After all this thing of AIDS reappeared, people use a special tone of voice for illness, that marks the difference between sick and dying. I’ve heard Kyuhyun is sick.

Kyuhyun passes over into the territory of not-longer-quite-alive. I calculate that if he got it five years ago, the general period of incubation , he must have been infectious on each of the hundred occasions when we slept together, giving me a huge chance of being infected.

Now he wants to see me.

Last time I saw Kyuhyun was a year ago. I saw him on the street with his new lover, a tall guy called Changmin. We said hello and goodbye very pleasantly and I considered that if he hadn’t had the continual need to all over the town, we might have moved in together and have a normal relationship. He liked having someone at home, waiting for him. Maybe it’s because we didn’t love each other that we broke off without any problem. Kyuhyun and I never had dates or anything. Some nights we saw each other in a bar but always went home with other people, just because he didn’t feel like doing it with me. We stopped sleeping together when people started to talk about AIDS again and this became more than a subject. Once I heard that one of Heechul’s friends was getting pneumonia and days later he faded out. Kyu used to say: This it’s getting scary and it’s getting close.

The worst thing is, I can’t feel anything for Kyuhyun. I’m too scared for myself.

“The thing is” Ryeowook said, “when he feels well he doesn’t feel as if he’s dying, the worst thing is acting morbid about it. Just have a normal conversation with him. But it’s a little bit late, you know, because now he isn’t lucid for more than a few minutes. At first he’s his old but the he babbles”.

I never thought I would be such a coward.

So if I do it with Hyukjae I risk infecting him. And then, I don’t know about him either. He was a junkie years ago and of course, besides , there is a thing with needles. People who used and shared needles would naturally get infected. Hyukjae said he hasn’t taken heroin in five years but junkies who do manages to kick usually up several times before they get off it. In addition to that Hyukjae looks like a magazine cover and honestly I can’t imagine he hasn’t satisfied all his ual appetites regularly, I mean, he is so well-spoken and smart, it’s so hard to imagine him peddling his on the sidewalk but who knows what people will do. I threw myself at him in less than a second after seeing that face and now I’m all scared. Maybe it’s because I just realized that, even if I don’t know him at all, I’m really in love with Hyukjae.

Heechul is a closer friend to me than Ryeowook. We see each other rarely because we are busy. Nothing happen to us except dinner parties, visits to the dentist and work. Our lives have the generic flavor of ordinary and simple until we fall in love or die. So when you’re busy, you just use the phone.

“Contamination” he says.

”Like water?” I tell him.

“Water, blood, sputum, urine, , any kind of fluid. It’s all in the food chain. You have to imagine particles, like from Chernobyl, setting into the water, like little dissolving snowflakes. They sink into the ground when it rains, go into the water, everybody drinks it. Some people get a little bit, some people get a lot. No matter how much, just BOOM! You got AIDS”.

And what if I