Strachey's folly

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This is screwy. This is nuts. This has to be some kind o f pathetic, sick joke!"

Maynard Sudbury unexpectedly blurted out.

Timothy Callahan and I stared at Maynard as he stared down with a look of shocked bewilderment at one particular panel in the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

"Jim Suter is not dead," Maynard said, gawking. "I don't think he's even sick. I saw him in Mexico not more than two weeks ago."

Maynard brushed away the shock of sandy-colored hair that had flopped across his ever-youthful Midwestern farmboy's face. It seemed as if he needed the clearest vision possible in order to take in and try to comprehend this shocking sight.

Just a few cottony clouds were strung out across a pale sky, and the sun was surprisingly warm for D.C. in October. At midday the Washington Monument cast a short shadow, none of it touching any of the forty thousand-plus panels of the Names Project quilt. The tens of thousands of visitors to the Columbus Day-weekend quilt display were silent or spoke to one another in low voices as loudspeakers broadcast a solemn recitation by grieving survivors of the names of the AIDS dead. Every two or three minutes a jet en route to National Airport screeched down an electronic flight path above the nearby Potomac, but no one seemed to mind the noise. Most of the people were too absorbed in remembering-lovers, pals, sisters, brothers, daughters, sons, parents-or too caught up in one or another of the life stories, depicted or sketched, of people cut down by the plague.

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