Read Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir Online

Authors: Paul Monette

Tags: #Paul - Health, #Health & Fitness, #Diseases, #Monette, #Medical, #Aids & Hiv, #General, #United States, #Patients, #AIDS (Disease) - Patients - United States - Biography, #Biography & Autobiography, #AIDS (Disease), #Public Health, #Biography

Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (10 page)

BOOK: Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir
13.09Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

 

stretches out and tends to become the whole of virtue, an inner harmony of the soul, a reasonableness which reveals itself in every action and attitude. In war-time it vanishes almost entirely—especially among civilians. It is, in the literal meaning of the Greek word, 'soundness of mind'. Restraint is of its essence, but is felt not as restraint... but as that natural service to right reason which is perfect freedom.

 

He wrote that in 1938, at the end of another world. There isn't a nuance of it that isn't full of Roger, all the time I knew him but especially through his illness. If I idealize him out of proportion in saying so, well, beware the storyteller then. I'm with Livingstone. You're not supposed to have to be a hero to embody such a vastness. The whole of Greece used to work toward it. If it seems rare and outsize now, that only says more about an age resolved to face the millennium without it.

More to the point, if Roger had great patience, I have none. Here at the pitch of emergency I can only lay out the fragments of what seared my frantic heart. I am the weather, Roger is the climate, and they are not always the same. Yet the careening of those next few weeks, fitting in visits to UCLA, more and more in tandem, is the story of a kind of bond that the growing oral history of AIDS records again and again. Whatever happened to Roger happened to me, and my numb strength was a crutch for all his frailty. It didn't feel like strength to me, or it was strength without qualities, pure raw force. Yet it took up the slack for Rog, and we somehow always got where we needed to be. In a way, I am only saying that I loved him—better than myself, no question of it—but increasingly every day that love became the only untouched shade in the dawning fireball. What Tillich calls God, the ground of being.

Roger's blood was drawn fifteen different ways, but we had no test for antibodies yet, so none of the numbers led anywhere. Still there was no perceptible cough, and the general malaise and zigzag fever weren't in themselves conclusive, could still be that phantom flu, shimmering now like an oasis. During one of his consultations, Roger came out to the waiting room and said Dr. Cope wanted to meet me. The feeling was mutual.

As soon as we sat down with Dennis Cope I silently took back every idiot pun I'd ever made about his name. He's a bear of a man, seized with concentration yet extraordinarily mild by way of affect. Speaks carefully but not guardedly, and never to cover his ass. We were three ways blessed: that he was brilliant, that his reputation gave him power, and that Roger had been his private patient for five years going in. Dennis Cope and Roger already had each other's measure before they ever engaged in this battle together. Modest to a fault, incidentally; doesn't even hear praise. And not once in twenty months did he not have time.

He was perplexed the day I met him, but proceeded methodically and threw up no red flag that I could see. He said we had to keep probing these tentative symptoms, but no, whatever it was didn't present like AIDS at all. For one thing, Roger wasn't sick enough. If that sounds naive two years later, I have to remember the syndrome was defined then only by its direst fulminations—gasping on a respirator, lesions head to toe like shrapnel. Roger didn't exhibit the requisite pair of
pre
signs, or not sufficiently to chart a downward curve. Maybe a doctor in New York would've been more grimly fatalistic, like the dude who flattened Craig in a matter of seconds. Maybe Cope was growing more worried and chose to protect us. But so far he still appeared to subscribe to the stubbornness of bugs, just like all our dutiful friends.

How far was that? On March 1 he told us the chest x-ray looked clear, except for a shadow that was probably the pulmonary artery, but he was playing safe and ordering a CAT scan to make sure it wasn't a lymph node. Roger and I had lunch that day at the hospital cafeteria, in the prison-yard court on plastic chairs under a lowering sky. Roger said how glad he was I was there. My sentiments exactly: as long as we stood our ground together we could thread our way through this maze a step at a time, Buddha's way to the top of the mountain.

A few days later when Roger went in to see Cope, I ran out to the corridor and called a friend, to grill him as to his own bout with "regular" pneumonia the previous winter. There had been a suspended day or two back then, as we all waited uncomfortably for the man's results, and then the tests proved negative for AIDS, and we all went back to life. Now I gripped the phone white-knuckled, hammering symptoms out of him. One by one I compared them to Rog, pinning my case on that regular brand of infection. When I strode back to the waiting room, Roger was sitting there stunned, and he stumbled out into the hall as if my five minutes away had nearly let him drown. He sagged beside the water fountain and spoke in a kind of bewildered shock: "He says it could be TB."

Then he started to cry, and the burst of tears sent one of his contact lenses awry. So instead of holding him I had to cup my hands under his eye while he worked the lens back in, swallowing the scald of tears. That specific helpless moment, the soft disk swimming out onto his cheek, stuck with me like a pivot of agony. A year and a half later I'd still be trying to explain to Rog, when the talk came round to the horror, how in that noon moment I died inside. As if I would not live in a world where my friend could be in pain like this. I don't remember what happened then, if we had another test or were given leave to go home, but something had cracked that would never knit again.

As to how we so tenaciously continued to deny it, I offer one morning when I let Roger off at the main entrance to the medical center. He was going to the eighth-floor pulmonary unit to have an arterial blood-gas test. I parked the Jag in the underground garage and was lurching across the plaza when Rand Schrader happened to come out of Jules Stein Eye Institute. As soon as we saw each other I began to weep, and Rand waited till I was calm and walked me all the way to where Roger was, through a labyrinth of corridors. He says now it was obvious that Roger was very ill, and the test in question extreme. They sink a needle into the artery at the wrist and sip out a vial of deep blood.

Rand doesn't remember, but I do, his telling me as we walked about an acquaintance in San Francisco who was out of the hospital after a bout of Pneumocystis, back to work and fit to travel. This was supposed to be encouraging. It was, in fact, so deep had the needle sunk now. My panic had evolved to the more encompassing fear that Roger was dying. If it kept getting worse, Death would start sniffing around, no matter how incomplete the diagnosis. Rand stayed through the test, then waited with Roger outside while I brought the car around. Yet he says by the time he got home he'd buried the whole episode. He bought our story two weeks later that Roger's pneumonia was normal as a football jock. He didn't want to know yet, and I don't blame him. Once you know, it's all over.

A couple of days afterward we were eating a glazed breakfast before going off to UCLA. As I cleared the table—things in order if not life—Roger looked up at me and said: "It's just the two of us."

"I know," I replied, though of course we weren't alone. Al and Bernice had left for the desert on February 1, but they were calling in regularly to check up on us, clearly very anxious. Roger had been looking forward all winter to his sister Jaimee's arrival in Palm Springs with Michael and the kids, yearning to put this thing behind him so he could go play uncle. We had two doctor friends we ran the numbers by, and the phone was constant with friends' concern.

All the same, it was just the two of us lining up as the tests grew more harrowing, the corridors at UCLA more like a separate equal world every day. Forgive us the feeling now and then that the woods had closed behind us. In the most visceral way, with a taste like a ball of blood in our mouths, it seemed that life itself was pulling in like a tortoise. Inside its armor crouched the "group of two" that Freud calls a marriage. Not career, not the past, the waste of errands or the state of the planet. Just us.

I was taking Roger's temperature every couple of hours now, shaking down the thermometer till I had a twinge like tennis elbow. One crazed afternoon I accidentally broke the thermometer against a door and fell to my knees keening, trying to pick up the shards as the mercury beaded into the jade-green carpet. I was cooking in twice a day, shopping at Irvine Ranch, bewildered by the sunny vigor of what Randall Jarrell calls the "basketed, identical/Food-gathering flocks," with their nine-dollar purple peppers and the BMWs in the parking lot. Already I went about in public as if I were on the moon. I had to ventriloquize my way through various meetings at the studio and with Alfred. I began calling my brother late at night in Pennsylvania, needing his constant reassurance after Roger went to bed.

"Paul, it's not AIDS," Bob said over and over, though he knew the tragic randomness of things far better than I. He was born with spina bifida, and had been in a wheelchair all his adult life. Six years younger than I, he spent months at a time in hospitals as a child. I have a vivid memory of visiting him with my parents in Springfield at the Shriners Hospital. Because I was under sixteen, I had to stand in the bushes and peer in a window and wave at him, lost in a ward of suffering. He's one indomitable character, my brother—an accountant's accountant and a teacher, married to his high school sweetheart, Brenda. Throughout the skirmish over my novel, Bob had been the buffer zone between me and my family, the one who understood being gay, who understood being a writer. In the summer of '83 a drunk plowed into his car head-on and put him in the hospital for a month. Oh, had he been there.

All through the week of March 4, Roger's calendar is full of precise notations: 2.0 Godino will, 0.3 Scott Redman. The hours of a lawyer are broken down into tenths, and he kept the record in his calendar because he was home in bed, but he wouldn't stop working. The blood-gas results proved to be in the normal range, which was a relief, yet there was clearly some kind of infection in the lung. The issue at week's end was whether or not that infection was "interstitial." Pneumocystis carinii—the deadly AIDS pneumonia, so-called PCP—is an interstitial infection, which means it invades the interstices between the lung sacs. A battery of x-rays seemed to indicate no interstitial involvement, and this was taken to be good news, especially by our doctor friends, Joe Perloff and Dell Steadman. Joe is a research cardiologist, Dell an eye surgeon. We were pinning them down for opinions in matters that weren't their field, but they were generous here as they would be throughout. Once I heard the interstices were clear, I tossed the Pneumocystis file away. You become very primordial about data. What you need you eat whole, like a python consuming a rat. What doesn't apply right here right now is moontalk.

Thursday or Friday a letter arrived from Craig. The doctor in Houston had confirmed the diagnosis: AIDS by reason of KS, no treatment at this time. Craig was writing to eight or ten friends to break the news, but otherwise he wanted to keep it private. He would widen the circle at his own pace. It couldn't have been more lucid or dignified, and I read it to Rog like a bulletin off the Kafka wire service.
When is enough
, I kept thinking, as if every tragedy mounting up would finally satisfy some savage god.

Despite the positive sign on the interstitial front, Roger still wasn't getting any better. Still not worse, but Cope decided it would only be prudent to have Roger come in for a bronchoscopy, in which a flexible tube is inserted in the lung for a specimen of tissue. The bronc has become such a fact of all our lives now, it's hard to recall there was a time I'd never heard of it. Joe Perloff promised the test was remarkably negotiable, though I recalled Joel saying the doctor had managed to puncture Leo's lung.

Roger would have to go into the hospital overnight to have it. Neither of us had spent so much as a day in that nether place, not in our whole ten years together. Till then I affected to feel rather phobic about the whole idea. The previous fall, when Kathy Hendrix had been in for surgery, I told her over lunch a week later that I hadn't been up to visit because I wasn't good at hospitals. I think I Still clung to the trauma of the past, pressed against the Shriners window, like a shield. I would learn now to put such bullshit behind me very fast, and afterwards would feel a kind of nuclear contempt for those who practiced it anywhere in Roger's orbit.

Over the weekend before he went in, we just hunkered down. I'd finished reading Forster and turned to
The Golden Bough
, as preparation for the powers of Egypt. Every night I would pore through Frazer's laundry-list account of magic and fear and atavism. I kept beside me a folder of Nile cruises, which I would scribble with lofty problems: Did it matter if we booked port or starboard? Mostly what I was doing was repeating the interstitial news like a mantra, over and over, to drown out the week's other blip of evidence. Roger had failed the scratch test for mumps—had shown no red or blistering when the patch was removed from his arm—and this was considered a crude sounding of weakened immune function. If the choice was either impaired immunity or, an unreliable test, I was for betting the farm against the test.

Roger was comfortable resting in bed, still no cough to speak of, animated with everyone who visited. Saturday night he convinced me to go out for dinner with the Perloffs and the Rankaitis/Flicks. These were the couples we saw most often, who gathered around them the most stimulating people, mind over Mammon. Marjorie Perloff was then at the University of Southern California, an encyclopedic and inexhaustible literary critic who knew every cusp of modernism backwards. Robbert Flick and Susan Rankaitis both make photographs, but the camera is merely the common denominator here. The light these two work by is opposite as sun and moon. Marjorie and Joe, Susan and Robbert, Roger and I—we had constituted an inner circle for many years.

At the restaurant I made Joe explain the interstitial data all over again, and he tried to ease my mind about Tuesday morning's test. Finally I lightened up enough to eat. Susan says she never suspected Roger had AIDS till I told her seven months later, so Joe presumably succeeded in reassuring somebody. When I got home, however, I found Rog sitting in the study coughing, and looking more drained, worn out and lost than he had all month. He was so glad to see me and be taken care of. At such a moment you move like an avalanche to oblige, for all the reasons of love but also just to keep busy. It was going to be fine, he'd be home by Tuesday afternoon, and after that there were no more tests. Then he would have to get better, I thought, as I kneaded his shoulders and curled him to sleep. I read
The Golden Bough
till 4
A.M.

BOOK: Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir
13.09Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Falling Fast by Sophie McKenzie
Blue-Eyed Devil by Kleypas, Lisa
The Reluctant Alpha by A.K. Michaels
Black River by S. M. Hulse
Dirt by Stuart Woods
Betrayal of Trust by J. A. Jance