by Carole Maso
Imagine this, Gary, I say: we pack a picnic lunch, champagne and fruit, a little cheese, some good bread, and we leave early. We drive at dawn, right into the sun. You have one arm out the car window and it feels so good. We’ve both got our Ray-Bans on, we’ve brought lots of suntan lotion, towels, magazines and books. And now feel the sun, how it warms us inside and out, and the water is so sparkly clear and blue. We are being caressed by waves and light.
“Oh, Carole, it feels so wonderful.”
I separate from him only long enough to think, Whoever is responsible for this is not forgiven. Whoever looked on this and allowed it to happen is not forgiven. How could this be allowed to happen? The age-old complaint with God still holds.
But you are still on the beach or in Paris or in front of the Giottos in Italy. Then you are back again, saying you think 1986 will be the breakthrough year, saying you’ve got to believe that.
Gary, I say, “Picture eggs that grow impenetrable, picture white horses galloping furiously, white tigers, white sharks that will devour this thing.”
“I see a horse with wings,” you whisper. “I see a horse made out of stars.”
I thought if I sat there day after day I could save your life. I thought I could turn my body into a pillar of light.
Gary, remember the dawn at Cummington when we went and watched hot-air balloons being blown up in that huge field. Bright. Striped. Picture this: those beautiful balloons inflating and rising into a pink sky. Think of being that light.
They said the AIDS was moving through your brain. I kept thinking it would be reversible, the damage to your brain. “Is it reversible?” I asked the doctor. “Is it reversible?” She is cautious. “I have never known a case to be reversible.”
You lost vision in one eye. “When I get out of here,” you said, “I’ve got to get this dog eye fixed.”
You’ve got a spiral taped to your chest that feeds medicine directly into your heart. You’re attached to a machine called an IMED. They taught you how to use it. They said you’d have to be on it every four days of the week for the rest of your life, but you forgot near the end how to do it, it was so complicated.
You were still hopeful then, like a little boy. But this time it would turn out, Gary, that we were small, so very small, and we were fighting something monstrous. You were always brave. You were always brave in the dark, in the hospital, at ten or eleven at night, well past visiting hours, everything quiet, only white shoes against a polished floor—you were so brave.
I am just trying to get some of this down.
When I was away from you, I had become only a person who misses, only the person who is afraid. Nothing else. No one else. When I turn the last corner, I brace myself for whatever you will be like that day. I can’t help. I talk to myself in half-sentences, sometimes only in sounds, in groans. How is—but before I complete the thought you are in front of me. You’re the same or you’re worse or you’re a little better. When you’re a little better my heart soars. Then it looks to me like you’re having trouble breathing; I think your chest heaves. I get the nurse. No, she says, no. I’m so afraid. I sweat. I’m drenched. I’ve never seen someone so young take so long to die. There is so much suffering in your one skinny body. I don’t know what makes your heart continue to beat. You hallucinate yourself free. I have never seen someone suffer the way you are suffering. I am no one but the person who goes to see you. And despite my visits, you are clearly worsening.
I am here to keep you alive, and I am failing so magnificently.
And God is a laughable thing, a child’s dream.
They promised me they’d give you morphine at the end, if you needed it. I kept checking. I kept asking if you were in pain. You kept saying no. You didn’t ever need the morphine. You started seeing things on your own. “Isn’t it fantastic the way they keep changing the paintings in here?” you asked me. “It’s really a great museum.”
You had been worried. For months and months before you even saw a doctor, you drew hospital beds, a hand reaching up through broken ice, a jet that descends. For months you drew an angel in a hospital bed.
And when the night sweats came at three in the morning and you knew what they meant, you closed your eyes and instead of saying I’m dying, you imagined being somewhere far off in a different place, under lights, a throbbing dance floor, and the way you were sweating and the way you shook when a stranger touched you on the shoulder. That freedom, that pleasure was something we could imagine dying for, though we never thought we’d actually have to.
I remember phone conversations from years ago. You’ll love this story, Carole, you’d say, or, This one is right up your alley.
Let me tell you about this beautiful farm boy, Gary, I’d say. I didn’t think blonds were your type, you’d respond. Or, When you’re done, send him my way. We didn’t think living could ever be this dangerous. Such intricate, marvelous stories. A bouncer from the bar whispering over the phone line at 5 a.m., I must see you now. Gary, a man takes me out into snow . . .
That handful of days, when you still had the whole world and not just the world of St. Vincent’s. Those four white walls, those diamonded pajamas with the V for Vincent over the heart. They were made of cotton. They tied in the back. And finally the ties that kept you latched to the chair because every time you’d try to get up you’d fall over from being so weak. “Untie me,” you’d whisper.
I am trying to get this down, Gary.
In your sleep, tied to the bed, you’d kick your legs madly. There is a home movie of me as an infant doing exactly the same thing. But my legs were pink and chubby. Yours are the skinniest legs I have ever seen. You were ninety pounds.
I am trying to get this down.
Your arm slung around my shoulder as I carried you and your IMED around the fourteenth floor. We’d stop at the large window that looked out high over the city. There’s Seventh Avenue and Greenwich. There’s the coffee shop, I said, where I sometimes wait for visiting hours to begin. And then a few weeks later when we stood at that large gray window, you said, I know exactly what’s out there but I can’t see it anymore. You were going blind. When the doctor came in I’d sit out in the hall and look out the window and watch in miniature a woman on a rooftop walking a dog. Watch an arm out a window pull in wash from the line, a world where normal things were still going on, same as always, a world beckoning us to enter. But I knew I was too large and too far off, hovering above the dark city, and the neurologist about to come out with his bad news.
The virus had crossed the blood-brain barrier. I kept asking what would happen. I asked the lovely nurses who had grown to love you too. How beautiful they were—the twenty-year-old nurses who did whatever they could—unflagging, attentive, diligent. “How are you feeling. Hon?” they asked you. “Oh, sweetheart, what’s the matter?” I think of my own mother, and I love her so much in this instant, once a twenty-year-old woman like these women, in a white uniform, thinking she could save anyone.
The future: I could imagine it only too well. The nurses’ faces are grave as you struggle for breath. It’s what they’ve warned me about. When the disease enters the brain stem your breathing will shut down. That’s one thing that might happen. And many people, they told me, die from the drugs, from the medication.
I am trying to get this down for good.
I hugged your legs. They were so skinny. “Aren’t these the bees’ knees?” you smiled.
I fed you. I didn’t know how big to cut the pieces. So I cut them tiny, tiny. “Well,” you laughed, “this certainly gives bite-size a whole new meaning.”
In my phone book next to your name, the jottings of years, as we talked and talked . . . M, T, W nights and TH lunch, reviews in Artforum, May GQ, NY Magazine. ARC. Chest X ray Fri. Cryptococcus. Call tomorrow about blood. Fri 11, Memorial Service, Society for Ethical Culture, 2 West 64th Street, CPW. A life in shorthand. These abbreviations. You were fine, you were well, and then you were not. Suddenly you were dying.
> A cry in the night. Gary, half the time I don’t know where I am. Half the time I jump up wondering if it’s time to go visit you yet. I think about what I can bring to you. I could talk nonstop into your one good ear. “Remind me,” you said, “to get my ear fixed too.”
I know, Gary, to write it down is always to get it wrong. But here, wanting you back, it’s the closest I can get to heaven—where I like to picture you.
But is it heaven you’ve gone to?
“Do you believe in God?” I asked you. “I don’t know,” you said. “Do you?” “Yes, and I’m praying for you.” “That’s good,” you said. “Thank you.”
I’ve always prayed to Mary, but I only ask her for help when I absolutely need it. To help me out of a debilitating depression. To save you. But now I’ve got to say I don’t know if I believe in God anymore or his skinny son and all that rising up. I am short of faith when I need it most.
We hold a dish under your chin while you spit up pills.
We’re going to need a miracle, my friend.
From your hospital bed you built churches. You measured the lumber in your head. You transported everything you needed from site to site. You described the altars to me. Talked to me about Le Corbusier. It was all so real. I was with you. “I don’t know if I can get them all done in time, Carole.” “Let me help you,” I said.
I think of the light that flared starlike in you for a fraction of a second in the history of the planet.
Gary, I am trying to talk to you.
You were put in an oven and cremated. I don’t know where your ashes went.
What keeps going through my head are bits from the Bible. Faces of Sunday school teachers. Miracles. Things I think I used to believe.
You thought a lot about Rilke, my cat. “What did he look like when he was dead?” you asked.
“He looked like he was sleeping,” I said.
You spoke a lot about children. In your last months you spoke of babies, dreams of babies, of adopting a small black boy and girl. “I ask you, Carole, what am I going to do with two small black children?”
My chest began to hurt. I imagined the lining of my heart to be inflamed.
“Maybe you could have the bed next to mine,” you said. “My brother is moving in too.” Gary, I wanted to say, I’ve already moved in. I live in a city named St. Vincent’s with you. I know the streets, the neighbors, the merchants, I know what’s for dinner.
“A city named St. Vincent’s,” you said. “They certainly are megalomaniacs, aren’t they?”
Like you, I start confusing your stays in the hospital. I can’t remember one from the next. In the beginning we talked a lot about art. You were in the Signs Shows with Jenny Holzer. I gave you a report on David Salle at Castelli’s. One of the most beautiful flower arrangements I have ever seen arrived from Marcia Tucker at the New Museum. Your window there was so fantastic. You were still disappointed your bunny plates didn’t do better. You’ve got a show, you told me, for 1987. You said 1986 was going to be the breakthrough year. You said you had to believe that. You said you were just on the verge of something large in your work, you had begun working with computer images, you were excited about all your stuff at the lab. You told me all of this as we walked around the fourteenth floor, you dragging your bag of blood. These must have been from earlier stays. By the last time it was all churches and pyramids and children. Trips to the south of France and Florence and Greece and then finally nothing. You could barely speak. I’d call your answering machine just so I could hear you talk in your old voice. Stringing words together, the way you did on your message, seemed a miracle now to me. “This is Gary Falk. If you’d like to leave a message, wait for the beep tone and I’ll get back to you.” I could almost believe that you would. That’s what the message said. You always called it “the beep tone.” Your mother told me that you left a message saying good-bye to your own machine. “This is Gary and, well, I guess I won’t be needing you anymore, I guess I’m saying good-bye.”
“Je suis Gary Falk,” you said. You thought you were in France. “Gary,” I said, “today I’ve got the map of Paris around my neck.” I took off my scarf and showed it to you, “Just in case we need it, OK?”
“Great,” you said.
“May I talk with you?” the neurologist said to me. I am not sister or lover. “May I talk to you for a moment in private?”
“All right,” I said.
“Does he know who you are?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, “he does.”
“Does he know where he is?”
“Yes, he knows exactly where he is,” I said, lying, protecting you and me. “Yes,” I said, “he knows.”
“There’s no hope for your friend,” he said.
I came back to you. “Oh, hi, Lorraine, I haven’t seen you in ages! Did you see that doctor who was just here?” you asked me. “Yes,” I said. “Well, he knows nothing about anything.”
You’re right about that, Gary, you knew. You picked up on him immediately.
I sit next to you. I know about the blood-brain barrier. It was a term I never wanted to know. I know everything that will happen.
From your hospital bed you painted in your head. On a field of slate green. You told me what you were drawing, where the lines intersected. What it would look like in the end.
I thought my desire to keep you alive would keep you alive. I got confused.
You have become my child. I race to you when you cry. I arrange your blankets. I fix your pillow.
Your bones began to glow. Each day I could trace your bones more easily as you became more and more skeletal. It became impossible for me to look at old photographs of you. I couldn’t recognize you in them anymore. I put them away. After a while it became impossible to call your answering machine.
Just a month before, we had watched a beauty pageant. You in your loft and me in my apartment. We would call each other during the commercials. “I think it’s going to be Germany or Greece,” you said. “No, it’s going to be Miss Brazil.” “Oh, Carole, you’ve always loved those Latins,” you laughed.
We talked about movies. The last ones you saw, I think, were My Beautiful Laundrette and Mona Lisa. What else? There must have been others.
I heard what happens is that you’re put into a wooden casket and then the whole casket is put into the oven. “Please,” you’d say, “you’re making it sound like a recipe.”
In April you read my book Ghost Dance in galleys. You understood it like no one else. You told Helen not to tell me, but you found the book so intense that you thought it was making you sicker. You knew, and when you tried to remember certain parts and couldn’t anymore, I began to cry and then grow ferocious. “Don’t die,” I shouted selfishly. “What?” you said, nearly deaf. “Please, don’t die,” I yelled and the nurse ran in thinking I needed help.
By the time the book was bound you could no longer read. I was thrilled with how beautiful it looked. I carried the first copy of the hardcover to show you in the hospital, but you just went on with your dying.
You worry about your catheter. You’re afraid of wetting the bed.
I kept feeding you. “What am I eating?” you asked, as if it were a natural question. When I told you, you said, “No, to me it tastes like veal, very simply prepared, veal piccata, I think. And how elegant and understated this restaurant is. Have you been here before?” Sometimes you thought you were in a hotel. Sometimes you said, “I’m so tired of traveling.”
Your bones glowed. Each day I traced your bones more and more easily, the head so much bone, the flesh melting. It seemed as if the flesh were melting from your face.
You were never as angry as I was. You maintained your hope, not only for yourself but for those you loved. Even at the end, when your parents would call, with your voice you tried to reassure them. It was your life, Gary, but you didn’t have the energy for rage I had. Rage was a luxury of the well.
I am trying to talk to you.
Your ey
es are black tulips, something beautiful and strange, something so rare, so unlikely. So lovely. Your eyes float separate from your illness. You are incapable of giving up. It’s the part of you that is not anchored to the floor. The part of you that is really you. The part of you that lasts forever. The part of you that never burns.
You’re not ready to die at thirty-two. It’s a breakthrough year.
Room 1433. I pace. Pace. Pace. With the part of you that gets up. With the part of you that can’t be tied down. So bring in the cameras, the teachers, the priests. Bring in the man on the street. There are people everywhere who say it’s deserved, who say that it only goes to show. They say they are not surprised, are not sorry. They tell us we deserve it.
I’m afraid, Gary, that somehow you might think you deserve it. Once you said to Helen, “Oh, Mrs. So-and-so”—a friend of the family’s, I can’t remember the name—“do you know what I have?” She nodded. “Can you believe that this has happened to that nice boy Gary Falk?” you said, with bitterness.
It should be possible to do something with words.
Gary, it is not your fault.
I get up with the part of you no doctor can touch. The part that will live. More tests: spinal tap, CAT scan (it’s like going through a giant bagel, you say). The best of modern medicine.
Gary, I’d have gone to Mexico for the Ribavirin. I’d have done anything.
They dipped you in blue. They dipped your skinny, childish body into indigo dyes. I saw your small shrunken genitals. Your nearly transparent hands. Your eyes bulging in your bony head.
I am told that there are certain bones that burn slower than others. They can be fished from the ash and crumbled by hand. There are parts of the body that burn slower, the foot, for instance, the breast bone.
I am so afraid. Still.
“Nothing has been finished,” you said, bewildered, “or put away.”
That last morning you kept saying, “My father loves me, my mother loves me.” Then, “Tekka maki,” you said, “kappa maki, hirami,” filling your mouth like a child with pure sound, delighted.