden inside everything. There was nowhere, it seemed, where I might not see him, and I tried to stay vigilant, for awhile. Peter seemed beyond me: too handsome, too adult, too cool to want me, and, certainly, unapproachable. There would be other men for me while I was there, but the sight of him on the back of a friend's motorcycle, or at the wheel of his VW Thing, his head settled low as he drove by, caught me every time, and this was, for a few more months, how I always saw him.

I knew the Jason mentioned to me by my friend Choire that day, as he was also an activist and we were friendly. He had a long narrow face, attractive in the way of a soldier from World War I, but done up in punk drag: Dr. Martens, leather jacket, torn jeans. He had what seemed to me to be an enviable sexual success, and I do recall on occasion feeling the contrast when we sat next to each other, his dyed blond hair making my dark hair seem darker, his lighter. In other words, we were not similar, we were opposites of a kind, and that we would end up having not one but two men in common was a sort of bizarre square dance, but in those times, ordinary.

Peter first asked me out at brunch at the Baghdad Café, on a morning after we had all eluded capture by the police downtown for a Gulf War street action. He walked up to my table and asked for my phone number. I tried to write my number, took his, and he waited as I wrote, grinning a little. He walked off with a look over his shoulder and a wave, to me, more or less ignoring my tablemates. He never asks for anyone's number, my friend Miguel said. He's still hung up on Jason.

People change, I said.

He had asked in a manner so calm, so at odds with my reaction, that I wondered at the time what on earth could have been the reason. For it didn't seem like desire. He had seemed like he was asking if I wanted to go shopping or something.

My days and nights in San Francisco tend to run one into the other: separating them takes an act of will. For years afterward, I recalled my time there as one long day and night, the night full of dancing on bars and long motorcycle rides, the day full of the eerie sunlight, coffee in enormous amounts, dusty used bookstores and, of course, earthquakes and police riots. It was half dream, half nightmare, and in this odd construction, for all the men I had there, Peter's face would remain, clear, at the center of it: Imagine a valentine made from earthquake rubble, spray-painted boots, dollar books, and gasoline, Peter's smile the center of it. Peter at Café Flore, sitting in a sunlit window, surrounded by friends; Peter walking a dark sidewalk, wheat paste in a bucket in his hand, for flyers; Peter at meetings, standing in the back of the room, scowling slightly; Peter's clean body, no marks or tattoos, shining in the reflection of the mirror in his apartment as he approached his bed.

A memory I have of Peter is of protesting the filming of Sharon Stone's vehicle to fame, Basic Instinct. Peter and I and Fernando, an ex-boyfriend of mine, stood under the overpass where they were filming and created a discordant trio howl. Peter and I were both formerly in boys' choirs, and Fernando couldn't carry a tune but was quite loud. The sound was haunting, a tone that climbed the bridge's belly and flew everywhere around us. I remember Peter's smile in the San Francisco night, his handsome face slightly contorted by a swollen gland.

Our shriek apparently caused so much distress on the set that Michael Douglas drove his car into a bank of lights. He was not harmed. Later, some of us had fake set passes and got onto the set during the filming. Riot police hidden inside emerged and handcuffed us and brought us all down to the precinct house, where we were held. Peter and Fernando both avoided arrest, I recall. They were technically legal observers and waited for us as we left the police garage. I remember sashaying out of the garage to the howls and whistles of my waiting friends, and that may have been the first time that Peter saw me. He was standing at street level, talking to Jason. But I saw his eyes find me, smile, and go back. A few weeks later, he would ask me out.

I don't know how Peter saw me. I'll never know.

When I finally met and dated Peter I was breaking up with someone dear to me: a Mexican American metalsmith and activist, who took up with Jason, Peter's ex-boyfriend: two of us dark, two of us light. Some odd trade occurred. Some could call it karma, but in those days, I called it pain, and I left it. This ex had been the only man to make me a ring and put it on my finger (no one else has yet done this). Jason and he would have a commitment ceremony. Peter would up until his passing think sometimes, in his dementia, that Jason, who visited him regularly and well, was still his boyfriend. Peter had not, as I'd said to my friend Miguel, changed: he still loved Jason.

I left this tangle. You are reminded: I am a minor character. You sense the distortion of this story, and you are right to ask, where is the main character? He is gone. I moved to New York, for another man. I could ask myself what might have happened had I stayed, but that's a false question, suitable only for novelists and drunks. I didn't stay. The pain went away and I figured I had left it behind. I was wrong. Peter's story continued without me, to its end.

How do you know someone is dead? One way is when they are referred to in the past tense. Peter lived for a few years after my departure, and his death happened out of my sight, my hearing. I was not part of the group that got called. I was one outside that group, after that departure I'd made. I now understand and accept this as one of the costs of my departure. Years later, in New York, my friend Choire was speaking to me about San Francisco, and he said, "Well, after Peter died. . . ." Peter had been dead three months when he said this.

I felt like he had been cleaning a gun and it had emptied into me. "Sorry," Choire said. "Thought you knew. Hate that, when people don't know."

Peter was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and had grown up in Washington, first on Mercer Island and then in Bellevue, where he went to Newport High School. He was a skier and a swimmer in high school, but "not competitive in that way people wanted from athletes," his mother adds. Intelligent, quick-minded, he never had to study hard and school came easily to him. "He used to love to bug me," his sister says of him. She remembers him always taking her back upstairs to re-dress her in the mornings, when she would come down in what he considered inappropriate clothes. He could get away with a great deal of mischief. "He used to leave the house undetected, all the time," his mother recalls. "I didn't know for years that he would get out of the house through his window and go out all night. He started doing it as a child." He graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in graphic design and left for Europe, living for the year in Spain and Portugal. He had been a kind of art prodigy, good at ceramics, drawing, design. He had made, in college, a ceramic relief so large there was no kiln big enough to fire it, and the relief stayed at his home in Washington until his father sold the house. His mother still has a set of plates he made in the shapes of fishes, and one Christmas, she recalls, he sent her copper candlesticks that had once been table legs; each one had been wrapped in brown paper and then the group arranged and tied to make the shape of a star. "I didn't want to open it," she says. "It was like, that was the gift itself, it was so beautiful." He did the artwork for the events posters for the Paradise Lounge, where he worked as a bartender, all done in a psychedelic mode. "So beautiful," Laura says, who bartended there with him. Peter created images for ACT UP's Marlboro boycott. He was personally happy to see earnings reports that showed they had lost money in the quarter the boycott began. He wanted to be a musician, and before he became too ill to do so, he had plans to record. "He had a beautiful voice," Lisa says. "He had a beautiful voice," his mother says.

He is remembered as consistent by anyone who knew him, steady with everyone, and a study in contradictions: he was immensely private, and yet he would say, without provocation, to anyone, "I'm a homo." Serious and grave, he would give in occasionally to a jig, a little hopping dance. Extremely quiet, he could, when he wanted, be the center of attention. "I was called to school by the principal when he was in the fifth grade," his mother recalls, "for a show. A talent show, by the students. And out came this little boy, my boy, so self-possessed. And he emceed the entire show from start to finish, totally confident, a little Johnny Carson." Peter attended his high-school prom in a black tuxedo he splattered with shocking pink paint to match his date's pink dress and the pink shirt he wore with the tux.

In San Francisco, after college, he became part of a punk rock scene that centered on a place called the A-hole, where he befriended the painter Pasquale Semillion, whom he and Laura cared for until his death from AIDS. Peter had turned to photography but still painted abstract canvases. No one is exactly sure who has what pieces of his art now. His sister has three of the Paradise Lounge posters framed in her home, his mother, the plates that he made and paintings and a sketch he had titled "Three Dogs and a Pig" that was actually of four dogs. She likes to remember this as a sample of his humor. Laura has paintings and pictures and tapes. Jason has memories only. "I can't really remember him from before he was sick, don't really remember the art," he says. "Isn't that terrible?"

Jill Kelloran, his mother, has a picture of him, framed, that she looks at regularly, of Peter on the beach in Portugal, waving from the sand in front of a tent he had made from everything he had found on the beach-flags, old jeans, sails-and where he lived for a good part of his time there. His father, Tom Kelloran, has framed a five-page letter that Peter sent from that Portuguese tent.

His favorite bands: Band Yellow and Adam Ant, Einstürzende Neubauten. His favorite article of clothing: a belt buckle shaped like a bullet. His favorite author: Kurt Vonnegut; in particular, the story "Welcome to the Monkey House," in which Billy the Poet, a lighthearted sexual rhymer, stalks a futuristic America with plans to make Americans enjoy the sex they now all deny themselves. Peter's plan: to become a musician.

When an artist dies young there is always talk of the paintings undone, the books unwritten, but that points to some imaginary storehouse of undone things and not to the imagination itself, the far richer treasure, lost. All of those works are the trail left behind, a path across time left as the sun leaves gold on the sea: you can see it but you can't ever pick it up. What makes us sweat from the sun here on earth is a fraction of the force the sun can bring to bear, and this is what this lost work is to us, these paintings in the apartment with him when died, unfinished: this is faint heat from faraway fire. What we lose with each death is like stars falling out of the sky and into the sea and gone. It is more than nothing that we have left, loss larger than nothingness; the something undone, the something that won't ever be done, remains unendurable to consider. My personal pantheon of heroes from that time are all dead: Peter, Derek Jarman, David Wojnarowicz. I feel more than unequal to any one of them. So instead I stand here and balance them on the tip of a crush a decade old. I feel they would all approve.

More than my other heroes, Peter and I were alike. Both oldest brothers, both with family money, both with a sense of political responsibility. More mundane details: both of us got away with all sorts of misbehavior as children, both of us liked to shock with our way of dressing, both of us liked science fiction. Both of us sang in boys' choirs as children. Both of us worked in ceramics in college. Both of us skied and swam and eschewed team sports, competitive behavior in general. Why should I survive on the earth where he didn't? As I near the age he was when he passed on, I feel a clock count off, though, at this writing, I am still negative. At this writing, no one has yet been cured of AIDS, either.

What can we endure? We cannot help but be reminded of what we do not know from these lost, and what they will never tell us, can never tell us. And I can't help but long for it still, can't help but long for Peter still, the sight of him, as I once did, love-struck and young, a star in my eye, the top corner of it dyed blue.

What I felt for Peter, I know, may never, if I'd stayed, have added up, but knowing what I know about him makes me believe in love at first sight more rather than less, because I wasn't wrong about him, even though I didn't know him: the truth of him came to me in the sight of him. And so this eye empties out what it saw, and I can't help but want to restore him with memory's pantomime, the imagination's garish theater, the fiction writer's song. And so now he is on this page. He is gone and not gone. Peter D. Kelloran, as he liked to appear in print.

I remember that on our first date Peter took me to see a concert. He picked me up at my apartment on Market Street, we went to the concert downtown, and then we drove back to my apartment, a flat under the Divisadero overpass on Market Street. I don't remember the music. The whole time I was only aware of Peter. I asked him in, and he said sure. In my room he sat down on my bed, a lumber and cement-block affair that I'd made with a friend.

San Francisco nights are always more vivid than the days. The sunlight of San Francisco, for all its color and clarity, has always added to the sense that the city was an illusion. That light shows nothing. The nights in San Francisco are where everything seems its true self and color. Peter seemed much older than me that night. He wore his leather jacket, a coat I loved, and it was one of the few times when I knew him that his hair was blond, his head nearly bare. I remember he kept removing a dropper of astragalus and taking it, which he did just then.

So, he said, as he sat on my bed and tucked the dropper into his jacket. I normally take boys home and tie them up and whip them.

I hadn't turned the light on in my room and we were in the dark there. He smiled as he said this.

Do you want to take me home and tie me up and whip me? I asked.

Do you want to be tied up and whipped? He asked.

No, I said. Not really. Part of me thought he was joking. Part of me knew his reputation.

He lay down next to me on the bed. The two of us lay there, in our coats and boots, and I felt alone with him for the first time. That's fine, he said. We don't have to do that. And he reached his arm around me.

Can you do me a favor? I asked him, after we had lain there awhile, silent and still.

Yes, he said.

Can you lie on top of me? Just, you know, lie there?

He rolled on top of me, in a light embrace, and the weight of him pushed the breath out of me.

Am I crushing you? he asked.

No, I said. This is exactly what I meant. And the weight of him pressed me out. I felt covered, safe; something dark retreated, and, for what felt like the first time in the arms of a man, I felt safe. Which is one of the things that love can feel like. Peter stayed there for some time. He may even have fallen asleep at some point. And so it is that when I hear stories of how thin he became, I can't reconcile them with the weight of the boy who pinned me to myself and made me feel the place in me where I attached to the world.

He got up and went home. We made a plan to see each other again. I was with him in a way that I was with no one else, and from what I understand, this was also true for him. Strange to ourselves and each other, only the feeling of the room, the silence of it, was familiar. All over the city, people were strung into slings, dancing on tables, walking down alleys following strangers, and on my doorstep it felt like we were a young couple out of Happy Days, out of the fifties, mild as milk. I watched him go and then turned and went back upstairs to bed.

He had shaved his head, having come back from his sister's wedding, for which he had grown out his hair. I wouldn't know, until years later, that he had just told his mother of his illness. On pictures from that day "he looked gorgeous," his mother says. But his grandmother, Paula Morgan, thought otherwise. "He's sick," she said, after seeing him. She knew before he had told them what was wrong. "He was a very special young man," she says of him now. "It seems to me this happens to special young men."

During his last two years, when he was very sick, he became so thin his pants would fall off him. He went in and out of dementia, regressing. He started smoking again. He would ask Jason, "Does my father know we're boyfriends?" Or he would say, "I met you at high school, right?" He went out from the hospice one day with Janet, his aunt, and went to get cigarettes and burgers, and he looked around at the people there and said, "These people, they're all homosexuals! Every one!" He was so thin at that point that even in the Castro, where people were accustomed to the sight of wasting, Peter attracted attention.

"He had wanted," Janet says, "to be at Maitri. And so we went and there was no room and it looked like he was going to have to go somewhere else, and then I called and found him a space there, which was good. It was where he wanted to be." Janet had rented an apartment for Peter to spend Christmas with her down in Carmel, and it was shortly after, upon returning, that Peter called her to say, "It's time. It's my time." He had been living at home until then, getting meals delivered and having home care, and when he called Janet, he gave as his reason, "I can't take care of myself anymore. It's my time."

Imagine all your days running through you, you like a pool of light and sound altering as you encounter them. That all at once you are every age you have ever been. Time is coursing through you, the time you lived, running back and forth through you, a flume of your days. This was Peter's dementia.

"I always knew where he was," Lisa says, of his dementia. "He, God, he would say something and people would say, 'He's crazy,' but he wasn't. No, people thought it was sad, and it was, but it was beautiful, really, because he was back in the days that he loved, just, all at once. I remember he said once, 'I have to give Lisa a baby!' and the people at the hospice really thought he'd lost it, but I knew. We used to talk about having a child, and then, well, he got HIV, and he never talked about it again. And so he mentioned the baby again there and I said, 'No, remember? You got sick. And so we didn't have it.' And he got quiet again."

Jason remembers him saying, "I am supposed to tell you something, Jason. They want me to tell you something." And so Jason waited, and then Peter said, "It's about love. I am supposed to tell you, they want me to tell you, it's about love."

"He was so angry at the end," Laura remembers. "Before Christmas we went out to dinner for his birthday, and he had chocolate. And it made him all warm, as he wasn't eating any sugar and hadn't for a long time. And so we took him home, and I stayed with him and it was then I knew, we'd lost him. That he was going to go. He was very lucid then, very disappointed. He was talking about how he'd never been properly loved by a man and how he wouldn't be, now. He spoke of everything he wouldn't do, the music, everything. And when I heard him talk like that, I knew he wasn't going to make it."

Before this Peter had wanted to live until 1995. Research that Laura and he had done in astrology said that 1995 would be an important year, and it would be. It was the year of the advent of protease inhibitors, the year many people mortgaged their deaths. Laura had done so much research into trying to keep Peter alive that she was awarded a complete scholarship to Mills College to study microbiology, and she received the letter notifying her the Monday after he had died. "It got me out of bed," she says. She had taken to her bed for a week after Peter's passing and would later in the year be hospitalized for two weeks for severe depression. "I've had a number of breakdowns since," she says, over the phone from her new job at a recording studio in San Francisco. "I just felt that I had failed him. That I wasn't able to keep him alive. And it hurt too damn much." Laura divorced her husband later, in part because without Peter she felt her marriage reduced, and she likewise gave up her research. She has lost more friends than Peter to the epidemic, but more than that, she lost the one she loved best. "If I thought for a second," she says, "that I could love like that again. . . ." Her mother and Peter's mother both had not so secretly wished the two of them would marry-Laura was a Lister, as in Listerine, and Peter was a Morgan of the banking family on his mother's side-but eventually both accepted the situation for what it was.

Laura and Peter had divined several significant concordances within their astrological charts, but for Laura the most significant was that he was Aries moon at twenty-seven degrees, she, Aries sun at twenty-seven degrees. "Your moon sign is your relationship to yourself, how you talk to yourself. The way he talked to himself, that was me. And your sun, that is how you greet the world."

Peter was not buried. He was cremated and his ashes spread on a sunny day from a catamaran that sailed out under the Golden Gate Bridge. "There's no marker," Jill Kelloran says. "Just our hearts. We know where he is."

Peter was a member of what was jokingly known at first as the BART 9, a group of nine activists who had handcuffed themselves to the pole at the center of a BART train when the doors were open, stopping the train in the station. This same group had also disrupted the San Francisco Opera opening night and blockaded the Golden Gate Bridge. This same group had done a lot of things over the years, and while many of them were in ACT UP, for most this was simply another in a series of protests designed to draw attention to the AIDS pandemic and the various ways in which companies were looking to exploit the dying. The whole thing had been over very quickly, with the group arrested and taken away. The train was made late but still left the station. Peter missed medication that day as a result of his arrest, Laura recalls. "It was a nightmare." Missing medication was a risk all AIDS activists who had AIDS took constantly. The police denying them their pills, out of whatever rules the jail follows, were murderous.

Peter felt the risk was worthy. At the time, we joked constantly about suicide missions. We have nothing to lose, the HIV-positive contingent of ACT UP would say in those days. We have nothing to lose, having lost everything. Understand that in 1989 there was AZT and that was basically it. Understand that those of us who lived there in San Francisco had the false impression that no one like us had ever existed before, because the ones who might have greeted us when we arrived were already dead. Their lives had been efforts of a transitory nature; they were like those species from the Pleistocene who never waded into the tar pit, who never left behind a fossil record. We lacked models for bravery and were trying to invent them, as we likewise invented models for loving, and for activism. In the writing of an article about love and HIV that I compiled interviews for over this last winter, I interviewed many young gay people who would say, I can't imagine getting older. Most of the people who might have shown them what it would be like to be gay and alive even at forty or forty-five are dead. What happened to me is happening again, ten years later.

When I fell in love with Peter, I fell in love with what I wanted to be next. In the Odyssey, Homer describes Poseidon Earthshaker as having blue hair. He is alternately "blue-maned Poseidon" and "Poseidon of the blue brows." Peter returned to the sea makes me think of that, his blue hair like a mark across his brow from an old god. Peter D. Kelloran, resident of San Francisco, a town ruled by earthquakes and inhabited by people who understood some of the value of what the Greeks left for us, Peter the blue-maned, now in the arms of Poseidon Earthshaker-he belongs to a time that already we can't imagine even though we lived through it, when there was one drug and hope was hidden so it wouldn't die. I like to imagine him now like the science fiction characters he favored, in flight through the sky, roaming the night in a nimbus of blue light, a smiling rogue punk rock angel, his wings dyed blue to match, from a Heaven where everyone dresses really well and mercy means love and a man you don't know will hold your hand for you when you die. A Heaven where when there's injustice you chain yourself to a train because you know somewhere, someone feels it. Somewhere along the spirit-chain world-mind over-soul, someone, somewhere, who maybe thought there wasn't a thing called strength, feels how you care enough to stand in front of the passage of a train. As children, we thought Superman was brave to stand in front of a train. That's not brave, though. Superman never stood before anything that could destroy him. Peter did.
Alexander Chee's stories have been anthologized in Men on Men 2000, His 3, Boys Like Us, and TakeOut. He is the recipient of a Michener Fellowship and teaches literary nonfiction writing at the New School University.

"After Peter" excerpt reprinted by permission of the publisher. From, White, Edmund, ed. "Loss Within Loss". Forthcoming for Spring 2001 from The University of Wisconsin Press.