The Medicine Burns (12 page)

He sat behind the wheel. “Where to?” he asked.

“Maybe the park,” I suggested. “I've only got about a half hour before my next appointment.” The thought of the window-less basement I worked in, the rigid scheduling of people, the rote questions, and legal responses I communicate seemed suddenly suffocating. I felt compelled to have this encounter—I imagined myself living by swap meets, keeping old appliances running years past their warranties, possessing a surgeon's hands with parts and wires. A fantasy of brute strength and primitive invention overtook me as we walked into the park.

“Do you like your job?” he asked.

“You're not thinking I took special pleasure in denying your claim?” I asked. It sounded bitter; I could teach him a thing or two about what he and I meant in the scheme of things. He laughed though, and for the first time it occurred to me that we might mean something to each other.

“I'm just curious about what you like to do,” he said, before leaning into the water fountain. I thought of William Holden in
Picnic:
the depths of simple men that threaten to drown or liberate us. His hair was black and wavy, dense as sealskin. His eyes seemed to have a perpetual squint—one, he explained, was glass. He turned the handle on the water fountain and drank. His lips were still wet when he looked up. He wiped them with the back of his hand. I noticed the U.S. Navy tattoo on his forearm.

The tattoo reminded me of a dealer I knew. I remembered him cleaning his gun after I'd purchased a gram of heroin. He said, “don't leave until you've cut me some.”

“I don't think so.” I said this walking backward out of the hotel room. I never took my eyes off the gun. It had been a test, and I remembered feeling exhilirated and fearless walking away from it.

“I'd like to learn how to shoot.”

“You never shot a gun before?” John asked.

“No, never had to.”

“That's good,” he said. “Be glad for that. I don't know why you'd want to, living in the city.”

I hadn't put my finger on the strange rage I'd been feeling, angry about altercations with Tom. Just that morning he threw his pills after me, and I left him in tears.

“The city is the best place to have a gun these days,” I said, “and besides, if post office workers can get a little crazy, unemployment workers deserve scheduled holidays for massacres.”

“They get all the other holidays,” he said. Then looking at my expression added, “just kidding.”

We walked to a bench perched over the San Francisco Bay—outside the park a row of mansions were developed around the same view. I pointed out the old Spreckles mansion that Danielle Steele had acquired and was now living in. Beneath the large, draped windows, cherubs held open folds of cement fabric. I imagined it as the palace outside Florence in
The Decameron
, where the wealthy told delicious stories against death, a reprieve from a landscape of plague. When I imagine cloistering myself, I think more of the movie
Salo
, where Italian fascists exercise the unchecked power of the libertine over a select, abducted group of youths. The abductors, having divested themselves of all but their own law, can only learn from their own cruelty.

But my own escape, for better or worse, was almost impossible to imagine anymore—requiring the kind of wealth I'd never touch in this lifetime, built on tawdry stories and generic endings. Still, I could not take my eyes off that impressive estate as we left the park.

Ever since Tom got sick, I started to feel only his disease could reel me back in, the urgency of his condition was the only thing I could respond to. Tom had a fatherly streak: he'd helped me stay clean, paid for my rehabilitation and continuing therapy. He respected me at my depths, and consoled me through a tenuous period of learning to live without heroin. He'd helped me back to life before he shared with me what he'd accepted as his impending death by AIDS. It was our struggles, our eternal vigilance that came to explain our being with each other. It became a way to explain the attraction to our skeptical friends.

I used to talk about the two of us going to India, but Tom resisted. He didn't like the idea that we'd have to entrust ourselves to strangers for directions, accommodations, and well-being. As long as I'd been with Tom, we'd forgotten how to do that. Once he started to get sick, I started to think about others, about the revelations of the hundreds of men before him, about how our life together was different from that, and how it wasn't.

Complicated men have always disappointed me: an economy to their intelligence where brilliance in one area leaves a deficit in another. I thought of Tom, how he carefully probed and reconfigured me, so that I saw myself as someone responsible: a bureaucrat by day, lover of a dying man by night. It didn't surprise me—this new breed of bureaucrat/caretaker. But I'd come to notice a widening blind spot in myself, a kind of painless execution of duties, and then there were the physical manifestations—a numbness that would spread from my fingers to my chest.

It was easy being with John Mason; I had already failed him by denying his claim. My excuse was legislated.
These limits are imposed on me. He must be used to this
. We sat in his truck in front of my workplace.

“I had a nice time,” he said. He leaned over and surprised me by closing my hand in his. “Would you come out to my house on the weekend?”

He wants us to get to know each other—as though anyone has time for this anymore. He tried to explain it. He lived outside the city, he'd like to take me shooting. “I'm not real outgoing. It takes me time to open up.”

He had a charm that scared me. Like heroin, he exuded a kind of peace approximating death—his whole face conforming to the still, tranquil, blue patience of his glass eye. Tom was there, a sceptered skeleton presiding over death, shaking his pills like an instrument of voodoo. I said yes.

I came home after work and caught myself trying to silence the turn of the key in the lock—a tactic I remembered from childhood, arriving after my parents' proscribed hour. That fatherly streak in Torn had had its effect—I'd gone back to secrecy. They'd warned me of this in my rehab at Saint Mary's—secrecy and isolation were addict behaviors. I was letting myself have just a little.

Though I'd discontinued going to meetings after about a year, I'd convinced Tom to help me pay for psychoanalysis. Freud's Eros and Thanatos instincts were practically a schematic for my life. Above all, I was looking for a transmission of Freud himself. Freud, who had created this artificial relationship, suggesting the minutes of the psychoanalytic hour, and who had come to psychoanalysis by conducting a self-analysis. This was the question I regularly posited to my analyst:
Can't I do this on my own?
Answering, Freud did.

Dr. Klein had mastered the screen—a kind of neutral presence upon which the analysand could direct their love and aggression. I saw fit to withhold payment from her for weeks, even when Tom was paying for them, or I'd demand an explanation of her enormous fee. I would constantly test her, certain and uncertain of the person beneath the ever-patient veneer. She was insufferably reflective.
You don't think you deserve this, do you?

No one deserves this
. But I'd continued seeing her, attracted by the almost inanimate aspect of her personality, the deflecting surface I would later project with Tom, but never master. For me, listening and compassion were merged. I wanted to learn the trick of her disengagement. I assured Tom analysis would make me stronger for him, a better lover. My therapy eased his mind. He became more cautious of my potential for self-destruction when he got sick—I suppose because I'd asked him to lock his drugs in a cabinet, and to keep count of his syringes.

Dr. Klein had reproached me for not addressing my anger over Tom's dying.
Why should I be angry? If dying is anything like my last OD, and I think it probably is, he's in for the time of his life
.

Yes, but you can't have that experience
.

I've already had it
.

Tom heard me, slowly emerging from the bathroom with an expression I knew too well—unwanted discovery. Perhaps there was a new lesion, a rash. He never spoke of them anymore. “I hope you had a better day than I did.”

“I usually do,” I answered, sidestepping him and moving into the bedroom. He followed me in, and leaned naked on the chest of drawers. I remember his body of just a year ago, not terribly muscular, but certainly there had been shape to his arms and chest. AZT has rubbed out this history, detaching muscles from the bone so that they hang on him and let the bones express themselves beneath his skin.

Tom was a historian with a particular love of the Elizabethan poets. He taught classes at State until six months ago, when he felt he had to quit. He used to ask his students to record themselves reciting the poetry of Marlowe and Shakespeare. The students' disembodied voices would surround his dark desk until late in the evening. They would stammer on the words, step on the music, but he'd listen patiently to their tapes of Donne's
“First Anniversarie.”
I think of Donne and his idiosyncratic imagery of commingling elements—the blood of lovers mixing in the body of a flea—and how his poems, recited in the terrible earnestness of his students, seemed to articulate the love and dread between Tom and me.

I helped Torn into the bed. “I'm sorry about today,” he said. “The medicines make me cranky.”

I wondered if I'd ever make love to him again. I leaned over and kissed his mouth, explored it with my tongue. I imagined the inside of his mouth, black and flinty like a mine. I didn't look at the resistance in his eyes, but went about kissing him as though restoring his breathing, doing this to him like an emergency worker. But once I'd let him go, I realized I'd held my breath, afraid to smell or taste him. I felt dirty for wanting and not wanting him.

“I want to die.” He always says this, but clings, as though addicted to dying. His prescriptions of Demerol are in a cabinet not far from the bed. I ask if he is in pain.

“I'm losing you,” he says hoarsely, “that's painful.”

My efforts feel like nothing, because they are efforts. Today his liver is bloated. “Stay off the drip,” I suggest.

I can't tell him
…

We were driving out of the city to San Carlos where John has a large home. We didn't talk much, and it was different than our day at the park; everything tinged with a strange quality of intent, a sexual quality that seemed to concern more than excite us. It was dark and I couldn't see much off the side of the highway.

“How long a drive is it?” I asked.

“Not long. You bored?”

“No,” I answered almost determinedly. “I'm glad to get away.”

“Good,” he said.

John reached over and pulled a flashlight from the glove compartment. He pushed a tape into a deck roughly incised in the dashboard. All music from the sixties, early seventies, the Supremes, the Stones, the Doors—co-opted soundtrack music for Vietnam films.

Someday, we'll be together
…

The music had a rich melancholy. I imagined John seeking comfort through heroin and Vietnamese boys on rivers burning like a Coppola set. Static, napalm…the hiss of
I love yous
taught in the absence of maps, weapons, reason. I imagined him confronting the potentialities of his death, forced to pantomime his fear for a boy whose name he can't pronounce, whose feelings he can't determine.

“This music makes me sad,” I tell him, “even when it's hopeful.”

“Why?” he asks.

“It makes me think of Vietnam, even though I was just a kid during that time. But somehow, it's the war I'm most intrigued by. Maybe because it was televised—but televised without censoring the ugliness.”

“I don't think about that stuff,” he said. “I couldn't live if I did.”

The Stones' “Gimme Shelter” swarmed the cab, impossible to remove from the green of jungles and camouflage.

“You remind me of my last lover—not in a morbid way—just the opposite. You seem very determined about life.”

I didn't know what to say, it was such an odd attribute—the rare and complicated quality of the survivor in me, something mistaken for cold efficiency, untroubled acceptance.

I laughed. “What makes you think that?”

“I don't know. Your getting off heroin, holding a job. I don't take that for granted. You want to live.” He's unnecessarily convincing.

He pulled the truck off the side of the road and we rattled across a path of dirt and stones.

“This is Crystal Springs,” he said. “People cruise up there sometimes.” He pointed at a darker patch. “That's where I met Antonio.”

He reached beneath the seat and pulled out an old pillowcase. “I only did this once,” he explained. “After he died, I started doing a lot of cocaine, and I was sort of at the end of my wire, and I came out here.” He reached into the bag. “I just had, you know, some of his underwear with me, and some pictures of him.” He pulled out old T-shirts, jock straps. The smell was so pungent and moldering I sickened. I cranked the window open. I watched him in silence, handling the items, shining the flashlight into the pillowcase, illuminating it from inside like an old skin. I wondered if he was going to perform some masturbatory magic with them. I thought of Tom's clothes.

“I wouldn't keep them,” I said.

He looked startled. “No,” he said, still looking at them. “It's probably not right.” He put them back in the pillowcase, and stuffed them back beneath the seat.