A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (48 page)

“That's pretty surprising,” I said. It wasn't what I meant to say. What I meant to do was, I meant to scream and cry and freak out and beg him to forgive me. But I sensed that it would only make things worse.

“To you, yeah, I imagine it would be. But here's the thing. I picture my life in five years. And one of the major ingredients in having it be a nice place—in having it feel good, and comfortable, and safe—is having you not in it.”

I stared at him for a long time, trying to formulate some reply. Trying to think of some way of talking him out of it. I wasn't going to argue with anything he'd said. I didn't know if it was true, but it felt true—especially the last part. In a way, I was jealous. I wished I could imagine my life five years later, without me in it. I thought it would probably be a lot nicer than whatever I was going to end up with.

I didn't say anything else. I got up and walked to the door. I kept wanting to say “See you” or “Talk to you later” or something, but none of that was true. Even goodbye wouldn't really work. There was nothing good about this. It was just “bye,” and, for some reason, I couldn't bring myself to say that, so I just left.

*   *   *

I had a strange realization later, when I was torturing myself trying to decide if the things Brandon had said to me were true. I realized that, in spite of my best efforts, not only was I no Han Solo—I was actually Luke Skywalker.

It was all there in the last movie,
Return of the Jedi
—the redheaded stepchild of the original trilogy. In the end of
Jedi
, Luke faces off against Darth Vader and the Emperor. He's accepted that Vader is really his father, and he tries to get his old man to redeem himself, but Vader blows him off.

“It is too late for me, son. The Emperor will show you the true nature of the Force. He is your master now.”

So Luke tries to attack the Emperor—the sick old bastard who corrupted his father in the first place—but Vader defends the creepy predator. Then Luke and Vader go at it, with Luke getting increasingly frantic as the Emperor taunts him about how all his friends are going to die and the Rebel Alliance is going to lose.

“Good,” says the Emperor. “Use your aggressive feelings, boy. Let the hate flow through you.”

And, sure enough, Luke kicks his old man's ass. He even chops off Vader's hand, like Vader chopped off Luke's hand in
The Empire Strikes Back
. But that's the turning point. Because when Luke looks at Vader, lying helpless with his missing hand and his robot body, Luke looks at his own robot hand and realizes that he's already taken the first step in the process of becoming exactly like his father. Just like I was turning into my dad.

Once I spotted the pattern, the parallels seemed obvious. The contagion of whatever had fucked my dad up all those years ago had spread to me, and now I was becoming this rage-fueled need-machine with no self-control or enlightenment. I didn't make choices. I wasn't deciding my own fate. Things just happened to me. I was always reacting. I didn't have a Wookie sidekick, and I wasn't going to get the girl. At the end of this movie, everyone else was going to be celebrating the happy ending and partying down with the Ewoks, and I was going to go off by myself to cremate my father.

And if I somehow got saved, it was going to be because of this weird old man who came out of nowhere and helped me, for no good reason.

Christ. I couldn't even pick my own movie character metaphor.

 

77

When I finally got tested, I did it in Olympia, on campus. The Department of Health sent an itinerant phlebotomist to Evergreen once a week to give free, anonymous HIV tests to the students. We didn't have a real campus health center, so he took appointments in one of the science labs. I knew the test results would take two weeks. What I didn't know was that the tester was required to provide counseling.

“What's that mean?” I asked. “Counseling? What exactly are you going to make me feel better about?”

“It's not to make you feel better,” said the Health Department guy. He was young, with longish blond hair and a beard. He was slightly overweight and frumpy in cargo shorts and a safari shirt. He had round glasses in plain steel frames, and he was wearing sandals. I'd forgotten his name as soon as he introduced himself, but I was leaning toward “Matt.”

“What's it for then?” I asked.

“To prepare you for the possibility that the test may come back positive.”

I sighed. “I'm prepared.”

“Do you have a plan?” he asked. “Do you have a support system?”

We were sitting in one of the rooms where Evergreen students studied chemistry and physics, seated on either side of a narrow counter made out of a hard black mixture of concrete and asbestos. The counter had cabinets underneath and a sink at the end, and a half dozen chrome-plated fixtures that dispensed natural gas and compressed air. The natural gas was for Bunsen burners. I assumed the compressed air was for making balloon animals or something.

“Not that it's any of your business,” I said. “But suppose I don't have a support system. Do I still get the test, or do I have to wait until I make some friends?”

“You get the test no matter what. I just have to ask these questions to help you think about them.”

I leaned back in my chair and looked at him. He was maybe ten years older than I was, but he looked very earnest to me. Unspoiled by real life.

“No,” I said. “I don't have a support system.”

“Nobody you can call?”

“No,” I said. “Not for this.”

“So what's your plan? If the test comes back positive?”

“I don't think you're going to like it,” I said.

“Try me,” he said with a smile.

“I'll pretty much keep doing what I'm doing until I become symptomatic. Then I'll kill myself. Probably by hanging, but we'll see how it goes.”

His smile changed gears, from friendly to patronizing.

“There are new treatments for this disease every day,” he said. “You don't have to be so dramatic. There are ways to live with this.”

“Hey,” I said. “Ask me why I don't have a support system.”

“Excuse me?” he said.

“Ask me why I don't have a support system.”

He sighed. Now he looked irritated.

“Why don't you have a support system?” he asked.

“Because I grew up with my dad. We moved all the time, and I never had any friends. I still don't have any friends. The only person who'd be my support system in a situation like this would be my dad. He'd be bad at it, but he'd do it. The problem is he's in a hospital, with end-stage AIDS, and he'll be dead in six months at the outside. I'm here to get tested because he passed out and cracked his head open seven months ago, and I got his blood all over me while I was taking him to the hospital.”

I was having fun now.

“So,” I said, “the reason I don't have a support system is because my dad, and most of the adults that I've known, ever, in my entire life, are all either sick or dying. Or taking care of someone who's sick and dying. And the reason my plan may involve suicide is because, unlike you—I'm guessing—I've actually seen what it's like to ‘live with this disease.' I've seen it really intimately. I know what it looks like. I know what it smells like. I know what it sounds like at two o'clock in the morning. I know it takes a long time, and it's horrible and painful, and I'm not going out like that. I think we can probably agree that would be an informed decision on my part, right? That I'm not being dramatic? That I know what I'm talking about?”

He was quiet for a while. I wished I had a recording of this, so I could listen to it later. I'd been rehearsing this speech in my head for years, and it was landing on him exactly the way I'd always dreamed it would.

“I don't know what to say to any of that,” he said.

“That's fine,” I said. “You people never do.”

“You people?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You normal people. You people who tell me it's possible to live with this disease. You guidance counselors and cops and welfare caseworkers. Funny story. Last time I picked up the mail back at my old apartment, there were letters from the Section Eight housing and welfare telling us we'd been selected for audits. They'd have to go through Dad's bank accounts. Inspect our house. Interview my dad. Joke's on them, I guess. So sure, I can have a free AIDS test. But first I need counseling. From you. Because you've got some fresh insight about my situation. So okay, come on, Health Department. Counsel me. Tell me what I should do if the test comes back positive, with no family and no money and a slow painful death to look forward to.”

“What do you want me to say?” he asked. “I want to tell you it's not that bad, but what do I know? You want me to tell you your answer freaks me out? That you're freaking me out? You are.”

“I want you to tell me I'm right.”

My own answer surprised me, but I knew it was true as soon as I said it. Just once, I wanted one of these people to look at me and tell me it was exactly as bad as I thought it was. I was sick of everyone watching TV while my family got trampled by elephants. I wanted some fucking acknowledgment, and if I couldn't get Ronald Reagan to come down here and beg my forgiveness for having sat on his thumb while Scotty died of yellow fever and Billy wasted away and my dad went slowly crazy, I'd settle for this earnest hippie telling me I was right. That a quick death might actually be my best option.

“I'm not sure I can say that,” he said.

“So, it's not so much that you're required to give me counseling, as that you're required to ask me some personal questions. The answers don't matter.”

“No,” he said. “I guess they don't.”

“Just another hoop I have to jump through, to get my free thing. Because people like me should have to jump through hoops.”

“I guess so,” he said.

I could tell I'd burned him out. I'd get no more satisfaction from this one. Not tonight. If the test came back positive, I'd have another window. And a better motive. This was the problem with these government hacks; they handed out Band-Aids for severed limbs, then got indignant when they caught a little arterial spray. He wasn't here for me. He was here for the home viewing audience. I should have gone to Seattle, I realized. I should have gone to the clinic, paid $20 for a test administered by someone who might know what the fuck they were talking about, and saved myself this sanctimony. But I'd sung for my dinner. I might as well get fed.

“So what now?” I asked.

“Now we draw some blood,” he said.

“Great.”

He found the vein on the first try. I saw him again two weeks later. The test came back negative. He seemed more relieved than I was.

 

78

My dad died in January of 1990, less than a month before what would have been his fortieth birthday, and a few months after I turned seventeen.

He got into Rosehedge House before he snuffed it. The hospice was in a nice turn-of-the-century Craftsman house, just a few blocks from Bruce's condo. It had wood trim, and plaster-and-lath walls, like so many of the leftover houses we'd lived in over the years. Medical equipment in the hallways made the building feel cramped and overused, but sound moved the way it was supposed to in there, and the smell was right: one-hundred-year-old fir, wax furniture polish, and some subtle trace left behind by generations of past occupants; scented oils from the old country and extinct lines of ethnic cooking. I hadn't really appreciated how integral those houses were to our life—to the life my dad and I had shared—until I'd moved into the dorms at Evergreen, where the floor, ceiling, and walls were all thinly disguised ferroconcrete, and the only smells were carpet glue and fresh paint. I knew that, even if he was unconscious, being in the right kind of house would have made it easier for Dad to die. Would have made it less frightening.

I got the call the morning after it happened. I talked to a nurse, who said Dad had died in the middle of the night, that he had been unconscious for several days, and probably didn't feel much pain. I asked if they needed me to do anything, to take care of the body or Dad's things. He said they didn't. He said other people were handling it. I thought he probably meant Bruce and Kris, but I was happy to let anyone else deal with it.

I went to class later that day. I didn't really know what else to do. My instinct was that if I covered my mirrors and tore my clothes and sat on the floor, I wouldn't be able to get up again. I didn't feel sad—just numb, and impossibly tired. I was afraid to mourn in sort of the same way I would have been afraid to lie down in the snow and go to sleep. So I got dressed. I went to class.

We had a lecture and a seminar that day, about the use of shadows and negative space in Japanese aesthetics and culture; the difference between things revealed and things implied.

Dad had always covered his windows with curtains, or filled them with plants. He abhorred bright lights. Floor lamps were better than overhead lighting; kerosene and candles were better than electric bulbs. Day or night, his room was a star chamber dotted with constellations of dim light reflected in polished brass and tiny mirrors. Tapestries, photographs, and color prints of art deco paintings lurked in the shadows like cave drawings. Everyplace we'd ever lived, my dad's room had always looked like some dimly lit Arabian treasure chamber to me.

When I'd packed things up to move to Olympia, I'd had to open the curtains and turn on the overhead light. Everything withered in that bright glare, turning shabby and sad. All Dad's treasures—things he'd rescued from abandoned buildings and flea markets and carried thousands of miles up and down the I-5 corridor—in the clear light of day it was all just a bunch of worthless junk.