What Belongs to You (13 page)

I made it to school in time for my class, disappointing the students who were gathered at the door, surprised to find it locked and excited at the prospect of a broken routine. There were only a few minutes before the second bell, no time for me to gather my thoughts, but they were good kids, talkative, amiable, eager for debate, and though I kept thinking about those vials even now giving up their secrets, eventually I lost myself in the conversation’s back and forth, grateful that it was a day on which the machinery basically worked. I taught four periods, two before and two after lunch, and I was sorry to see the last of the students go, for once I would happily have taken any offer to prolong our talk. The same women were at the counter when I returned to the clinic, and the one I had spoken to before picked up the phone when she saw me, talking with someone quickly as I approached. You speak some Bulgarian, yes, she asked, settling the phone back in its cradle, and then she told me that my results weren’t quite ready, inviting me to sit and wait, it won’t be long, she said. The waiting area was empty now, and in general the clinic was quieter, free of the morning’s bustle. I sat in one of the plastic chairs beside a long, low table covered with pamphlets, informational brochures on eye care and diabetes, advertisements for medications, for a particular brand of lubricant, the glossy paper swirled haphazardly about. I glanced at one brochure but could make little of it, even the cover was full of words I didn’t know, though when I opened it the images were familiar from other waiting rooms I had sat in, the stock visual language of medical admonishment and reassurance. For all that I avoided such offices these images, with their warnings about precaution and prevention, had long been part of my most private sense of myself. I grew up at the height of the AIDS panic, when desire and disease seemed essentially bound together, the relationship between them not something that could be managed but absolute and unchangeable, a consequence and its cause. Disease was the only story anyone ever told about men like me where I was from, and it flattened my life to a morality tale, in which I could be either chaste or condemned. Maybe that’s why, when I finally did have sex, it wasn’t so much pleasure I sought as the exhilaration of setting aside restraint, of pretending not to be afraid, a thrill of release so intense it was almost suicidal. As I sat flipping through brochures, waiting for someone to collect and usher me elsewhere, I remembered the first time I was tested, in my last year of high school, at a free clinic in Michigan. I had left my hometown two years before, and in that time news had reached me of friends falling ill. I knew I must have been exposed to it, I had been extravagantly reckless; and as I waited for the nurse to call my name, two weeks after the test, I was sure of the news she would bring. My best friend was beside me, and I held his hand as the woman read me the results and I felt not relief, exactly, but disappointment, or something so bewilderingly mixed I still have no good name for it. Maybe it was just that I wanted the world to have a meaning, and that the meaning I wanted it to have was chastisement.

For the first time since I had arrived, the clinic door opened, and the nurse I had spoken with that morning came in. She was moving slowly, holding between two fingers of one hand a thin plastic cup of coffee, the bottom sagging, distended with heat. Hello, she said in her strange accent, are you here for your results, and when I told her that I had been waiting for some time, that I was beginning to feel forgotten, her face darkened in sympathy. Well, she said, let’s see what we can do, and she turned and began speaking quickly to the receptionist. She referred to me as
gospodinut
, the gentleman, which surprised me; older people here usually call me
momcheto
, the boy, a friendly term I like more. Come with me, she said, turning, and I followed her to the room she had taken me to before, a strange weightlessness in my abdomen. I’ll be just a moment, she said, wait here, and then she knocked sharply on the laboratory door and opened it without waiting for an answer. She left the door ajar, and I could hear something of the conversation she had, or at least her voice, which was louder than the other and tinged with something like rebuke. I heard a chair groan as someone rose from it, and then a quieter, extended exchange I could make little of, though I knew it must mean they had something to discuss, and I realized, with a sharp clenching in the pit of my stomach, that I was surprised, that for all my anxiety I hadn’t really believed I had it, and I thought of R., of what I would have to tell him and of how he would respond.

The voices drew closer and I heard the technician say Do we just put it in his hand, and the other woman, my guide, saying Yes, of course, they are his results. She stepped into the hallway alone, holding the page and smiling, and perhaps it was only in my imagination that her smile seemed changed. Tell me, she said, have you ever had a positive result on any of these tests before, and I said no, I hadn’t, I had always been negative. Well, she said, there may be a problem, and she held up the sheet in her hand for me to see. Here, she said, pointing to a line where there was a mark handwritten in ink, a plus sign or cross, surrounded by Cyrillic letters and other symbols she didn’t give me a chance to decipher. You have tested positive for syphilis, she said. Since it was the news I had prepared myself for I didn’t react, which seemed to surprise or disappoint her, as if she had been cheated of an intended effect. It’s a very serious infection, she said, almost sternly, as though I were a child she had to school. Yes, I said meekly, of course, and she went on, mollified, But this is only a first test, you must have another to confirm it. Can we do that now, I asked, sick at the thought of more waiting, but she said Oh no, as if surprised by the question, you have to go to another clinic for that, we can’t do it here. But here, she said, pulling out a smaller piece of paper that she had been holding behind the report of my results, I’ve written it down for you, where you need to go.
THE XXIX POLYCLINIC
, she had written, the numbers in block Roman numerals, and beneath it
GOTSE DELCHEV
, the name of a district where I had never been. As I took this paper, I imagined having to find my way to an unfamiliar part of the city, to a public clinic where no one would speak English, and I thought of all I had heard about such places, the long lines and poor facilities, the incompetence or disregard of doctors. She must have seen how I felt, and as if taking pity, she said One of the buses that stops outside will take you there, I think, I’m sorry I don’t know which one. She started walking toward the reception area again, having done everything she could, and I followed obediently behind her. That was why I hated clinics and examinations, I thought, the indignity they inflict, the way they let doctors and nurses deliver a sentence and then wash their hands of it, so that however they change one’s life they remain unchanged themselves. You will have to go on Monday, she said, they will be closing soon for the weekend. Tell me, I said, as we neared the glass doors of the entrance, once I have the results from the second test, can I get the treatment here? I had spoken this in what must have been a hopeful tone, or a tone of entreaty, and it seemed to me she replied with pleasure as she opened the door for me and said again Oh no, it’s best that they take care of everything from there. I stepped outside, and then half turned back to raise my hand in goodbye. But it was a wasted gesture; she had already moved on to other tasks, letting the door swing shut behind her.

On Sunday night Mitko appeared again. He buzzed up from the street this time, confident I would answer; or maybe he had gotten tired of waiting for someone to open the door. It was late, I was already in bed with a book in my hand. It had been a long, anxious weekend, and I had hardly needed to exaggerate when I wrote to my department chair that I was too ill to come in, freeing the next day for the clinic. I was caught up again in the poetry of the illness, as it were, that aura or miasma of shame; I felt unclean, I wanted to hide myself away, feeling, for all I had learned of the disease, that even touching someone might contaminate them. I washed my hands compulsively, and made obsessive use of the little bottles of antiseptic gel that most teachers keep close by. I stayed at home as much as I could, and when I had to go out I shied away from any kind of contact, careful not to bump or nudge into people on the street or in the grocery store, which is difficult to avoid here, where there’s such a different idea of personal space. I had been sick before, of course, but this felt like more than sickness, like a physical confirmation of shame.

I told R. everything on Friday night. I called him on Skype as soon as I saw him online; I had been waiting for a while, he had been out with friends and got home later than planned. He was still in his street clothes when his image filled my screen, his hair mussed from the hat he had just pulled off. He was already in the middle of a sentence when his voice came through, apologizing for being so late, and it took him a moment to notice that something was wrong. What is it, he said, what happened? I couldn’t bring myself to speak for a minute and then I spoke like a child, I said I have to tell you something, I’m sorry, please don’t get mad. What is it, he said again, a little frightened now, just tell me. And I did, watching his face as I told him about Mitko’s visit and the clinic and what they had said. I didn’t know how he would respond; I thought he would be angry, I was even afraid he might end everything between us. But he only took a somewhat deeper breath and said All right, I’ll get tested, it’s not a big deal, right, the worst case is a shot. Calm down, he said, and I was flooded with gratitude and relief. I was surprised he took it so calmly, more calmly than I had; I was usually the more dependable one, older and more settled, and after we logged off Skype I wondered if his calm would last, or whether he was just shocked at what I had told him, experiencing a kind of blankness before worry set in. And I was right, the next morning I woke to find my in-box full of e-mails he had sent through the night, each more anxious than the last. He had just graduated university and was still without a job, entirely dependent on his parents; he would have to ask them for money, he wrote, which would mean telling them the whole story. He had only recently told them about me, in the process coming out to them; how could he tell them he might have syphilis, he asked me, what would they think. He was frantic by the last e-mail he sent, and I felt horrible for what I had done. We spoke again when he woke, and I told him that I would wire him money, of course I would pay for everything, I said, after all it was all my fault. Though I braced myself for his anxiety to turn to resentment and then to blame, it never did. By Sunday night he had regained his resolve: we would go to our respective clinics in the morning, we agreed, we would be treated, it would all be over soon.

I had put the computer away and settled into bed to read when the buzzer rang. I knew who it was, of course, but I still stepped out onto the balcony to look. Mitko stood below, bareheaded against the cold, peering up to catch sight of me. He smiled when he saw me, and I held my hand out to him in a staying motion, as if patting something down, before going back in to quickly put on the clothes I had left crumpled on the floor. We had agreed, R. and I, that when Mitko returned I shouldn’t let him into my apartment, that we should speak outside or go somewhere else; I don’t like the idea of him there, R. said, and really he thought I should cut him off entirely. Why would you see him again, he had asked me several times over the last days, you don’t owe him anything, you’ve already helped him, and if you keep helping him there will be no end to it, he’ll take and keep on taking. You know he doesn’t care about you, R. said in one of our conversations, you were never friends or anything else. I did know this, and so I found it difficult to explain the obligation I felt, the sense that I couldn’t, whatever else might happen, simply cut Mitko adrift, though I had tried to do that before, and maybe I would have to do it again. You want to be the big American, R. said in a final charge, you think you can fix things, you want to save him. And maybe that was part of it; certainly there was a tenderness in me that Mitko struck as no one else did, and I hated that, for all his sometimes brutality, he was finally so helpless in a world that took little heed of him. I did want to help him, but I no longer believed, if I ever had, that Mitko could be drawn in any permanent way out of what had become his life. I knew I couldn’t save him, but how could I explain to R., especially to him, the feeling of inevitability I had whenever Mitko appeared, as though we were in a story that had already been written.

He was waiting patiently when I stepped outside into the cold, standing beside the door and drawing on a cigarette that he left in his mouth as he held his hand out in greeting.
K’vo ima
, he asked, glancing up at the dark apartment, what’s wrong? A friend is staying with me, I said, the lie R. had told me to use, and Mitko nodded,
Yasno
, I get it. Your friend from Portugal, he said, the obvious assumption, though I was taken aback to hear any mention from him of R., and I quickly shook my head, as if dismissing the thought of him from the air. No, I said, just a friend, and then, before he could ask anything else, Are you hungry, should we go somewhere to eat? We began walking slowly together over the ice, which was thick and many-layered on the sidewalk. Mitko was wearing the same clothes I had last seen him in, the same thin jacket, but he seemed unbothered by the cold, and in general he looked better: he had showered and shaved, his clothes were clean, and looking down, I saw that the canvas sneakers had been replaced by short leather boots, well-worn but sturdy. A friend gave them, Mitko said when I asked, shrugging his shoulders, they’re not so nice but they do the job, they’re better than the others. We turned to the right just past my building, down a side street that was less traveled and so especially treacherous now, and despite my boots I slipped several times, once nearly falling. Careful, Mitko said, grabbing me and holding me steady, surer-footed than I, and once I had regained my balance he squeezed me hard around the shoulders, leaving his arm there as we continued picking our way to the main boulevard. There was a McDonald’s on this street open twenty-four hours; it was always well lit and there were always people there, as R. had reminded me; it would be a good place if I had to meet with Mitko, he said, a safe place.