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24 Getting In Bed With a Man Who Is Sick Every night I get in bed with a man who is sick. I have to move fluidly and stiffly, as if a healthy thrust under the blankets, a shift of my body to find the right spot could cause his body to end up in agony. All through the night, in my sleep, I hear his moans, constant now as breathing. His flesh is disappearing. More and more I see his bones. In some places I see right through his skin to the blue-pebbled tumors erupting there, pushing in two ways, toward the light and toward the death of their unwilling host. His breathing is labored. His voice has changed. Tonight he kissed me back brief and hard with a strength I thought I’d never know from him again. See, it said, I remember. I wonder if that will become one of those moments we tend not to forget; that come to be all of it together, so we can say it sometime in the future in one sentence and don’t have to replay the life and the dying over and over again. When we are sleeping alone, and we wake, and the walls are breathing, and they are the company we keep. ...

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