Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (11 page)

Al and Bernice had decided to drive in from the desert, even though we told them it wasn't necessary. They agreed to hold off till Monday and just stay overnight till we got the results of the bronc. On Sunday evening I fixed the two of us as cheery a supper as I could muster. Roger's appetite hadn't suffered, at least. But in the middle of the meal he excused himself to go to the bathroom, where he had a twinge of diarrhea. This didn't prove to lead to anything ominous on its own, and in fact through all his sickness Roger didn't have to deal with much intestinal static. But as I sat at the dining room table waiting for him to come back, the food like ashes on my tongue, I had a sudden vision of what a flimsy wall we'd been building the last few weeks, brick by brick.

He seemed so weak and overwhelmed by then, and the hardest thing to watch him lose in the early days was the spring in his step. He'd always had a quickness about him, a vigorous enthusiasm that I can still see in picture after picture out of the past, like a great store of potential energy. The wellspring of it wasn't athletic; it flowed from a joy of life. In the steepening decline of the previous months he'd lost the physical edge of that delight—lost it for good. Though he had reservoirs of deeper and sweeter tones to compensate, I missed the boyish energy most. Perhaps because mine went with it.

Sunday night,
Vertigo
happened to be on television. We'd both seen it decades ago but never since, especially not with the drift of learned exegesis that has developed around the fifties Hitchcock. We lay close in bed to watch it and were soon transported into its spiral subtext. The worry about tomorrow seeped away a little, or maybe it was just a relief to watch somebody else—in this case Jimmy Stewart—be torn apart by suppressed hysteria.

On the way to UCLA on Monday morning, driving along Sunset to the west side, Roger asked quietly: "What if it's really serious?"

Despite the positive talk all week—all month—and despite the fact that my last nickel was riding on denial. I don't know if I answered the right question, but I know my voice was steadier than I would've thought possible. Rog, I said, you have to understand how much everyone loves you. He had nobody out there even approaching enemy status; I'd never heard anyone say an unkind or quarrelsome word about him. The same could not be said of me, by a long shot. I gave a little encomium on his talent for friendship and loyalty, the idea being that everyone would be there for him if the going got tough. I'd learned this tactic of human grounding from Roger himself, who would always be saying as we drove away from a dinner party, about someone I hadn't even noticed, "Such a nice man. So unpretentious." Unless we were driving home from a migrainous Hollywood party, in which case he might grumble about some hustling producer or other: "Too noisy. So full of himself."

I can't really separate the March 11 check-in on the tenth floor of the medical center from a dozen others. Amateurs still at the system, I expect we appeared like two meek refugees, with the overnight bag and a briefcase full of work. The tenth floor at UCLA is called the Wilson Pavilion, all private rooms and food prepared to order, the carpeted veneer of a hotel corridor not quite masking the naked hightech sick gear. There was a waiting room across from 1028, dedicated to Nat King Cole, where we plunked the parents down with their thousand-page potboilers. I stayed with Roger throughout the day, working in fits and starts on
The Manicurist,
as the interns came in and drew his blood.

We would both grow grimly accustomed to the first day of a hospitalization, with the interns sweeping in as if by revolving door, trying to look serious in spite of their comical youth, mad with backed-up things to do and racing like the White Rabbit. There would come a time when I would take over this phase, give the tedious history, answer the bald questions: Are you a homosexual? Are you or have you ever been an IV drug abuser? On March 11 I couldn't tell one intern from the next, intern from resident. I didn't realize that in a teaching hospital like UCLA every patient is one more unit to cover as they cram for the test of their budding careers. And here in the presence of a new disease, each kid doctor wanted an A. But remember, Roger was only supposed to be there overnight, so I held them all at arm's length and resisted differentiating.

Roger bore the process very well, and we seemed to be taking a proper stand of firmness in saying he was feeling not too bad.
Not sick enough, not sick enough
—I kept repeating Cope's phrase. It was still so, wasn't it? The pulmonary man came in to explain how the bronchoscopy worked. They would do it early in the morning, and we should probably have the results by noon. Home for lunch.

Dennis Cope was a welcome sight late in the day, because he at least knew who we were, and more to the point, the interns knew who he was. That is one of the shocking things about a hospital: its leveling of you to your body's weakest link. The Ph.D. in Comp Lit, the years in Paris, the wall of books—you do not wear these badges on your johnny gown. No wonder I was forever giving our resumes to doctors and nurses, as if to beg them to see us for real, see what happy lives we had left at the border, which waited still like a dog on the front stoop.

I must've gone out for dinner with Al and Bernice, and I must've been full of reassurance and interstitial data. All the blood work was normal so far, but I don't recall if an actual T-cell test was taken, or if we knew the results before the verdict. The T cells are a subset of the white blood count. Infection with the AIDS virus reverses the T-cell ratio, indicating an immune dysfunction. A test was available at that time, but it was still considered exotic and far down the line of inquiry. Today I know fifteen people who have their T cells tested every six or eight weeks.

I also wonder now, in a sort of stupor, how it was we had no plan whatsoever if the news was bad. We hadn't ever discussed who would know and who wouldn't, how we would euphemize, indeed if hiding was even feasible. In a way it was like the whole last year, when we never talked about dying because we were fighting so hard to stay alive. I understand that in theory it's good to have these matters out, to make one's lifeboat plans and release the sum of one's worldly goods. But we didn't seem able to do that and forge ahead at the same time. Warriors in pitched battle do not make their last will; they become it.

The final thing I remember from the night before was a visit from Michael Gottlieb, the immunologist who'd reported the first four cases of the disease to the CDC in the summer of 1981. Dr. Gottlieb was an intense man with darting foxlike eyes, who probably hadn't had ten minutes to catch his breath in the four years since he grasped the iceberg's tip. He spoke casually enough with us and said—I think I'm right about this, but who can sound the depths of my longing to hear a good omen?—it would all probably prove to be nothing. Then Roger asked him specifically: "Have you ever seen anyone with my symptoms who turned out to have it?"

"Yes," said Gottlieb.

My brother and Sam, my therapist, concur that they talked to me late that night and gave me the final pep talk:
It's not AIDS, it'll all be fine tomorrow, get some sleep.
Did they really think that? I ask them, and they both say they don't know anymore. They realize they were in shell shock then, to a lesser degree than I but with the same dazed sense of staring into headlights. How was I to know my very advisers were locked in a vertigo precipitous as my own?

I was over at UCLA on Tuesday morning before the pulmonary team, and his parents and I gave Roger a bracing squeeze. I stayed with him till the doctor came in to administer the local anesthetic, and then I waited in the empty lounge with Al and Bernice, watching them as they dutifully read their books, refusing to leave my watch when the two of them went for coffee.

Altogether it took maybe twenty minutes. I was in Roger's room the second the team walked out. Roger was lying on his side, with an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. They'd told us he would need it till the anesthetic wore off. What they hadn't said was that he would be coughing, almost without stopping and clearly in real discomfort. I patted him and talked a bit, but we really couldn't communicate. Even if this was a predictable reaction to the procedure and nothing more, the reality was jarring in the extreme. For this was the very cough we'd always said wasn't there. Could things have changed so fast? And who among my advisers would have me not worry now?

I sat in the red vinyl chair in the window corner and worked on another half-page of dialogue. If comedy's roots are pain, those must have been hilarious lines. Thankfully, Al and Bernice didn't come into the room; we were better off alone till we could talk again. I guess we had already arrived in that leveled place where nobody could follow, the only thing worse being the portal from which I would be barred myself, nineteen months and ten days later. I don't think there was any magic left in me as the clock ran down its final minutes. I was struck with a fit of the metaphysical bends, equal at least in hollowness to that bruised and hacking cough.

Finally it abated, and the oxygen mask came off. Roger was so debilitated from the trauma of the test that he lay back in an exhausted sleep. I don't know how much time went by. When the doctors came in—a pair of them, the intern and the pulmonary man—they stayed as close to each other as they could, like puppies. They stood at his bedside, for the new enlightenment demands that a doctor not deliver doom from the foot of the bed, looming like God. The intern spoke: "Mr. Horwitz, we have the results of the bronchoscopy. It does show evidence of Pneumocystis in the lungs."

Was there a pause for the world to stop? There must have been, because I remember the crack of silence, Roger staring at the two men. Then he simply shut his eyes, and only I, who was the rest of him, could see how stricken was the stillness in his face.

"We'll begin treatment immediately with Bactrim. You'll need to be here in the hospital for fourteen to twenty-one days. Do you have any questions?"

Roger shook his head on the pillow. I wanted to kill these two ridiculous young men with the nerdy plastic pen shields in their white-coat pockets. "Could you please leave us alone," I said.

And they tweedled out, relieved to have it over with. I ran around the bed and clutched Roger's hand. "We'll fight it, darling, we'll beat it, I promise. I won't let you die." The sentiments merged as they tumbled out. This is the liturgy of bonding. Mostly we clung together, as if time still had the decency to stop when we were entwined. After all, the whole world was right here in this room. I don't think Roger said anything then. Neither of us cried. It begins in a country beyond tears. Once you have your arms around your friend with his terrible news, your eyes are too shut to cry.

The intern had never once said the word.

The first thing we did was call Sheldon. He must have told us to, because I can't imagine why I wouldn't have gone right across the hall to break the news to Al and Bernice. Sheldon said not to do anything till he got there, and since nothing was what we felt like, it was an easy order to follow. Fifteen minutes later he walked in, vigorous and very calm. His attitude was so startling, so unlike our own dumb aftershock, that we both looked readily to him for direction. He was relentlessly upbeat. Not surprised about the results, and the only thing to do was get the infection taken care of and back to work. There could be no question of telling Al, because the shock might kill him. Why burden the parents anyway? In fact we couldn't tell anyone, for as soon as word got out, Roger would lose his practice. AIDS was that extreme a stigma. The losing of jobs was a foregone conclusion.

It was an insidiously airtight argument, and Roger and I agreed immediately. After all, I'd already promised Rog we were in this thing to win, and what better way of winning than to go on as if nothing had changed? I knew from Craig's example the week before, his lightning trip to Houston, that there were people out there who knew more than anyone told us. But I made it plain to Sheldon that certain ones would have to know. My brother, my therapist, the Perloffs—Joe had been following the case for two months. Sheldon resisted every name I mentioned, especially Rand Schrader and Richard Ide, as if gay men in particular couldn't be trusted not to gossip. It almost came to an argument, but I wasn't about to be budged, and we couldn't start bickering in front of Roger.

Having sealed the smallest circle he could get, Sheldon, brimming with optimism, sailed out. I still don't know why we allowed him so much power, except that he'd always assumed the role of head of the family. He made it seem so much easier to island ourselves with the secret, putting off the cold reality of all our loved ones' grief. I think Roger couldn't endure the thought of pity, he who was always so self-contained. For him at least, the secrecy didn't spring from shame, though I had a very bad case for a while. The shame of being different was rooted deeper in me than the fact of being gay: in the mesmerized faces of those who would stare at my brother on crutches, my brother too busy walking to notice. I noticed.