The cancer party was a surprise and I knew surprises scared Harvey. He startled if I interrupted his Foucault; he jumped when I nudged him away from the trashcan. But he was Boston bound for a cancer checkup and the surprises he'd get. I was his boyfriend; in my mind, the party was essential.

Behind the brick wall covered with Northampton graffiti – U.S. out of everywhere! Your mom loves anarchy, I fucked Jen DER – Harvey ambled up the fire escape into Everybody's Kitchen. I opened the door. Fluorescent light flickered. The party began.

The cancer: It began when three-year-old Harvey fell down. After his first seizure, the white coats said epilepsy and observation, EEG and oligodendrogleoma. The cancer and the party converged in the Kitchen. Stolen coffee caught his nose and the radiance of cooling ovens warmed my skin. A wave of drunken exhales skidded and slurred "surprise" when we stepped toward the center of the arc, a half-dozen of his friends from school standing on the checkered tiles. A joint slept on the baker's counter. I snapped up a beer from a muffin batter bucket full of ice water.

"Throwing solidarity to the wind?" he asked me.

I pressed my hand against his back. I wondered if he entered this room unwillingly and dutifully. I wondered if this was just another appointment.

But I grin believably. "I'm just drinking for the both of us."

Amy changed the music to what she had dubbed "The Ultimate Mope Party Mix" – the Smiths, the Cure, up-tempo Tori, Nirvana's unplugged album, some new Rufus Wainwright, some old Prince, and, of course, early Miles. It was the first public test of Amy's warped take on my free music library, and I was relieved to see people dancing. Watching Kevin mouth the lyrics to "When Doves Cry" on his overturned milk crate, I realized that the cancer party was a revolution. This was a birthday, a graduation, a wake.

He touched the small of my back. I turned quickly and gasped. I looked at him, and in an eavesdropped echo, I mumbled, "You don't like it." Imagine, amidst open windows and humidity, overhearing a lengthy, tearful Lord's Prayer from your neighbor's house, when all the while you're just lying there with a bottle of water between your legs, trying to find a rerun to watch. That plaintive note sailed through his voice despite everything, and I was embarrassed. I wondered if music and food just replaced wires and brain scans, if friends replaced doctors, or worse, his hovercraft family. What nothing replaced, what I wanted to raze from his landscape – thoughts of medications and restrictions, hard facts about soft tissue. But it came out all wrong. I felt weak. "I knew you wouldn't like it."

"No, Stanley."

"What's wrong then?"

"Nothing. I'm just overwhelmed." He scratched his ear. "Nobody's ever done this for me, a random party in my honor. You dragged all these people here, baked all this food, stole all this coffee. It's just a lot, baby. From nothing to everything in a blink."

A few more people had come in, lifting the crowd to fourteen. The newest clump was a trio of fellow Kitchen folk back from a beer run. They knew his name and little else, but a party was a party and they liked him enough for that. Amy and Heather lived right upstairs in a co-op. The Sarahs both lived in Harvey's dorm, and Kevin, the guy I can't avoid, grew up with him. There were others – Jessica Dreadlocks, Brendan Bike Cop, Ellen Indie Rockefeller, Green Thumb Maria. They were milling, talking; Jessica danced with Brendan as "Girlfriend in a Coma" began. I turned now to my mopey boyfriend, busily leaning against the Hobart.

"Step away from the dishwasher," I commanded. No response. "Look. This appointment. I know it's stressing you out."

When he made the appointment six weeks ago, we broke up. He told me at the time that he couldn't trust me.

He said, "I have to go to a place that you can't go."

He said, "There is no point in being together."

In Everybody's Kitchen that night – our Kitchen for that night – he ran his thin fingers through my coarse black hair. This was what he did when he sensed me reliving a fight. He was deadly accurate.

"You shouldn't have gone to all this trouble," he told me. "This is going to get you fired."

"Nothing is going to get me fired," I shot back. "Stop being my mom for Chrissakes. I could buy beer before you could drive."

"Now, lovers, be kind," said a high voice from behind me. Petite fingers squeezed my shoulders. My shoulders relaxed, and I rolled my eyes at Amy.

"Baby bear, you're such a busybody," Heather interjected. "Why butt in? It's obvious that these two are trying to break up again."

Our instability mortified him much more than it did me. After we'd been together for four months, when he broke up with me over trust or the appointment, I started saying, "I love you today. Tomorrow looks good, too." I said it every day for ten days and then he told me he hated it. "When you say that," he said, "I feel like things could change any minute. I hate that feeling. I just want something to be solid. I just want something to be certain." We'd been together for six months, and things were less certain than ever.

"Heather Kopec, you're just jealous." She took a bite of day-old chocolate croissant. "You know we have a model relationship."

"Right. Something like: 'I just can't handle all this bliss, baby. Let's break up for two days.'"

Amy giggled and joined in. "'Let's spend three days having mind-blowing make-up sex.'"

Heather folded her hands like a proper lady. She pursed her lips, and I almost couldn't see her spiked pink bangs and freshly shaved head. "'Ah, yes, ah I think that's the right thing to do.'"

"'It hurts me so much to do this to you." Amy punctuated her sentences with pelvic thrusts.

"'Oh, baby yes. But I think it's for the best.'"

"'Yes, yes," Amy said. "The best.'"

Harvey turned to Amy. "Well, we could process everything for hours over cigarettes at the Whately Diner." A belated grin ruined an otherwise perfectly good insult.

"Harvey, that's the best idea you've had all night," jabbed Amy.

"Just because that's what you do, Freud. Analyze from your ass?"

Amy stuck out her tongue; I tried not to notice her thrust tank top in Harvey's face. I was relieved when he turned and walked back to my side of the room.

"I'm fine skipping to the make-up sex," he called over his shoulder. Wrapping his hands around my hips and back down the top of my thighs, he looked directly at her: "You know where my brain lives – behind a zipper."

Amy and Harvey were close, and not the good kind of close. It was a fight he and I had a few times. Harvey was bi. It confused things. "All right, all right, enough." I guided him by the hip away from me. "You have a party to tend to, young man."

I did not want him thinking about his brain tonight. I'd felt his scar, bumpy and U-shaped, raised and interlocking. Not unlike a zipper, really.

"Yes, enough," cooed Heather. "Kiss and make up you two."

She hopped up on the baker's counter and lit the joint. It was enveloped in her meaty but dexterous hands. Her khaki pinky blended into the shade of the rolling paper. She passed it to Kevin, still perched on his milk crate. He inhaled and she rested her bare feet on his shoulders. They were strangers. That's the kind of party this was.

. . .

I knew better than to ask, but Amy didn't. So she asked Harvey about genesis. "I had a seizure playing hopscotch at recess. That was normal. In the middle of it, I piss myself. Just everywhere, right? I must have had a Big Gulp on the way to school or something. I was just peeing forever." Heather and Amy, politely mesmerized, are neither disgusted nor amused by his detail. "I go to the bathroom, I'm so embarrassed I couldn't get the smell out. The smell wouldn't come out and I started crying. I was crying for probably twenty minutes. My teacher had to go into the bathroom to get me out."

My voice was still flat as I asked, "Were people nasty about it?" It was a question I'd asked when he made the appointment. At first he'd been vague. I kept asking little questions –"What did a seizure feel like?" or "What did your friends think?" He went from reserved to recalcitrant, and I stopped. Tonight though, Harvey took a breath, flicked his fingers one by one against his thumb, and began talking.

"No. Nobody really made fun of me. I think they were afraid I'd collapse or something. Boy in the bubble, all that." He rubbed his belly. Ponce de Leon had the Fountain of Youth; my boyfriend had his nonexistent gut from drinking nonexistent beer. When nervous, he found it. It was soothing, albeit imaginary, and I preferred to let him believe in it. "My mom came to school. She's a big softie and she signed me out because I was so upset. She brought me home, gave me soup. We played War. She let me win. "

"How do you let someone win at War?" Amy asked.

"There was a deck with lions on the back. She bought it at the hospital. I think she kept them in ascending order. I never figured it out til after I was too old for War. By then, the seizures had changed, mom was killing me at Spoons and I'd started dating Tiffany. We played Egyptian Rat Screw."

"I learned that game differently," Amy giggled.

"Well, let's keep this a family show. I recovered from the second operation over February vacation. She had the week off, so she was there everyday. We played lots of Ratscrew – "

"Is that what the kids were calling it back then?" I interjected.

"Will you shut up?" Amy hit me less than playfully on the arm. "Go on."

"Well, you know. We'd eat the potatoes I got for dinner and complain about how hard it is to eat vegetarian in the hospital. We'd poke my Jell-O." He paused, and looked at me, then continued. "She'd walk with me down the hall. I had to practice walking. I had this cane, and she'd hold my other hand. She was always insistent about which side of her body I was on. After the operation one of my sides was weaker than the other, and it felt weird to have someone stand on that side. It was as if I didn't know they were there if I wasn't looking right at them. Very strange feeling. But it worked out between us, because she could still walk on my right side, and I'd know where she was. We could hold hands, and I could use my cane with my other hand, and we could walk to the end of the hallway without me falling down. We fit each other, perfectly."

"What was different about the seizures?" I asked. I was starting to wish Amy would leave. I didn't like Harvey talking about being with a girl around her. They were close, and it was dangerous.

"The first time I had one I'm in her living room. We're making out like it's our job, then blink of an eye, I'm staring at a wall, not really conscious, eyes wide open. Tiffany calls her mother at work. I come back to life and Tiff's freaking out on the phone. Her mom tells her to call an ambulance; that they'll need to keep an eye on me for the rest of the day. And I should call my mom. We don't do any of that for a while. Instead, we sit on this white loveseat by their out-of-tune piano, all these first editions on the shelves, these paintings on the walls. I put my feet on their coffee table. We're tired and I'd want to make out again. Fourteen-year-old boy, I just wanted to get back to business. But we're sitting in front of a cabinet of mint condition Barbie dolls. These dolls totally creeped me out, all tiptoed behind glass, just these plastic zombies starting right at me. I just couldn't look at the Barbies. It was too much, right then."

Coming out of one of those seizures must have been like moving from dark to light, from hiding to openness. But also from paint-by-number to Guernica. I imagined order suddenly and temporarily trumped by chaos. I saw a normal Sunday dissolving into the grotesque, the shocking. I saw Harvey suddenly back in his girlfriend's living room, in everyone else's world, trying to figure out what she's talking about. I wondered if it was the scariest moment he'd shared with a person. If it still was, even through the operation, through physical therapy, through that lonely, hard summer. I watched Amy nodding, sympathetic and sincere, and I wondered why he couldn't talk to me like this.

"I knew someone who had spells like that," I said. I wasn't really sure if this was the same thing. I remembered my cousin having fainting spells, staring fits, eerie little things. The phrase he used popped in my head. "Absence seizures, right?"

"Is that what they're called?" Harvey asked, flatly. He bit his croissant twice. Raspberry lingered on his lower lip. "If it's not, it's a beautiful phrase."

Absence seizure: exact and resonant, eerie to the point of poetry. Seized by a lack of presence. "You have no idea what's happening," I asked.

"Right."

As I watching the act of naming deflate the weight on his shoulders, I wondered if to describe was to liberate. Maybe it was just the heat in the room, the smell of the bodies, the noise, the hour. Maybe when I saw him stand up straighter it was because I'd taken some of that weight onto my back. The law of conservation of baggage and bullshit had never failed me before, and it proved itself again that night. When I ran my hand down the small of his back, I felt a coat of sweat. He touched my cheek with his index finger and when it came to rest on my lips, I tasted a trace of the large, deadly ocean.

Amy passed what she was smoking to her girlfriend. Heather inhaled deeply. Held it, one, two, three, then out in a circle. She and Harvey made the most intricate patterns in their smoke. They blew happy faces, triangle-and-square houses, attempts at stars. They signaled S-O-S and short cuss words to each other in Morse code. Both rabid Sherman Alexie fans, ("fuckin' funny" – you had to be there), they joked about their "inner Spokane." But their secret language was in those smoke signals.

"I think someday you're going to wake up and all this is not going to matter so much. I know that actually it's a matter of life and death," Heather said after spelling TITS. "But it's also just another thing. It's not something that's right there right now that you have to worry about and work through. I was in a car crash once, but I still drive around. And you know how I drive. I'm a total Masshole, cutting people off, banging lefts, ignoring speed limits and crosswalks. When you let go of whatever's holding you down, when you let someone else carry this weight on your back, that's when you can bring someone to Boston with you. You'll feel a lot better."

"Okay." He ate more croissant in guttural, ripping bites. He chewed pensively. "I don't know what to say to that."

"You don't have to say anything."

"Well, I want to say something. I just don't know what to say. I think you're talking out of your ass. I think you don't know what this is like. I think you're something like right. But you're not right and I can't believe that everything is just going to fall into place like that. I just don't see the world working that way."

"It doesn't Harvey. I'm not trying to say it does. But it can. That's all. Go enjoy yourself."

Heather passed the joint to Kevin, who continued telling her about his first Halloween with little Harvey. A gawky boy growing a questionable beard, Kevin sat on an overturned bucket, and everyone asked if he was comfortable. Until one day he ran into us on the campus of our sprawling state university, I never knew Harvey had once been the smartest kid in class, or wanted desperately to be President and so never swore until sixth grade. Kevin had been the only one who had seen Harvey fistfight the new boy who called Larry, the mainstreamed LD kid, retarded. Kevin had watched Harvey convince girls to play kickball with the boys, and teach the boys to understand the rules of hopscotch and Mancala.

Kevin was there when Harvey once held up class for five minutes after a spelling test because he had misspelled "united." My boyfriend insisted that he knew how to spell it, spelled it eight times on the spot. "He wanted to be President, everybody knew that," jawed Kevin. "Harvey Arnold, the next John Quincy Adams, if not for the SpellingGate scandal!" Growing up with Harvey, Kevin knew his history with the word "untied."

. . .

We were all tired. Harvey leaned against the curved metal counter by the Hobart. People were talking about going to Whatley for pancakes and coffee. I said we'd stay here, and Amy, dumping coffee down the sink, didn't respond. She quietly rinsed the urn, taking a quick peek in the walk-in to check on the muffin batter. She was satisfied and turned back to me. "Are you coming over after?"

"Is that all right?"

"I told you it would be."

"Where's your girlfriend?"

"Upstairs already. Changed into PJs."

"Thanks for letting us stay. It makes things easier for us."

"Don't sweat it."

"I like Heather."

"Me too."

"We should talk more."

"You know we don't agree about some important things, Stanley." She glanced at Harvey, barely blinking as she saw his burning ears coming toward us. "But okay."

I turned to him with a supersized smile. "Are we there yet? Gotta go bathroom."

"Yeah, we're almost there. I'm just about to turn into a pumpkin."

He started to say his goodbyes. The hippies, then the townies, then the neighbors, then the workers, then the girlfriends, then Kevin.

"Bye-bye, whipped cream pie," he said, winking elementary school inside jokes to him.

"See you later, ice cream hater."

Kevin reached out his arms to hug Harvey. He swung his friend around, and when he set my boyfriend back down, he slipped. In that slip, I watched Harvey's head rush toward the ground, helplessly witnessed it crack and split and bleed; I watched him seize uncontrollably for the longest minutes, and I wrote and delivered a heartfelt eulogy. But what really happened is that Amy caught his arm, Brendan a leg. Some other hands grabbed his back and like a mob they lifted him up. Harvey was shaking but it was his lungs in laughter not his body in a fit. "Put me down, put me down," he shouted. Kevin, at his place at the front of the mob, said "Invaders of Everybody's Kitchen, revelers and revolutionaries all ... Follow me!"

I was just standing there, so I did the last thing needed. I opened the door. I held it with my foot. The mob flooded down the stairs, past the shouting wall, under Heather on the balcony, smoking in her scrubs. The music had stilled and the mob's chatter was dulled by Harvey's weight on their hands. It was 4 a.m. on a Thursday and Northampton was sealed in silence. On his last certain day, I touched my empty palms and watched my boyfriend leave his own party on a sea of hands.