Garner working as a waiter at an upscale restaurant with a growing attraction to a man named Alonzo, who always asks to be put in his section for dinner. One night after work, the man is assaulted while trailing Garner. Garner goes to his aid, but is shot for his trouble.<br><br>Taking time off from work to recover, Garner is resting on a park bench when Alonzo suddenly appears at the other end of the bench. Garner never saw him approach. He asks why Alonzo is trailing him.<br><br>After some hesitation, Alonzo explains he wants to recruit Garner to help fight against others who systematically hunt people like himself. Garner isn’t inclined to get involved in anything dangerous, but he does finds Alonzo more and more attractive, so he agrees to consider the idea. As he learns more about Alonzo’s bizarre and dangerous subculture, what Garner really wants to know is whether Alonzo is romantically interested in him at all.

Call to Love

“The alwaysis implied,” he had told Garner. “The universal case is inferred when the general is used.”


Garner had been intimidated back into silence by the teacher’s dismissive attitude. But he still hadn’t understood the response, not then and not since then, for he remembered it ever since. Maybe it made a kind of sense, but he still hadn’t agreed. It seemed important to him to statethe universal, at least in that context.


It was with such irrelevancies that occupied Garner’s mental meanderings.


At the time he had memorized the entire short poem. But now it was only that first line, and one other, further down. And it was only in English that he remembered it:


Light has its own fixed limits, but Night has a boundless unfathomable dominion


As he repeated this to himself, he was brought back to his current situation, and understood why he had remembered the poem at all.


Chapter 84