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E ddie, restless Eddie. He keeps going, searching for the explanation, the evidence, the reasons why. Real, true? True, real? If only he can find Francis, maybe he’ll understand. He’ll search all day (year, century) if he has to. He’ll run the length of Manhattan and back again if he has to. If he can’t find the answers, if he can’t understand truth, nothing will ever make sense again.

Look, here he is on Christopher Street, taking a photograph at the intersection of Bleecker Street, aiming down toward the blue sky over the Hudson. A car backfires at the corner, and suddenly the tall buildings along river fade into air and Eddie is in 1971, in the thick of the Gay Liberation March, snaking between men and women in faded jeans and leather vests. Is that Francis, there, chanting in the crowd? Eddie shouts his name, but Francis doesn’t hear, and though Eddie shouts again, and again, and again, the crowd’s chants are too loud. They close around Francis, swallowing him away.

“No!” Eddie shouts, but his voice is drowned out.

Here he is on Waverly Street, outside a stucco building on the corner with a rainbow flag flying over a door that says Julius’ . He takes a picture, and when the flash reflects in the building’s dusty window and straight back into his eyes, the rainbow flag has disappeared, and the electric cars on the street are old Volkswagens now. It’s 1966, and three men in dark suits and skinny ties enter the building. Eddie watches them through the window as they order drinks from the bar—until the bartender stops abruptly. He puts his hand over the glass and suddenly everyone inside is standing up, shouting, defiant, and an old-fashioned police sedan comes racing around the corner. They enter the building and the patrons come pouring out—all men. In the middle of the crowd is Francis, unmistakably Francis, but when Eddie shouts his name, the cops shout louder, and Francis runs.

“Wait!” Eddie shouts, but no one hears.

Here he is over by Washington Square, taking a photograph of a newsstand, when a storefront grate comes crashing down behind him and everything around him changes again. The newspaper says 1982 now, and the headline reads “A Disease’s Spread Provokes Anxiety.” Eddie looks up. Is that Francis across the street, reading the same newspaper? Eddie sprints through traffic to reach him, but before he gets there, a garbage truck rolls past, kicking up dust, and cutting him off. Francis is gone.

“Come back!” Eddie shouts, but Francis has vanished.

Here he is downtown on Park Row, taking a picture of City Hall, when a sharp siren cuts through the air, transforming the street into a 1990 ACT UP rally, a sea of people in white T-shirts shouting “How many more! How many more!” as they lie down on the asphalt, blocking traffic. Policemen in riot gear march in step through the crowd, shields held in front, batons swinging. Is that Francis being dragged across the pavement by a pair of cops to a police bus? Eddie rushes toward him.

“Stop!” Eddie shouts, but a policewoman blocks his way.

Eddie runs from neighborhood to neighborhood, up and down and across the Manhattan grid, through the tangled streets of the Village, across the Brooklyn Bridge and back. He sees Francis everywhere he goes. In Tompkins Square Park in 1988, where Lady Bunny is emceeing the Wigstock stage. Entering Webster Hall in 1913, holding the door for the drag queens as they arrive at another ball. Pressed up against the velvet rope at Paradise Garage in 1980, pushing through the leathermen to the front of the scrum. In the window of a downtown bookshop in 1887, examining a copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass . On Broadway in 1934, waiting at the backstage door for an autograph from Noel Coward. Here he is in 1999, 2012, 1926, 1979. Eddie races, reaches, shouts, dives, more desperate by the minute to connect again with Francis. To grab him, grasp him, hold him, feel him, prove him.

But at every place, in every time, Francis is only a fleeting vision, a vapor, always a beat ahead or behind, never quite there, too impermanent to capture. Too slippery to be real.