Fatal Reaction

he had the backbone to defy his father. While there is little doubt it was Stephen’s good looks that prompted Danny to strike up a conversation that first day, it was quickly apparent to both of them that they had something very important in common. What both men shared, what they immediately recognized in each other, was the same fierce desire to prove they were better than where they’d come from.
    Danny grew up in a grim, blue-collar pocket of Detroit, the only son of an intermittently employed welder and his embittered, alcoholic wife. Stephen’s father, on the other hand, was a Chicago business tycoon with ties to organized crime. What had become of his mother was a question you learned not to ask twice.
    Over the years I have tried to imagine how Stephen must have seemed to Danny back then. It is hard to believe he wasn’t mesmerized. At eighteen Stephen had been an Adonis—accomplished, athletic, and rich. That Danny reinvented himself using Stephen as a model I am certain. Years later there were still things about him, from his taste for Bushmills to his deep-seated love of jazz, that he’d picked up from Stephen the way a poor relation might acquire a suit of hand-me-down clothes.
    But Danny was no weak shadow. After ten years he bore little resemblance to the child of poverty and longing who’d gotten off the bus in Cambridge. Although Stephen routinely received the credit for Azor’s meteoric rise, those closest to the company quietly agreed that while it was the fire of Stephen’s entrepreneurial genius that had fueled the rocket, it was Danny’s firm hand on the throttle that had kept it on course.
    And yet, despite all the exigencies of business, Danny was able to remain a man of wide-ranging interests. A passionate collector of modem art, he also served on the board of the Chicago Academy of Sciences and raised money for the Lyric Opera. That he was gay always seemed one of the least significant things about him.
    I will never forget the day that Danny came to my office to tell me he’d tested positive for HIV. I’d assumed he was coming to discuss a possible stock offering for Azor. Instead, he asked if I would draw up the necessary documents granting Stephen power of attorney in the event he became incapacitated. Up until that moment AIDS for me had always been a word on paper, nothing more. Now I sat and looked across the desk at Danny, blond and sunburned from spending the weekend on a friend’s boat, and all I could see was a dead man.
    Eventually the horror receded, papered over by other problems, different crises. Ironically it was new drugs developed by the very pharmaceutical companies he and Stephen had long decried as dinosaurs that finally offered hope. For the past year Danny had been taking a “cocktail” of anti-AIDS drugs. While they reduced the amount of virus in his blood to below measurable levels, the regimen left him struggling with a plethora of side effects. Tormented by deep muscle pain, blinding headaches, and a general sense of malaise, Danny had been forced to cut back on his schedule. Even so, one day in ten found him too weak to make it in to the office at all. While Guttman had been railing about Danny’s unavailability, Danny had probably been in bed, shuddering through waves of nausea and despair, no doubt feeling less concerned about the company’s prospects of survival than his own.
     
    At five o’clock I waited on the corner of Adams and LaSalle with the darkness gathering around me. In winter, night comes early to Chicago; by the time December rolled around, it would practically fall in the middle of the afternoon. I pulled the heavy cashmere of my coat around me and stamped my feet against the cold.
    Stephen pulled to the curb and I slid gratefully into the warm, dark car. He was talking on the phone, immersed in a conversation I could not understand—something about chemical sequences and protein folding. As we glided through traffic I listened with half an ear, vaguely comforted by the thought of atoms and molecules binding and releasing like dancers in a quadrille.
    We drove east on Adams then turned north onto Michigan Avenue through the thickening rush-hour traffic. It was a clear night and everything seemed crisp from the cold. Thanksgiving was still weeks away, but the trees were already hung with tiny white Christmas lights that glittered like diamonds strung against the dark velvet of the night.
    As we turned onto East Lake Shore Drive