Tiny Tango

by Judith Moffett

  TINY TANGO

  Judith Moffett

  Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, February, 1989

  Although Judith Moffett is the author of two books of poetry, a book of

  criticism, and a book of translations from Swedish, she made her first

  professional fiction sale in 1986. Since then, she has won the John

  W. Campbell Award as Best New Writer of 1988, and the Theodore Sturgeon

  Award for her story "Surviving," and her first novel Pennterra

  was released to high critical acclaim. She has since completed a second

  novel. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, she now lives with her husband in

  Rose Valley, Pennsylvania. She has a Ph.D. in American Civilization

  from the University of Pennsylvania, where she is presently adjunct

  associate professor of English, and teaches courses in science fiction

  and creative writing, in addition to directing a variety of independent

  study projects. She has also taught for four summers at the prestigious

  Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and was given a National Endowment for

  the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship Grant for her poetry -- which she

  then used to finance the writing of her first novel. "Surviving" was in

  our Fourth Annual Collection, and her story "The Hob" was in our Sixth

  Annual Collection.

  Here she offers us a disaster story of a very personal sort, in a

  powerful and deeply moving tale that may be one of the most controversial

  and talked-about stories of the year.

  Tiny Tango

  Judith Moffett

  I

  I've been encouraged (read: ordered) by my friend, a Hefn called Godfrey, to make this recording. I'm not sure why. It's to be the story of my life, and frankly, a lot of my life's been kind of grim. Godfrey tells me he values the story as an object lesson, but to whom and for what purpose he's not saying. It isn't news anymore that the Hefn don't think like we do.

  I made an important choice at twenty-two. Because of that choice I'm alive right now, but I'm still wondering: was it a wise choice, given that the next twenty-five years turned out to be a kind of living death? I hoped that if I did this recording, thought it all through in one piece, I'd be able to answer that question. I need to understand my life better than I do. I'm about to be put to sleep for a long time -- forever if things go badly -- and I need to know . . . well, what Godfrey thinks he knows. What it's meant. What it's all been for.

  I can't really say that this review has worked, because I still don't think I know. But who can tell? Maybe you listeners in the archive will see something in it I can't see. (Godfrey's betting that you will.)

  I recall a certain splendid June morning between the two accidents, mine and Peach Bottom's -- a bright, cool morning after a spell of sticky weather. I'd hobbled out to the patio in robe and slippers with my breakfast tray, and loitered over my homegrown whole-grain honey and raisin muffins and strawberry-soy milkshake, browsing through a new copy of Rodale's Organic Gardening magazine (featuring an article I'd written, on ways to discourage squirrels in the orchard and corn patch). Then, after a while, I'd taken my cane and gimped out in a leisurely way to inspect the crops. I'd broken an ankle bone that was taking its time about healing; to he forbidden my exercise routines was distressing, but also kind of a relief.

  Because the kitchen garden provided my entire supply of vegetables and fruit, my interest in it was like a gardening hobbyist's crossed with a frontier homesteader's. If a crop failed I knew I wouldn't, or needn't, starve. On the other hand, since I never -- ever -- bought any produce for home consumption, if a crop failed it would almost certainly mean doing without something for a whole year. The daily tour of the kitchen garden was therefore always deeply interesting; and if the tour of the field test plots was even more so, theirs was an interestingness of a less intimate type.

  Something serious had happened to the Kennebec potatoes; I noticed it at once. Yesterday at dusk the plants had been bushy and green, bent out of their beds on water-filled stalks by last week's storm of rain but healthy, thriving, beginning to put out the tiny flowers that meant I could soon steal a few small tubers from under the mulch to eat with the new peas. Now the leaves of several plants were rolled and mottled with yellow. I pulled these up right away, doubting it would do any good, sick at heart as always to see my pampered children fail, however often failure struck them down.

  The biggest threat to crops in an organic garden like mine is always disease spread by insects, aphids or leafhoppers in this case, which had all but certainly passed this disease on to other potato plants by now. The mottling and leaf-rolling meant that the bugs -- probably aphids, the flightless sort I'd been taught to call "ant cows" in grade school -- had infected my Kennebecs with a virus. At least one virus, maybe more. The ants would soon have moved their dairy herd all through the patch, if they hadn't already. Plants still symptom-free would not remain so for long. When Eric showed up I would get him to spray the patch with a Rotenone solution but it was probably too late to save the crop by killing the carriers, the vector. These potatoes already had a virus, incurable and potentially lethal.

  I remember that I thought: Well, that makes some more of us then.

  I left the heap of infected plants for Eric to cart to the incinerator; they must not be composted but burned, and at once, or there'd be no chance at all of saving the crop and I could look forward to a potatoless year. Destroy the infected to protect the healthy. The AIDS witch-hunts of the late nineties, the vigilante groups that had broken into testing and treatment facilities all over the country in order to find out who the infected people were, had been acting from a similar principle: identify! destroy! They wanted not just the ones with the acute form of the disease, but also those who'd tested positive to HIV-I, II, and/or III. I'd been lucky; workers in the Task Force office where my records were kept had managed to stand off the mob while a terrified volunteer worked frantically to erase the computer records and two others burned the paper files in the lavatory sink. The police arrived in time to save those brave people, thank God, but in other cities workers were shot and, in that one dreadful incident in St. Louis, barricaded in their building while somebody shattered the window with a firebomb.

  My luck hadn't stopped there, no siree. I had the virus right enough, but not -- still not, after twenty-five long years -- the disease itself. (These two facts have shaped my life. I mean my adult life; I'd just turned twenty-two, and was about to graduate from college in the spring of 1985, when my Western Blot came back positive and everything changed.)

  Even the sporadic persecutions ended in 2001, when they got the Lowenfels vaccine. That took care of the general public; but nobody looked for a cure, or expected that a way would ever be found to eliminate the virus from the bodies of those of us who'd already been exposed to it. The best we could hope for was a course of treatment to improve our chances of not developing full-blown AIDS, at least not for a long, long time. The peptide vaccine that had become the standard therapy by 1994, which worked with the capsid protein in the cells of the virus, was ineffective with too many patients, as were the GMSC factor injections; and zidovudine and its cousins were just too toxic. A lot more research still needed to be done. We hoped that it would be, that we would not be forgotten; but we didn't think it a very realistic hope.

  The bone punch, and especially the Green Monkey vaccine which quickly supplanted that radical and rather painful procedure, meant the end of terror for the unsmitten; for the less fortunate it meant at least the end of persecution, as I said, and so for us, too, the day when the mass inoculations began was a great day. A lot of us were also suicidally
depressed. Imagine how people crippled from childhood with polio must have felt when they started giving out the Salk vaccine to school kids on those little cubes of sugar, and the cripples had to stand around on their braces and crutches and try to be glad.

  It didn't do to think too much about it.

  The Test Site clinician who gave me the news had steered me into a chair right afterwards and said, "When the results came in I made you an appointment for tonight with a counselor. She'll help you more than you'd ever believe, and I don't care what other commitments you've got to break: you be there.' And he wrote the address and the time on a piece of paper, and I went.

  The counselor was a woman in her thirties, sympathetic but tough, and she told me things that evening while I sat and was drenched in wave after icy wave of terror and dread. "We don't know why some people seem to resist the virus better than others, and survive much longer, or why some of those that are AB-positive develop the disease fairly quickly, while others can have a latency period of five or six years," Elizabeth said. "We don't know for sure what triggers the development of the acute disease, if and when it does develop, or what percentage of infected people will eventually develop it.

  "But there's a lot of research going on right now into what they call 'cofactors,' variables that may influence the behavior of the virus in individual cases. Cofactors are things like general health, stress levels, life style. We think -- we're pretty sure -- that it's extremely important for people like you, who've been exposed, to live as healthfully and calmly as you possibly can. The HIV-I virus is linked to the immune system. You get the flu, your immune system kicks in to fight the flu virus, the AIDS virus multiplies; so the trick is to give your immune system as little to do as possible and buy yourself some time.

  "Now, what that means in practical terms is: take care of yourself. Get lots of sleep and exercise. Don't get overtired or too stressed out. Pay attention to your nutrition. Meditate. Above all, try not to fall into a despairing frame of mind! There's a good chance they'll find an effective treatment in four or five years, and if that happens and you're still symptom-free, you should be able to live a normal life with a normally functioning immune system, so long as you keep up your treatments."

  That was the gist of her talk, and some of it sank in. She was wrong about the treatment, of course. In those days everybody expected it would be the vaccine that would prove impossible to make, that a drug to control the course of infection seemed much likelier. We were better off not knowing. Even with treatments to hope for, in those days it was fairly unusual to survive as long as four or five years after infection.

  Elizabeth suggested a therapy group of people like myself that I might like to join, a group that had volunteered for a research project being done by a team of psychoneuroimmunologists, though we didn't know that's what they were. They were the hope-givers, that was enough. During the weeks that followed, with help from Elizabeth and the group, I began to work out a plan -- to impose my own controls over my situation, in accordance with the research team's wish to explore the effects of an extraordinarily healthful life style on symptom-free HIV-I carriers.

  My undergraduate work in biology had been good enough to get me accepted into the graduate program at Cornell with a research assistantship. Until the test results came back I'd been excited by the challenge and the prospect of a change of scene; afterwards, and after a few sessions with Elizabeth and her group, I began instead to feel apprehensive about the effort it would take to learn the ropes of a new department, new university community, new city famous for its six annual months of winter. It seemed better to stick to familiar surroundings and to continue with the same counselor and therapy group. So I made late application to my own university's graduate department and was admitted, and I stayed on: my first major life decision to be altered, the first of many times I was to choose a less challenging and stressful alternative over one that in every other way looked like the more attractive choice.

  I'd caught the virus from my major professor; he'd been my only lover, so there could be no doubt of that. While I was still nerving myself up to tell him about the blood test he died in an accident on Interstate 95. Distressingly enough, I'm afraid I felt less grieved than relieved. The death let me off the hook and, more importantly, cleared the way for me to stay, for Bill's presence would have been a diffculty. I'd felt from the first instant that I wanted no one , apart from the Task Force people, to know. Not my Fundamentalist family, certainly. Not my friends, from whom I now found myself beginning to withdraw (and since, like me, most of these were graduating seniors, this was easier than it sounds.) Overnight my interests had grown utterly remote from theirs. They were full of parties and career plans; I was fighting for my life, and viewed the lot of them from across the chasm of that absolute unlikeness.

  I strolled, more or less, through graduate school, working competently without distinguishing myself. I wasn't in a hurry, either. Distinction and rapid progress would have meant a greater commitment and a lot more work, and these were luxuries I could no longer afford, for my first commitment, and first responsibility, now, were to keeping myself alive.

  As for how I was to use this life, a picture had gradually begun to form.

  First of all it was necessary to divest myself of desire. The yuppiedom I had only recently looked forward to with so much confidence -- the dazzling two-career marriage and pair of brilliant children, the house in the suburbs, the cabin in the Poconos and the vacations in Europe -- had become, item by item, as unavailable to me as a career in space exploration or ballet. Children, obviously, were out. So was marriage. So, it seemed, was sex in any form; sex had been my nemesis, scarcely discovered before it had blighted me forever. The prestigious high-pressure career in research, which my undergraduate record had made seem a reasonable ambition, had become anything but. I was not after all going to be one of those remarkable professional mothers, making history in the lab, putting in quality time with the kids every day, keeping the lines of communication with my husband open and clear at every level no matter what. I built up the picture of the life I had aspired to for my counselor and my group -- and looked at it long and well -- and said good-bye to it, as I believed, forever. All that was over.

  The next step was to create an alternate picture of a life that would be possible. We discussed my abilities and my altered wish list. I toyed briefly with the idea of a career in AIDS research -- but AIDS research in the late eighties was about as calm and unstressful a line of work as leading an assault on the North Face of the Eiger in winter, and I had no yearning for martyrdom, then or ever. Through the hours and hours of therapy it emerged that what I wanted most was simple: just to survive, until the other scientists working that field had found a drug that would control the virus and make a normal life possible again. It wasn't hard to work this out in group, because we all wanted the same thing: to hang on until the day -- not too far away now -- when some hero in a white coat, mounted on a white charger, came galloping up to the fort, holding a beaker of Miracle Formula high like a banner.

  But how to hang on? For each of us the answer, if different in particulars, was also the same. We wanted to he able to support ourselves (and our families, if we had them) in reasonable comfort, and to keep our antibody status secret. Achieving this, for some of us -- the older ones -- meant giving up practices in law or medicine, or business careers, or staying in but lowering our sights. Some of us quit struggling to save troubled marriages or get custody of children.

  For me the obvious course seemed to be a teaching job in an academic backwater, preferably one in that same metropolitan area. Accordingly -- at a time in my life when I'd expected to be at Cornell, cultivating a mentor, working with keen zest and keener ambition at my research, developing and pursuing a strategy for landing a classy position at a prestigious eastern university -- I quietly looked into the several nearby branch campuses of the Pennsylvania State University Commonwealth Campus System and made a choice.
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br />   My personal style altered a lot during graduate school. I'd done some acting in high school and college, and that made it easier -- though you mustn't suppose it was easy -- to put my new persona over by turning down invitations ("too busy") and so on. Before long my department, which had been so delighted to keep me, had lumped me in with that breed of student that fizzles out after a promising undergraduate takeoff, and the rest of the RA's had given up on me too.

  My therapy group speedily became my complete social universe. Nobody in the Bio Department could possibly have shared the intensity of common concern we shared within what we came to call the Company (after the thing Misery loves best). When as time went by one or another of us would lose the battle for wellness, the rest would push aside our own fears and rally round the ailing boon Companion, doing our best to make the final months as comfortable as we could. That wasn't easy either, let me tell you. But we did it. We were like a church family, all in all to one another. Elizabeth, who had given her life to helping us and the researchers at Graduate Hospital -- she was our pastor and our friend, and yet, even so, a little bit of an outsider. When she asked what I meant to do for fun -- since life could not consist entirely of the elimination of challenges and risks -- I could only reply that just staying alive and well seemed like plenty of fun for the present, and think privately that no true Companion would ever need to have that explained to him or her.

  We never told our real names, not in a quarter of a century, and stubbornly refused all that time to evolve from a collective into an assembly of intimates, but we knew each other inside out.