ALL THINGS CONSIDERED : Goodbye, Mark, you were missing for years

Mark, these things happened on the day I was told you had thrown yourself off the Golden Gate bridge.

I'm at home. The phone rings. It's Judith. Judith says: "John, I don't want to be the one to tell you this." She keeps repeating this. Blood thunders in my head.

And I say (because I know): "It's Mark. He's dead."

And you are. Judith says your briefcase was found on the bridge yesterday morning, a Sunday, and that it contained instructions for whoever found it to call Ron and the police, too.

Ron returned from his lover's memorial service to find the police waiting. He followed your instructions and went to your office and found the letters you said would be there, letters explaining everything. There was a will, too, one that would supersedethe will Judith already had. And I knew then, Mark, that you were really gone, because that was so you. Trying to keep everything painless.

The police told Ron they would have to keep the letters as evidence but, what the hell, they would photocopy them. Ron could fax copies to your friends, OK?

Judith says you had attempted suicide before, which I know, but had buried. Judith says something inside you was broken, something deep, raw and dark that could not be mended. I ask the predictable questions: Why didn't you call? Didn't you know we lovedyou? One of us would have got on a plane.

Judith says that you couldn't go on living for other people. Judith says that there comes a time when you have to live for yourself. Or not.

I clamber into bed. I'm five again and the world's a scary, unfair, infinitely big place. A loop plays in my head, a loop that's playing right now: did you stand by the bridge rail for a long time, looking down at the water, or did you just jump? I'm trying to plug the gaps, Mark, because I'm never going to know for sure. I have to make your death up, invent it, because that's what suicide does; leaves those left behind wondering how time slipped away.

I rock back and forth, thinking about the night you broke up with - who was he? just another guy you couldn't live with, or without, I guess - and about how drunk we got and how we talked about suicide, me anti, you pro. I paraphrased Arthur Miller's After the Fall: suicide isn't meant to kill one person. Suicide is meant to kill two people. Two or more.

And you said no, I was being moralistic and sentimental (again), that sometimes suicide was the only possible choice. The only possible good choice.

The phone again. Simon.

He tells me what your father did to you when you were a child. What he did to you nearly every day.

I'm on the mobile so I get to the bathroom in time to throw up. I press my face against the cool porcelain and it feels like bliss, only the room smells bad. I open the window and hear Simon's voice in my ear saying he posted a letter to you that very morning, a letter full of jokes and good wishes. Simon says he spoke to you a few days before, actually, and that you sounded fine, that you had new medication for your depressions. Simon says that I shouldn't be angry with you because ... becausebecausebecause.

Mark, I was angry, lying there on the bathroom floor, wanting to sleep for a long time, for a hundred years, becausebecausebecause this wasn't to be borne. And it gets worse. Simon says he has photos of you from a couple of years ago, standing under the Golden Gate bridge, on the sites Hitchcock shot Vertigo. Were you thinking of suicide even then? Tell me.

I get into bed again. I remember the first time I met you, at the ICA. We had lunch. You told me about yourself, or I thought you did. You were funny, Mark, funny and smart and enchanting: I didn't see the tension in your immaculate control until much later - how mess and disorder and chaos would provoke you. But that day everything was perfect.

The phone. Richard. I always thought you were most content with Richard; content because you would never allow yourself to be happy. Richard says he can't quite remember why you two broke up. Everything seemed OK. Then one day it suddenly wasn't. You were someone else, this demon in a rage, a whirlwind of hate, someone who seemed to anticipate pain, someone who couldn't quite believe in joy or the tiny, quieter, everyday things that last.

Richard says afterwards, when he thought you simply could never be friends, that you rang up and fixed things, made them somehow OK again. For a while.

I put the phone down. I fall asleep almost instantly. If I dream of you, I don't remember.

It's a week later now. Looking through Capital Gay, I see a news story that lists you as "missing". The tides are coastal in San Francisco Bay, and the police say your body has been taken out to sea, beyond any hope of recovery, so they may have a point.But you've been missing for years, Mark, haven't you? I'm sorry I was so slow - I can't believe that I've just finally noticed.