The Medicine Burns (11 page)

“My CD8s look great,” Matt said after a while. “The fatigue isn't nearly as bad.”

“The fatigue,” Alan groaned.

“How'd you two meet?” I asked, oddly compelled to rescue the situation, and not sure for whom.

“We met at the San Francisco AIDS Conference,” Matt explained. “Alan promptly seduced me.”

Still seduced? I wanted to ask, but kept silent.

“A man in every port.”
Ken had said it, but it seemed petty. Not knowing who to trust wasn't something new to me. It had become a way of life while I was using. It goes without saying—never trust a junkie. There were little dishonesties. At the time I considered them discrepancies: a little less dope when you halved it, a few extra bucks when you copped for someone who didn't know what you could get it for. Even with Jayne, the photo I'd bought for cheap that I thought I would sell later. Something made me keep it. My friends who were long-term survivors of AIDS insisted that they couldn't trust their doctors, researchers, or the pharmaceutical companies. “Save your own life” was their call to battle. They formed motley coalitions, guerrilla clinics.

Matt embarked on a litany of offenses the medical establishment had committed.

“The research is there,” he said of DNCB, “but because it's not patentable, the pharmaceutical companies want nothing to do with it. They disregard therapies that might really prove effective in favor of the long-standing antiviral therapies that limit people's life expectancy.”

As if needing to explain Mart's passion, Alan turned to me, “Matt was diagnosed with lymphoma several years ago—and just look at that body now.” He put his hand through Matt's curly hair.

“I had a life expectancy of weeks, maybe months. They knocked out my immune system before the cancer with every nucleoside analog produced. And after the chemo I had skin like glass, no hair, no eyebrows, no lip color. I had to paint my face in like a doll and wear a shroud.

“Alan thinks it's funny; he thinks I sprang back to life like a plant cutting. Well, the lymph nodes don't grow back after a biopsy. You're just left with the scars of their invasive curiosity.”

“I have nothing but respect for you,” Alan said. “If DNCB saved you, then I'm thankful you found it.”

“Education saved me, and a lack of trust. What I
don't
understand is why you started AZT in the first place.”

Alan didn't respond right away, and when he did it was whispered and accusatory. “Do what's right for you, Matt, and let me make my own decisions.”

“Whatever—” Matt said, “you trust your colleagues and I guess that's good. I wish I could—but I love life too much.”

“What do you do?” Matt asked, turning his attention to me.

“I'm a student,” I lied, “in psychology.” I realized I was lying to Alan, as well, who hadn't even gotten around to asking me what I did, probably assuming I earned a paycheck being creative, or arrogant, or in recovery. In his world, people got paid for what they did. I'd been out of work for the past eight months and living on GA. The hustle I'd been respected for as a junkie, looking good enough to stay employed, had run itself out.

“Why psychology?” Matt asked.

“To be quite honest,” I answered, “I'm interested in what people are willing to tell me about their lives.”

“There are a lot of uninteresting people out there,” Alan said. “I hope you're not disappointed.”

“The truth is what they don't tell you,” Matt added.

Many of the doctors and researchers were at the City Club when we finally arrived, holding up their glasses to Alan as we entered the vaultlike, marble lobby—a toast where those honored weren't provided a drink.

“There's Don and Selma,” Alan whispered. “Did you see
And the Band Played On?
”

“No,” I answered, “no television.”

“Don Francis is played by Matthew Modine and Selma Dritz is played by Lily Tomlin. They're the heroes of the film.''

Selma, a short woman with brown eyebrows drawn on and a beige sweater—bearing no resemblance to Lily Tomlin that I could see—reached around Alan's neck and hugged him.

“I saw your movie,” he said, “and I thought Lily did a great job. She has your feistiness down. What did you think of it?”

“Well, I liked it,” she answered. “But a lot of it never happened—or it happened for Hollywood. I for one would never kiss the owner of the baths.”

She smiled at me, so I introduced myself.

“This is your friend?” She deferred to Alan.

“Yes,” he answered, “he's a psychiatry resident,” embellishing the lie I'd hoped he'd forgotten.

Other doctors converged around us, and spoke of ski trips, research funding, and colleagues who'd died.

They seemed to love the surface of things, talking about who was in, who was out, who was funded, and who wasn't. There was a lot of talk about the movie—almost a nostalgia for the difficulties and horrors it chronicled. The history of the epidemic looked good in its encapsulation. It felt finite. And the past seems safe when you haven't a clue to approaching the future. We'd all read about the Berlin conference—the revelations of the Concorde study, not particularly startling, about the ineffectiveness, even danger of early intervention with AZT and other antivirals. The heroes and the newcomers at this gathering all seemed suddenly hopeless to me, and I could recognize it now, from my own addiction. In recovery they say, “
doing the same things over and over hoping for different results
.”

Alan asked me to go meet people, work the room—a skill I knew he took seriously. The crowd, almost all men, and almost all doctors and researchers, seemed to coalesce around me. These were men I'd be embarrassed to raise my sleeve for, the veins still reluctant to surface. Alan was gone, but they crowded closer, sensing the outsider. I imagined their derision, like his friends we'd had breakfast with. I imagined myself reduced to the anonymous blood sample of an IV drug user.

I went silently to the bar and ordered a glass of wine, where I struck up conversation with the bartender.

“Not a doctor?” I asked him.

“No,” he answered, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. “I'm a bartender.”

“An anesthesiologist,” I suggested.

“That's one way to look at it,” he laughed. “Having a nice time?” he asked. “You look lonely.”

“Just thinking,” I said. I was staring out at the crowd, as though I were pretending to look for someone. Just then, at the catering trays, I saw Jayne, standing lopsided on her broken heel and filling her plate obliviously. I watched her walking through the crowd, blouse open, and the keloid healed over like a peach pit. She sauntered toward me, unacknowledged by the doctors who seemed to clear a way for her unconsciously.

“This is a great party,” she said, putting a deviled egg in her mouth.

“Do you really think so?” I asked. “I'm not really sure we belong.”

“We're all connected here,” she answered, her mouth full. “
Bloodlines
.”

“Your friends wanted me to contribute to your obituary, but I couldn't. It seemed wrong. I wasn't there for you when you needed me.”

Her tongue darted from her mouth to catch a piece of egg that fell from her lip to the carpet. She took a portion of her wig and daintily wiped her mouth with it. Her face was pearl white and sloppily made up.

“Mirrors don't work for me anymore,” she said, reading my criticism.

“I never wrote you,” I said, “I was afraid of you. Not AIDS—but death—how close you lived to it.”

“You should eat more,” she said. “That jacket's much too big for you. By the way, this thing finally healed.” She raised her hand up to touch the protrusion in her chest.

“How long did it take?” I asked.

“Forever,” she answered, and clumsily stepped backward into the crowd. Then she was gone and Alan emerged. He asked if I could use another glass of wine.

“I think I'll go home now.” I put the glass, still full, on the bar. “You have a set of keys.”

His slide carousels, brief case, and PowerBook were in the hallway when I arrived, a body of work that, more than research, was divination—requiring our best faith. I wondered what he would speak of in his seminar, what justifications in tables or graphs, what picture of the epidemic he would surmise through all the data and losses.

I hung his jacket, left my clothes in a pile on the floor, and slipped beneath the blanket, naked. I thought of Jayne, of how my living had kept me from her dying; what hatred of my own life had kept me from hers; what self-destruction had kept me from sympathy, from responding to her letters. I looked at his medicines, still lined up by his toiletries bag—gods swallowing their own miracles.

I slept briefly before Alan entered the room in darkness. “Are you awake?”

“Yes,” I said, rolling over onto my side to look at him. I noticed the projector in his hand.

“I have to check these for tomorrow. Do you mind?”

He plugged in the projector, and a beam of light created a small rectangular box on the wall. I heard the first slide drop down into the carousel, and he focused a picture that meant nothing to me, some viral activity on a cell, then dropped in a succession of other slides with pie charts and tables labeled:
Depression, Enervation, Negative Affect
. Another table headed by
Acute Psychological Phenomena in People with HIV
included subheadings:
Fear and Anxiety of Isolation and Rejection, of Infecting Others and Being Infected by Them; Depression Over the Virus Controlling Future Life, Over Limits Imposed by Ill-Health and Rejection by Others, from Self-Blame and Recrimination Over Being Exposed to HIV; Guilt Over Past Lifestyle Exposing One to HIV, Over Possibly Having Unwittingly Infected Others
.

“And here's the final image,” he said, dropping the slide. “It's very dramatic, very powerful.” The image at the foot of my bed was of the globe encapsulated in the virus, the critical card in his divination, the one that would erase our differences, lift the burden of guilt. He shut the projector light off.

“Are you upset about something?” he asked.

I wanted to say I was sorry to hear about his lover, and felt betrayed he hadn't mentioned his status to me—things, it seemed, that might heal between us if we had forever. Even in recognizing the imperative of honesty, I told him I was only upset about his leaving, how short our time was together.

He undressed and got into bed beside me and held me close to him. He whispered, “I'm sorry. I thought I'd lose you if I told you the truth.”

I heard him breathless behind me, as though I had some power with which to punish him, some code by which I could judge him. We are, in the end, small gods to each other in whom redemption and desertion are closely tied.

 

 

 

NOTE:
DNCB: Dinitrochlorobenzene, a photo chemical used as a potent topical contact sensitizer. DNCB is used to boost cellular immune response resulting in increased numbers of cytotoxic T lymphocytes and natural killer (NK) cells. When applied to the skin in a small patch, DNCB causes an immune response akin to that seen in people sensitive to poison oak.

Dr. K.

I was working determinations at the unemployment office. During a structured interview, I found myself staring at his blunt fingers. He tapped them at the edge of the desk, nervous. His voice was so soft, so I was forced to incline myself toward him. This mismatch of troubled speech and the tapping of his fingers distracted me—a difficult simplicity to both gestures, an equal inarticulation. I asked again about his last job—why he'd walked off the jobsite and not returned. To this, he responded, “there just wasn't a point to it.”

A week later, he stood behind me at the coffee shop. “Remember me?” he asked, “you denied my claim.”

“It wasn't a personal decision,” I said. “I'm obligated—”

“You don't have to explain. I've been making some money fixing cars, and I do the swap meet on Sundays.”

“Let me buy your coffee,” I offered.

He continued talking. “It keeps me busy—that and the house.” When I asked for the coffee to go, he asked me if I'd like to look at his truck.

“I'm parked just outside your building.”

He wasn't kidding about fixing things; the truck was patched and soldered like an old furnace. He opened the truck door for me, lifting a box marked “Biohazard” from the front seat and placing it in the back. “Hop in.” He closed the unpaneled door behind me. The window was down. He asked, “can we go for a short ride?”

I can usually tell a pick up, but it was tough with him. He had a darkness about him that made an advance seem improbable—
there just wasn't a point to it
. There was something about him, or his isolation, that I was familiar with—a transience, an insubstantiality that reminded me of the men I'd gone home with before I'd settled with Tom. Glimpsing into these men's lives held all the fascination for me of a Diane Arbus photograph. They were shop owners, truckers, fathers, addicts, and drifters. I'd sit with them in donut shops and cafeterias, have sex with them in trailers and parks, marvel at their failings, and catch them on their way down. Before Tom, I sort of accepted the temporariness of these encounters, and even began to enjoy their brevity. You could share a lot very quickly, or nothing at all.

He waited for me to respond. “Sure,” I said, “let's go.”

I remembered his name from the paperwork.
Mason, John Mason
.

I watched him walk around the front of the truck. He patted the hood like a service station attendant. The thought occurred to me he might be holding some kind of grudge because of my determination; I wondered if I should be concerned with my safety. At that moment, it was the fact that I would have to trust him that excited me.