by John Boyne
“She doesn’t respect what we have here,” I told him. “What the three of us have.”
“Of course she does,” said Ignac. “She knows how much you’ve both done for me. And she respects it.”
“She thinks there’s something untoward about how we took you in.”
“No, she doesn’t.”
“She practically said as much to me! How much does she know anyway?” I asked. “About your history, I mean.”
He shrugged. “She knows everything,” he told me.
“Not everything?” I said, leaning closer to him and feeling my heart skip a beat.
“No, of course not,” he said, shaking his head. “Not about…that.” The things that had happened toward the end of our stay in Amsterdam were never discussed between any of us. They were part of our past, something that perhaps we all thought about privately from time to time but never discussed aloud.
“But she knows about me,” he said. “What I was. The things I did. I’m not ashamed of any of it.”
“And nor should you be. But you should be careful who you talk to about those times. When people know too much about your life, they can use it against you.”
“I don’t like to keep secrets,” he said.
“It’s not about keeping secrets,” I insisted. “It’s about holding some of yourself back. It’s about privacy.”
“But what’s the point? If I’m going to be close to someone, Cyril, then they can ask about my life and those days are part of my life. If they’re bothered by it, then they can move on, I don’t care. But I will never lie about who I am or what I’ve done.”
He wasn’t trying to be cruel, I knew that. He knew very little about my own past and the lies that I had told over the years of my youth, not to mention the damage that I had inflicted on so many people. And I wanted it to stay that way.
“If you really want to go to Dublin,” I said. “If you want to see Trinity and find out whether it would be a good fit, then perhaps I could take you there.” The idea slightly terrified me, but I said it nonetheless. “The three of us could go together.”
“You, me and Emily?”
“No, you, me and Bastiaan.”
“Well, maybe,” he said, looking away. “I don’t know. At the moment, it’s just an idea, that’s all. It might come to nothing. I might end up staying on in the States. I don’t have to make any decisions for a while yet.”
“All right,” I said, not wanting to push him. “But just make the decision yourself, OK? Without anyone pressuring you.”
“And will you try to get on better with Emily in the meantime?” he asked.
“I can try,” I said doubtfully. “But she has to stop calling me Mr. Avery. It’s driving me fucking crazy.”
Patient 630
The patient who I enjoyed spending time with the most was a lady in her eighties named Eleanor DeWitt who had spent most of her life flitting between the island of Manhattan and the parlors of political salons in Washington, D.C., while summering in Monte Carlo or on the Amalfi Coast. A lifelong hemophiliac, she found herself infected with the disease after a careless transfusion delivered corrupted blood into her body. She had taken her misfortune steadfastly, however, never complaining, and claiming that if it hadn’t been AIDS that had taken her down, it would have been cancer or a stroke or a brain tumor, which might have been true, of course, but I’m not sure that many people would have shared her stoicism. When she was a girl, her father had run unsuccessfully for governor of New York—twice—and in between political campaigns he’d made a fortune in construction. She’d been a debutante in the 1920s and had mixed, she told me, with a fast and witty crowd: writers, artists, dancers, painters and actors.
“Of course, most of them were fairies, just like you, darling,” she told me one day while I sat feeding grapes to her, as if she was Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra and I was her Richard Burton. She was lying in her hospital bed, her skin unnaturally thin, almost transparent, the contaminated blood visible as it coursed through her veins. She wore an enormous blonde wig to hide the sores and wounds that lay beneath, many of which were replicated around her body. “I should know,” she added. “I married three of them.”
I started laughing, even though I’d been there myself. She was one of those flamboyant old doyennes one didn’t expect to meet outside of a movie theater and the idea of her walking down an aisle in a wedding dress while a terrified homosexual husband waited for her—three times—was priceless.
“The first time,” she told me, throwing her head back against the pillows, “why, I was just a girl. Seventeen years old. But such a beautiful girl, Cyril! If you saw pictures of me then, I promise you’d fall over in a faint. People said I was the most beautiful girl in New York. My father, who was in concrete, wanted an alliance with the O’Malley family—the steel O’Malleys, that is, not the textile O’Malleys—and so he basically sold me like a piece of chattel to a friend of his who had an idiot son going begging. Lance O’Malley III was his name. Seventeen years old, just like me. Irish blood in him, just like you. The poor child could barely read and had feathers in his head where his brain should have been. But he was a looker, I’ll give him that. All the girls were crazy for him as long as he didn’t open his mouth. Most of his conversation revolved around whether there might be aliens living in outer space. They don’t need to live there, I told him. There’s enough of them already here on earth, but he was too dim to understand what I meant. On the wedding night, after the reception, I took him to bed and I don’t mind admitting I was quite looking forward to what was going to happen next, but the poor boy started to cry when I took my panties off. I didn’t know what I’d done wrong and so I started crying too. And so there we sat, the pair of us, all night long, weeping into our pillows. The next morning, I waited until he was fast asleep and I carefully pulled his drawers down and climbed on top of him, but he woke up and got such a fright that he punched me in the face and I fell off the bed. Of course, Lance was distraught—he hadn’t a violent bone in his body—and when we came down to breakfast both our families tried to ignore the fact that I had a black eye. They must have thought we’d been up to wild games in the night! No such luck. Anyway, Lance and I stayed married for a year and he never touched me once during all that time and then one day I confided in my father that the marriage had never been consummated because, the truth is, I was close to killing myself with anxiety and that was the end of that. The whole thing was annulled and I never saw Lance O’Malley III again. The last I heard, he’d become a merchant sailor. That may or may not be true, however, so don’t spread it around.”
“But he didn’t put you off marriage?” I asked.
“Well of course not! That’s what people did in those days. If one husband didn’t work out, then you took another. It didn’t matter whose. You just kept going till you found a match. I’m sure there’s a card game that works along those lines if I could only remember what it’s called, but this damn disease is playing fast and loose with my memory. Now, my second marriage was by far my happiest. Henry liked boys as well as girls and he told me all about this before we went down the aisle and so we made an agreement that he could have a little fun on the side if I could too. We even shared a young man from time to time. Oh, don’t look so shocked, Cyril. It was the 1930s, people were a lot more evolved then than they are today. Henry and I might have rubbed along pretty well together forever, but the problem was that he was quite mad and threw himself off the Chrysler Building on his thirtieth birthday because he thought the best was all behind him. His hair had started to thin, poor dear, and he couldn’t stand the idea of what other indignities middle age might throw at him. Such drama! I could have lived without it. Although when I look in the mirror now, I wonder whether he might have had the right idea.”
“And the third time?” I asked.
She turned her head slowly to look out the window and her body suddenly began to pulsate with a spasm of pain. When she looked back at me, he
r expression had darkened and I could see that she wasn’t entirely sure who I was.
“Eleanor,” I said. “Are you all right?”
“Who are you?” she asked.
“It’s me, Cyril,” I said.
“I don’t know you,” she replied, waving me away. “Where’s George?”
“There’s no George here,” I told her.
“Get George!” she screamed, and then began to cause such a commotion that one of the nurses had to come in to settle her. Finally, she calmed down and I was considering whether I should leave for the day but she turned back to me with a cheerful smile as if nothing untoward had happened.
“The third time was no good either,” she continued. “It lasted only a few months. I married a famous Hollywood actor in secret on a beach in Mustique. I was rather besotted with him, to be honest, but I think that was because I was so accustomed to seeing him up there on the silver screen. He was pretty good in the sack, but he got bored with me after a few days and went back to his boys. The studio wanted to keep me on salary, but I had too much self-respect for that and we ended up getting divorced too. It never even came out that we’d been married.”
“Who was it?” I asked. “Someone famous?”
“Someone very famous,” she said, beckoning me forward. “Come here and I’ll whisper his name to you.”
I leaned forward, but perhaps I moved too slow for she quickly pushed me away.
“Oh, you’re just like everyone else, aren’t you?” she snapped. “You say you’ve come to help but you’re just as frightened of me as the rest of them. What a shame! Oh, you’ve let me down terribly!”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to—”
I leaned forward again but she lifted her scarred hands and held them in front of her face. “Just go,” she said. “Just go. Just go. Leave me to suffer alone.”
I stood up to leave, certain that when I returned a few days later she would have forgotten the incident entirely, and made my way back toward the reception area, where Shaniqua eyed me suspiciously and moved her purse into the top drawer, locking it carefully. I phoned up to Bastiaan’s office to see whether he was able to leave early for the day and he told me that he’d be another hour yet, but could I wait for him?
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll see you at reception.”
Hanging up, I did my best to make small talk with Shaniqua, but she was having none of it.
“Isn’t there anything useful you can do?” she asked. “Other than sitting around here bothering me?”
“I’m waiting for Dr. Van den Bergh,” I said. “I have time to kill. Tell me about yourself, Shaniqua. Where are you from?”
“What the hell do you care where I’m from?”
“I’m just making conversation, that’s all. Why do you always wear yellow?”
“Does it offend you in some way?”
“No, not at all. As a matter of fact, I happen to be wearing yellow boxer shorts today.”
“I didn’t care to know that.”
“Shaniqua,” I said, sounding out the syllables on my tongue. “It’s an unusual name.”
“Says Cyril.”
“Point taken. Is there anything around here to eat?”
She spun around in the chair and gave me her death-stare. “Ever been thrown out of a hospital by security?” she asked.
“No.”
“Wanna keep it that way?”
“Yes.”
“Then go back to Patient 630. I’m sure she’d appreciate some more of your company. I know I find it totally stimulating.”
I shook my head. “She’s a little antsy today,” I said. “I think it’s best if I steer clear. Maybe I’ll go visit Philip Danley. He’s a nice kid.”
“We don’t use names here,” she said. “You should know that by now.”
“But he told me his name,” I said. “He said I could call him by it.”
“I don’t care. Anyone could be passing by. Reporters are always looking for families to embarrass by—”
“Fine,” I said, standing up. “I’ll go see Patient 563.”
“No, you won’t,” she said. “He died on Tuesday.”
I sat down again, astonished by how she’d broken the news to me. I’d lost patients before, of course, but I’d visited Philip many times and liked him. I understood that she had to keep a distance from the emotion of her job or be unable to survive it but there was such a thing as compassion.
“Was anyone there?” I asked, trying to keep the anger out of my tone. “When he passed away, I mean?”
“I was there.”
“Any of his family?”
She shook her head. “No. And they wouldn’t take the body either. It went to the city crematorium. Well, to the AIDS section. You know they don’t even want the dead bodies of AIDS victims to mix with the dead bodies of other people now?”
“For fuck’s sake,” I said. “That’s ridiculous. What the hell can they do to the dead? And how could the boy’s family stay away when he needed them the most?”
“You think that’s the first time that’s happened?”
“No, I guess not, but it’s just so fucking heartless.”
We said nothing for a few minutes and then she reached for a file from her desk and flicked through it. “You want to go see someone else or not?”
“Sure,” I said. “I might as well.”
“Patient 741,” she said. “Room 703.”
A bell rang in my head. Patient 741. The patient that Bastiaan had told us about that night in the restaurant on 23rd Street. Heterosexual, angry and Irish. Not necessarily a combination I wanted to deal with at that moment.
“Isn’t there someone else I could visit?” I asked. “I’ve heard he’s quite aggressive.”
“No,” she said. “You don’t get to pick and choose. Patient 741, Room 703. Take it or leave it. What the hell’s the matter with you, Cyril? The man’s dying. Show a little compassion.”
I rolled my eyes and gave in, leaving the office to make my way slowly down the corridor. For a moment, I wondered whether I could skip out of this visit entirely and just go down to the cafeteria and wait for Bastiaan there but Shaniqua knew everything that took place on the seventh floor and the chances were she’d never let me back in again if I disappointed her.
I paused outside Room 703 for a few moments, taking a deep breath like I always did when I met a new patient for the first time. I never knew how badly the disease might have affected him or her; they could look frail but unscarred or their appearance could be devastating. And I never wanted my reaction to be too cruelly revealed in my expression. I opened the door slowly and peered inside. The curtains were closed and as evening was drawing in the room was quite dark but I could just about make out the man lying in the bed and hear his heavy and labored breathing.
“Hello?” I said quietly. “Are you awake?”
“Yes,” he murmured after a short pause. “Come in.”
I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. “I don’t mean to disturb you,” I said. “I’m one of the hospital volunteers. I understand you’ve been on your own and wondered whether you might like a visitor?”
He said nothing for a few moments and then, in an anxious tone, said, “You’re Irish?”
“A long time ago I was,” I said. “I haven’t been back in years, though. You’re Irish too, I’m told?”
“Your voice…” he said as he tried to lift his head a little in the bed, but the effort proved too much for him and he collapsed back with a groan.
“Don’t disturb yourself,” I told him. “Can I open the curtains, though, to let in a little light? Would you mind?”
“Your voice,” he repeated, and I wondered whether the disease had eaten into his brain too much and I would get little sense out of him. Still, I had resolved to sit and talk with him and that is what I would do. He neither offered permission nor withheld it regarding the curtains, so I stepped over to the window and pulled th
em apart, glancing down onto the New York streets below. The yellow cabs were driving up and down honking their horns and the view between the skyscrapers held me for a minute. I had never fallen in love with this city—even after almost seven years my head was still in Amsterdam and my heart was still in Dublin—but there were moments, like this one, when I understood why others did.
Turning back, I looked toward the patient and our eyes met in a moment of recognition that sent a shiver through my body so deeply that I was forced to reach a hand out to the windowsill to steady myself. He was no older than me but almost completely bald, a few wisps of hair clinging pathetically to the top of his head. His cheeks were sunken, as were his eyes, and a dark oval of purple-red sent a hideous bruise along his chin and down his neckline. A line came into my mind, something that Hannah Arendt had once said about the poet Auden: that life had manifested the heart’s invisible furies on his face.
He looked a hundred years old.
He looked like a man who had died several months earlier.
He looked like a soul in pure torment.
But still I knew him. All the changes that the disease had made to his once-beautiful face and body and still I would have known him anywhere.
“Julian,” I said.
Who’s Liam?
I left a message with Shaniqua, asking her to let Bastiaan know that I’d see him at home later, and made a quick escape from the hospital without even stopping to take my coat, running westward in a daze and somehow ending up seated on a bench near Central Park Lake. It was cold and I could tell that people were staring at me, thinking I was crazy to be dressed for summer on such a cold day, but I couldn’t go back yet. There had only been time for me to utter his name in astonishment, and for him to whisper mine in reply, before I found myself running from the room and charging along the corridor, certain that if I didn’t get outside into the fresh air quickly I would pass out. It had been fourteen years since he realized that our friendship was based on a simple deceit on my part, and this was to be the cruel circumstances of our reunion. In New York City. In a hospital room. Where my oldest friend was dying of AIDS.