Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (48 page)

"Not good," she replied fearfully, running out of the room. The curious helpless breathing continued, like a storm inside him, while I sat there utterly still. Then six or eight different people rushed in, all the interns and the nurses off the floor. They stared at him and jabbered at each other in their own terrible shorthand. Finally one of them turned to me. "Is there a living will? What do you want us to do?"

Nothing. Because that is the point of the living will he'd signed, that we couldn't take him to intensive care and put a tube down his throat. The breathing had leveled out, but his temp was shooting up, and they expected heart failure at any moment. What had happened was that the meningitis had crept to a certain watermark in his brain, and the terrible breathing—Cheyne-Stoking, it's called—was the start of the final drowning. They paged Cope, and he ordered something to reduce the swelling in the brain. Gradually the temp came down to normal, and within the hour he was sleeping deep and easy. He looked most vividly well, in fact, his weight normal and his color good. They gave him oxygen and shouted his name and lifted the side of his head from the pillow, but it slumped back without any muscular life. The battle was over.

I walked through the rest of it numb and lost, borne along by the new and ghastly rituals of separation. Yet I was curiously abstracted too, and unable to cry. The fight had gone out of me, there being no point anymore. Alfred came over and stood outside the room for eight hours, making whatever calls needed to be made. A half-dozen friends came streaming in, and I talked to them all from inside a bell jar. I didn't want to talk to anyone long, because I had to keep going over to Rog to kiss him and tell him I loved him. Everyone always said hearing was the last to go, and I didn't want him to miss a syllable of me before he left, even if he only heard it in a deep and thoughtless dream.

His mother called from Denver to say their flight had been delayed and they were running to catch another. "He's not going to make it this time," I told her. None of us thought he could possibly last till they arrived. Joe Perloff came and sat with me for a while, propping me up with talk of Roger's courage. Dennis Cope, who had fought with us in the trenches for nineteen months, came in and stayed the longest. "What am I going to do without him?" I asked in a hollow voice, and Cope replied immediately, with great force and conviction. "Write about him, Paul," he said. "That's what you have to do."

Sheldon came by but couldn't bring himself to step into room 1010. I had to go to him in the lounge, where he said he didn't know what to say. Cope returned at ten and waited till Al and Bernice arrived. When they walked in they greeted him warmly, not looking toward Rog right away, thanking the doctor for all the long fight. Al gripped my shoulder and declared, his voice breaking, "This boy took care of him like a mother." Then Bernice went to the side of the bed, touched Roger's hand and said, "Good night, sweet prince." But they held their tears, those two, because they had sworn since the very beginning of the end to be strong for me.

After an hour or so they left, and then I dispatched each of the friends. Though Rog had been expected to die by seven or eight, Cope told me at eleven that if he was still alive in the morning they would give him another dose of the ampho. It was all unpredictable now, and Roger might even resurface again, one way or another. Or maybe he would go on like this for hours or even days.

Finally it was Rog and me alone, late at night in the quiet, the way it had been all summer. Still I would not cry, because I wouldn't let him hear sorrow. I spent all my own endearments—
my little friend—
and sat till four o'clock. When I'd kiss his forehead I could still smell the freshness of the shampoo. I called Sam at four and said I was ready to leave, and we talked awhile about whether I needed to be there for the actual moment. I didn't, I don't know why. I clipped a lock of his hair, which got lost in the chaos of the following day. I slipped off his father's sapphire ring, which the nurse had taped to his finger. I said what half good-bye I could.
You're the best
, I whispered as I walked out the door, what I always said when I left his room at night.

I drove home trying to beat the dawn and knew it would not even start until morning. Waking teaches you pain. The parents were in the front bedroom, so I took a Dalmane and curled up in Roger's bed, where I still sleep every night because he is nearer there than anywhere else in the house. When the phone rang at six I drifted out of bed and went into the darkened study. Bernice was standing in the hallway door, and we held each other as the machine answered the phone. After the beep, a voice said: "This is UCLA Medical Center calling. Mr. Roger Horwitz died at 5:42
A.M.
this morning, October twenty-second." Bernice and I hugged each other briefly, without a word, and I swam back to bed for the end of the night, trying to stay under the Dalmane. Putting off as long as I could the desolate waking to life alone—this calamity that is all mine, that will not end till I do.