A four-year-old prodigy once said that reality is the ultimate fantasy. Maybe that's true. Some of the best things in life seem impossible -- too hokey for good fiction. This is one of them. Every word is true, at least to the best of my recollection (except for changing the names and some of the dialogue about a billboard). So bear with me, I want to get this so you believe it as fully as I do.

Let's call him Gordon. He was a friend of mine, a fellow English tutor at the local community college. (If you must know, Seattle Central Community College). He died from AIDS on December 15. Yes, another one, but this one I cannot ignore.

He was not pure by any means. He had a good wit, he seemed to be comfortable with who he was, and toward the end, he spoke his mind freely. When we were tutoring, for example, he'd read a student's composition and say to her quickly, "Oh good Lord this is awful." Somehow, coming from Gordon, the student wouldn't be hurt. He could say what he felt without offending them; the honesty was refreshing.

Gordon had some uncanny experiences before he died. One I cannot dismiss, one involving, of all things, a ladybug.

I really would rather not risk my credence as a writer, an ex-advertising copywriter for science textbooks for that matter, by revealing that there are certain things that cannot be explained without making one sound, well, nuts. The best I can do is tell you the events and let you decide for yourself. Example, just now, as I write this story to you, a ladybug appears on this coffee shop marble tabletop again. This is still winter for crying out loud. I'm preparing a story based on a ladybug. A coincidence? The last time it occurred
was after drafting a letter to a pastor about Gordon's death. The insect came out of nowhere and crawled across my typewriter. And the time before that, a few months before Gordon's death, it happened again. It occurred after Gordon posed the question: Is there a God? We were having lunch at a restaurant on Broadway
in Capitol Hill. He exclaimed, "I want three-dimensional proof that God exists!"

To show his conviction, he started to pound the back of his hand with his fork. "This is my pain--I am tired of feeling this pain!"

The next day he left a message on my answering machine:
"Thadeous, you wont believe what just happened. I had just gotten a cup of coffee as I usually do before class, and I'm walking up the stairs leading to Red Square and I hear this voice. It says, 'Here's your 3-dimensional proof...' and my fingers closed upon something. I looked between my thumb and forefinger and there was a ladybug..."
The voice on the tape was shrill, excited, like a little kid stumbling across an unbelievable discovery. I replayed the tape. He didn't sound like he was making this up.

Gordon was a realist. With a finance degree, he traveled to Japan to teach classes in business and English. He was not exactly a religious person and had a pretty hard-core view of the world. He tolerated prejudice both here and in Japan. Once while we were walking down Pine street toward Capital Hill some people in a passing car spat on him and yelled, "Fucking Faggot." He wiped the saliva off his shoulder and continued the conversation without missing a beat. I was in shock. I said, "I've never seen anything like that. Has that ever
happened to you before?"

"Oh, yes," he said, "It happens a lot."

I wondered how they picked him out of the crowd--the guy doesn't look gay--how do you look gay? He wasn't a jock by any means. He was scrawny, probably more from being HIV positive for eight years than anything else. He played violin as a child, Suzuki trained, he wrote Elizabethan poetry, did abstract wall sculptures. OK, so what if he doesn't meet your image of a stereotypical heterosexual. Neither do I for that matter. His real name was Adam Bartholomew Rochester III. He changed the name after his parents kicked him out of the house
when they discovered he was gay. I would change my name too if my parents cut me off. He talked of the whole affair matter-of-factly.

"Don't you ever call your mom?" I said.

"I don't know where she lives."

"He's a surgeon."

We kept walking. I thought about his dad's occupation. Now here's a parent, obviously educated, unable to accept his own son's lifestyle. Now he may be soon dying of a disease and there's no attempt to communicate. I had read somewhere that 30% of diseases occur because of abandonment of loved ones.

After the ladybug experience, I called him up excitedly.
"Gordon, what happened!"

"You won't believe it. I was on my way to class--I was walking up the steps to Red Square, and I'm scraping my finger between the rows of bricks along the wall beside the stairs. I heard a voice. It whispered, "Here's your three-dimensional proof," and my fingers enclosed around a ladybug.

"What does that mean?"

"I don't know, but what a beautiful gesture, wouldn't you say?"

He paused and said, "I think it said it was the wind."

After that, every day between tutoring students at the local community college I was playing twenty questions with the voice. I am a terribly curious person, and if God had manifested in Gordon, I was going to be sure.

"Is the voice still with you?"

"Would it be OK if I wrote about nature?"

He paused, leaned his head back as if listening to something I cannot hear, and said, "You want to write about nature?"

And on I went, treating poor Gordon like some sort of Ouija board. I wondered what it looked like, and he told me that it seemed bigger than the universe--the personality was often sprite, excited in the morning. He said it would get him up early. It said, "The sun is up, lets play!" He also said it responded to music. It loved dance. Yet, on other days, he described it as something like the hash-smoking caterpillar from Baum's Alice in Wonderland. A slow thing, infinitely knowledgeable, but detached from the world. I asked how something
like the Holocaust could happen in a world with a God. He said it didn't give an answer. He could see in his mind a picture of something, telepictures, as he called them, and said "it" just shrugged. I got freaked out after that. I didn't want to know any more. I wasn't even
sure if he was possessed by a deity or a demon. How could "it" be indifferent to such violence. I remembered a Buddhist Koan: if you see a Buddha in the road, kill him. In other words, don't be easily fooled by authority.

Gordon, too, got freaked. One day he announced that it wanted him to build up his body with good nutrition and weight lifting, then to go into nature and fast. He was afraid that it was calling him to be some kind of oracle. He had shifted his reading at that time, I noticed, from literature to spiritual texts...the Bible, writings on Moses, and books on Indian shamans. He was also seeing a therapist and going to support groups for people with HIV. He told them about the voice, but they didn't believe him. One therapist was supportive, however, and recommended he read more texts on Indian spirituality.

Shortly thereafter he said the voice told him a name. He said it was Cloud Reflected on River; he thought it was an Indian shaman. I grew more skeptical. I felt he was being influenced by the literature. I also tried to trap him by asking it questions to see if it could read my mind.

"Am I thinking of a square or a
circle?"

"A circle."

"But I have a disease," he said emphatically, confessing the seriousness of his illness to me for the first time.

"I know, but you're getting dependent on the money. If you are getting better, you should start increasing your workload."

At the time he was maybe working ten hours a week. He was still proofreading once a week at SGN (Seattle Gay News). I was too, we both traded off at times.

Ultimately, I had no business prying into his financial life, but I go ahead, "And you borrow money from your sister ..."

"The night traffic. Squint at the red and white streams. Can you see it?"

I never considered I-5 traffic poetry. I squinted, but felt bothered by a Gilbey's Gin billboard looming above us. A brunette in a low-cut black velvet dress playfully eyed a man in a black tuxedo.

"But look, Gordon, doesn't it bug you how the media is so blatantly
heterosexual?"

Gordon continued squinting.

"It's a heterosexual world."

"But what an intrusion it all is. TV, magazines, billboards, you can't get
away. How do you stand it?"

"I fantasize."

"Fantasize?"

" I 'queer' the images." He looked up at the billboard. "To me, right now, that woman is a man, a sultry, long-haired male with flowing locks looking seductively into the eyes of another man."

Gordon looked back into the traffic, his eyes were red from the reflection. I pulled on a clove introspectively.

The two-story high billboard bathed us in a harsh white light, but we continued to lean against the cement protectors of the overpass and looked out at the traffic. I took another drag off the cigarette and tried to squint to see the red and white streams, but the light from the billboard made it difficult to see.

On a bad day, Gordon was terribly frightened. He was bothered by the tenacity of this same spirit that had entered him. We had just finished tutoring and while we were passing each other in the hall he said with trepidation in his eyes, "I'm going up into it. When I die, I go up into it."

Once we saw the movie, "Sister Act." Gordon saw it before, but wanted to see it again with me. Gordon began to enjoy uplifting movies. We walked toward his apartment after the movie. I remember him asking me a question."

"Do you believe in reincarnation?"

I thought a moment and said, "I think we are born daily, and we die daily."

I talked some more, but Gordon stayed quiet. Finally he said, "You know, it's so refreshing being around someone who thinks so differently than other people."

I didn't know what to say. We got to his apartment and he gave me a sudden hug.

"You know I love you, Thadeus," he said painfully.

I hugged him back and said stiffly, "I love you, too." I really did--I loved him as a friend. He disappeared into the apartment.

When Naoko returned from Japan I still invited him to church, but he never showed up. I enrolled in the evening school and got involved with courses. At the tutoring center, he started to avoid me. I remember him distinctly walking toward me, then mechanically turning away as if I didn't exist. I felt like I was yet another in a long line of people who have abandoned him. I went over to his tutoring table and said, "Naoko and I are having some people over for Thanksgiving turkey. Would you like to come over?"