What is left is the word: everything else died or departed long ago. What is left is the imagination. If I had to formulate a theory of language then I would say that because our grammar allows us to link any one word with any other—the words “life” and “death,” for example, can be joined by a single conjunction—then no word can quite escape all those other meanings. It’s not just that nothing is simply one thing, it’s that one thing can be, must be everything, and this multiplicity of meanings is, I believe, the writer’s only consolation. How else could we live with what little we manage to get on paper? I choose to locate my quest for the soul in you because there is no way something as imprecise as this language can ever arrive at the absolute nature of love, of pain, of hunger, of the soul. There can only be my love, my pain, my hunger, my soul; there can only be your love, your pain, your hunger, your soul; and it’s my hope that somewhere in the conjunction between you and me I will arrive at something that is more than either of us. We have, as they say, poured our souls into every word we’ve written. We’ve tried with each of those words to communicate a complete vision of the world. We know that art, like radical politics, seeks to make itself unnecessary: embedded somewhere in every poem, every story, every play is a utopian vision that, if achieved, would make the words irrelevant, redundant, unnecessary. You have your vision, I have mine, and I suspect that these visions are closer than we realize; and now I’ll reveal something about myself to you: I don’t know what good it does to write about someone after they die, but I’m not above thinking that if I write about someone before they die then they’ll keep on living. I don’t mean that metaphorically, and I don’t mean just you. “The epidemic is the revelatory aspect of our time,” you wrote in a letter when you were alive, but what it reveals to me and what it revealed to you are not, I think, the same thing. Faced with that, all I can offer is a variation on childhood’s dare: I’ll show you what AIDS has shown me, if you’ll show me what AIDS has shown you.