The weekend passed with the usual routines for Sean, Samantha and the rest of the city. There was laundry and basketball and for some, there was Sunday worship.

Then came Monday, with a sticky rain.

A college student named Nathan woke up, his alarm clock boring a hole into his consciousness.

"Shit," he muttered. Light bled through his red-and-brown striped curtains. The whole dorm room was steeped in ruddy shadows. He was alone. (His roommate had probably spent the night at his girlfriend's.) He roused himself to a sitting position.

Nathan was twenty years old and a fanatical student. He was short and still had some baby fat. He needed his rest, the same as any growing boy. He was also a closeted gay kid, coming out of the closet more and more, lately. Most important, Nathan was a major in history (with a desire to become a medievalist). Gayness wasn't the issue in his life. Maintaining high scores was.

He went to bed cranky; he woke up cranky. Even though he was a brilliant student and he loved his major, he was having fights with two of his professors. One of the teachers was a straight guy who was patronizing to Nathan; the other was a gay professor who was just as condescending as the straight one.

Nathan got up and brushed his teeth. His hair no longer needed combing, because a couple of weeks prior, he had gotten it shaved off completely, as a fashion statement. He shaved it again, periodically, and now had a bit of a bur growing back, but, well, it suited him.

He examined his round, babyish face in the mirror; despite the grim mood he was in, he recalled with pleasure first showing up in class with a shaved head. Everyone gasped, and then they applauded.

He came out of the bathroom after washing up.

"Fuck," he thought, sinking under the pain of exhaustion. "I hate these two teachers. I'm a straight-A student. I tested higher on my entry exams than most of my teachers ever did on theirs, but I still have to tolerate these two assholes."

As he threw on his pants, a thought stopped him. He had been trying to phone a woman friend for several days, just to say hello. She still hadn't gotten back to him.

"Bitch," he muttered.

He threw on his shirt and socks, his shoes and his coat. He cast a baleful look at the sloppy side of the dorm room - his roommate's side - then he grabbed his backpack and left the building for a coffee bar.

***

Usually, nothing distracted Nathan from his studies. The sky pummeled him with stinging raindrops on his way to the café where he hoped to read over some texts. There, he caught his breath and prepared to drown his angst in an intense Colombian brew. Everyone was huddling over their books and their croissants. The whole human race seemed to have bags under their eyes, that hour. Students weren't the only ones present; he also saw local shop owners, activists, unemployed artists, and a couple of neighborhood eccentrics.

Nathan sat in the tidiest corner he could find. On a radio behind the counter, there was news about Ronald Reagan, John Poindexter and Ollie North and the shady arms deal called "Iran-Contra". Nathan quickly browsed through a college catalog and sneered at the various classes listed on gay politics and gay culture.

"Mickey Mouse courses," he thought.

He opened up one of his class books and pored over it, killing forty-five pages in fifteen minutes. The radio report continued about the politics in Washington, D.C. He found the news easy to ignore. However, that thought recurred about the woman friend who should have called him by that morning. As Nathan went over some study notes, he remembered a mutual friend of theirs named Emily. His gaze rose from his work, as the rain fell on the city.

Emily had been living with AIDS for just over a year. (She and Marissa used to be lovers.) Emily had gotten the infection from a guy she had screwed, who used needles.

Nathan hated the thought of Emily suffering. He also was squeamish about diseases. "It's 1987," he told himself. "We have that AZT on the horizon. Emily'll be fine."

He suppressed his worries and guilty feelings, and returned to his reading.

***

In a different part of Manhattan, Sean made his way to work that morning; the raindrops were splattering the street and sidewalk, leaving wet spots as big as black gum stains. Pushers were pushing drugs, muttering, "smoke, coke…" all through the Wall Street area. Sean wondered, "How can the authorities just allow these guys to do this so openly?" Ever paranoid, Sean assumed the intelligence community and the drug cabals must have had a special arrangement.

AIG to his back, Sean passed Hanover Trust and Chase Manhattan Plaza. The little cafes with gourmet pastries brightened up the rainy hour. Those places were among the "great equalizers" in the city, just like the subways at rush hour, for in the cafes, vice presidents stood next to messenger boys, who brushed elbows with partners, secretaries and receptionists, while waiting for their bialy bread or scones.

Everyone in Wall Street looked tired that morning. Fatigue was another great equalizer.

Sean felt the wetness of his pant legs as he grabbed a gourmet coffee-to-go. His black tie flapped in the wind, while he ran to his building. He took an elevator to the suite, which looked out over the Manhattan Bridge and the World Trade Center. Rain clouds were hanging low and appeared smudged, like black charcoal blending with white chalk. The suite seemed hermetically sealed from the din, outdoors. A few co-workers were turning the soggy headlines of New York's several newspapers. Umbrellas got shaken out. For the most part, the suite had the sterility of a jetliner. Day in and day out, Sean stared at computer hardware and florescent-lit surfaces, while listening to lawyers mumbling to each other or Caribbean cleaning women laughing in the coffee room down the hall. Sean was tired most days, because he never slept well, and he partied a little too much in the evenings. (He was searching for a lover, and always went to glamorous clubs to find one.) The ceiling lights at work shone down, making his eyelids heavy.

After signing in and settling himself, he started a word-processing assignment. He was slipping into that office clerk trance, when someone told him he had a phone call. He roused himself and answered. It was someone from the Gay and Lesbian Social Defense League calling with bad news.

"Tell me again - I didn't really hear you," Sean said into the receiver, somewhat alarmed.

The office had become suddenly noisy, for an assistant had brought a bunch of free pastries through the door to help morale on so rainy a Monday.

The guy at the other end repeated, "The steering committee of the League decided to boot Mark out of the organization."

"Oh, Jesus," said Sean. "Are you sure?"

"That's what I heard, anyway. It's not the official word."

Mark was one of Sean's favorite people in the League, and one of the first to make Sean feel welcome in the organization.

"What reasons did the steering committee give?"

"I'm not at liberty to talk about the details," said the other League member.

"Why not?"

"Because."

"Does Mark know why?"

"Well," said the other member, "probably not all of the reasons."

"How could they be so cruel to him?"

"I've only heard the report second or third-hand," said the caller. "But the word is the steering committee felt that Mark was a loose cannon. He's non-violent, but he's a cut-up. I think this steering committee wants a more dignified image for our organization, to gain more respect for our community. But don't quote me. It's just what I heard."

"Oh," groaned Sean, recalling Mark's words about how Lukas wanted to use the group as an avenue to City Hall. But then, again, Lukas didn't have much clout, himself, in the organization, so Sean really didn't know what the committee's reasons could be for booting Mark out. Sean said slowly over the phone, "We've lost a lot of the senior leaders, you know. Those two outreach people have left. The treasurer left. These were the leaders of the movement. Some were even in that Stonewall riot way back when." Sean had to say this quietly, because he wasn't out to his co-workers.

"I know. It's all just growing pains, for the group."

"Growing pains!?" said Sean.

Sean got a dirty look from his supervisor. He said "goodbye".

He tried calling Mark an hour later, to see how he was feeling, but Mark's line was busy. That afternoon, Sean tried again. No answer. Not even the machine was picking up.