Fallow Park Today

by Joseph Glenn

  Ardis looked up from the cards and seemed to be scrutinizing Meredith’s face. “Nothing serious, you understand. Civil disobedience stuff. My husband and I were arrested many times. The last time resulted in my sixth conviction.”

  Ardis reminded Meredith that, only twenty years before, the names of gay men and lesbians were collected by state and federal agencies. She spoke with an unmistakably long-term resentment when she referenced “the lists.” It wasn’t just the testing, she said, but the very real possibility that the local media would get hold of the story. The straight people who were determined or categorized as those likely to produce homosexual children worried about the testing, she reminded Meredith. “But the people who were actually gay and living as straight. That was another animal altogether! For the exposed gay people there were lists. And if you were on such a list, you were on it forever. Anyone could find your name on it; it was a matter of public record. A simple computer search of a person’s name, searching for no particular reason, just an open-ended search, would reveal that the person was on the list—if he were.

  “I remember,” Meredith informed her. “Most people ran the names of everyone they knew.”

  “Hank, that was my husband,” Ardis said, “Hank and I did a fair bit of protesting after the lists came out. We fought against everything. The list itself. The privacy issues, of course. The marriage nullifications. The rampant discrimination that resulted from the easier identification of gay people. One of my few trips out of the Midwest was to the march on Washington with thousands of others in our situation. Happily married, or contentedly married, couples in which one, or sometimes both spouses, had been determined to be gay and their marriages were, as you probably remember, terminated.

  Meredith nodded, but she said nothing to break Ardis’ train of thought.

  “Oh, Hank and I tried everything. We wrote letters. We started petitions. I lost count of how many interviews we gave. We marched in Milwaukee, Chicago, Saint Louis. We marched, marched, marched. Unfortunately, all that marching didn’t get us very far. We found it exhausting and expensive. But that kind of civil disobedience—the sit-ins, the sometimes too emotionally-charged demonstrations in front of court houses, and the wholly justifiable trespassing—it does get you into trouble with the law.

  “Anyway, when they started identifying people to target as potential residents of Fallow Park, my name naturally came up. I was a known person. And I happened to be in a federal prison, about to be released. So, naturally, my whereabouts were known.”

  “But you came willingly then?” Meredith asked with confusion. “Because it wasn’t until four, five years after the parks opened that living in them became mandatory.”

  “Yes, I signed up. I came of my own volition. The first recruits were carefully chosen. Hand-picked. They knew what they were doing. It was important to them, to the government I mean, that the first reports—the initial impressions formed and relayed by the media, and consequently swallowed whole hog by the public—were very pro-park. I don’t know if you recall, but there was some opposition at the time. And it wasn’t just the gays; lots of people jumped on the bandwagon. The ACLU was pretty busy, as you can well imagine. Obviously, despite all the protests and lawsuits, the government prevailed; I suppose because of people like me. But what choice did I have? I was very tired. I was sixty-three and a cancer survivor; I had a mastectomy when I was in prison. I was suffering from exhaustion. My husband and I had not been working for a couple of years. We were broke. The park was attractive because it offered an opportunity to rest. It came along at the right time for us. My husband and I were getting nowhere with our cause. It was time for him and my kids to get on with their lives. And I figured, correctly as it turned out, that it would only be a matter of time before all of us would have to live in one of these places.”

  One of the camera operators, now out of the television room and working the main floor, lingered by their table. She was filming a chess game some yards away, but Meredith anticipated her approach.

  “Pass me a couple of those cards,” Meredith whispered. “She’ll go away after she gets a shot of us enjoying a friendly game of cards.”

  “Austin kicked us out of the TV room,” the cinematographer said. “They started running a news story about Jack Harbour; Austin and that Makepeace guy were concerned that we would pick up some of that on the audio.”

  Meredith looked to the television rooms. On the big screens facing her, she saw the news story about the mythical trouble maker. “Yes,” she said to the woman, “I can see how that would be a problem, particularly when Dr. Makepeace has taken the position that this Harbour fellow doesn’t even exist. What’s the big story?” She could read the headline, “Jack Harbour sighted in Washington, D.C.,” but the printed story running at the bottom of the screen was too small to make out.

  “He was supposedly seen at one of the D.C. airports,” the woman said. “These stories crop up from time to time. We never find out if it was really him, a look-alike, or a hoax.” She looked over her shoulder as the coverage continued. “They always have stock footage of him to run with the story. Not bad looking, I’ve always thought.”

  Meredith studied the man when he appeared in close-up, though she could easily conjure up a facsimile of the much-photographed man in her head. Good features, with hair longish, but not unstylish, and strawberry blond. Not bad, she agreed, though decidedly of the pretty-boy variety. The clip the news broadcast kept streaming appeared to have been taken at some sort of rally or other political event. He was talking through a bullhorn, as he usually was when he appeared on television. He wore a suit and tie, a uniform Meredith believed he had long abandoned for “living on the edge” attire more suitable for blending into crowds: jeans, dark sneakers, and solid color sweatshirts with no print on them. “Not worth a second look,” she told the cinematographer. “He’s a fugitive and gay to boot. I mean, where’s the future in that?”

  The woman with the hand-held camera smiled at them after filming a minute or so of the women pretending to collaborate on the Solitaire game, pouring over the seven columns of alternating black and red cards. After she passed on, Ardis picked up the thread of the conversation. “I also predicted that Faulty Park would fall into the shape it’s in. I never studied economics, but even I could see how impractical, how unworkable the proposition was. A lot of promises were made that never could have been fulfilled on a permanent basis.”

  “It must be particularly hard for someone who’s been here from the beginning. You’re more conscious than most of how much has been lost.”

  “I am. That’s true.” She sighed before adding: “Shikat ga nai.” She smiled at Meredith’s confused reaction. “It’s a very old Japanese expression. It means ‘it cannot be helped.’ You simply roll with the punches and accept every change, every loss as your new reality. There is nothing to be gained by making a big fuss. They’re going to do what they’re going to do. And if you make a big stink, they seem to enjoy depriving you of the things that much more.”

  Ardis continued to play Solitaire as she spoke. The handful of cards Meredith had used as a prop were returned to the top of the deck, their original order intact. Ardis moved cards from one column to another and flipped cards off the deck three at a time without a break in her narrative.

  “Red four,” Meredith pointed out.

  “I know,” Ardis said. She left the card on the pile and turned three new cards over on it. “I’ve already taken two cards from the deck. If I take one more, I’ll see the same cards the next time through. It’s a calculated risk.”

  It seemed the perfect note to leave her on. Meredith understood that Ardis, the First Woman of Fallow Park, the traditional housewife turned civil rights activist with a criminal record, limited her risks to card games these days, including Solitaire if no one knows how to play bridge.

  Chapter Twelve

  Austin Green looked grim. It could not be said that he had been upbeat or what anyone would desc
ribe as “fun” even at the outset of the shoot, and this was now day three, but he seemed a bit more irritated with the world than before. Meredith could tell he needed sleep; he had worked long days during preproduction, and now he was putting in eighteen hour days. Bill, who was aware of everything around him, had commented on the director’s irritability. He observed that Austin’s work schedule would break the strongest of constitutions. That was Bill, Meredith reflected of the assistant, conscious of other people’s circumstances, attentive to whatever factors might affect their behaviors. At the time of Bill’s observation, Meredith, who was not particularly moved by Austin’s back-breaking schedule or his drive to meet the demands placed on him, pointed out to the naïve assistant that Austin had plenty of experience in this business and knew exactly what he had signed on to do. “When I was doing weekly television,” she started to point out, but Bill stopped listening just then and her example was left incomplete.

  “He’s not exactly the auteur I thought he’d be,” Bill noted. “It seems that he has to answer to a lot of higher-ups.”

  Meredith nodded. She knew of the contentious phone calls with producers, and she suspected there had been regular communication with some of the executives with the production company. There were, no doubt, arguments about what could be used and what must be ignored at Fallow Park.

  Austin’s face brightened now as though he had struck on the happiest of ideas.

  “Merry,” he said, “let’s stand you under the sign.”

  Meredith stood under the “Infirmary” sign in the refreshingly well-lit, ground-floor hallway of the medical building. “Better,” Austin said. To the camera woman he instructed: “Now start out further back with the close-up of the sign. Meredith will start reading and you pull back until she’s in the shot. Action!”

  Meredith launched into her introduction. She read the teleprompter. She had not taken the time to memorize the speech. This far into the job, with two-and-a-half days of work already “in the can,” she reassured herself that she could now drop some of the professionalism she had demonstrated at the beginning of the week. She also took some comfort in Bill’s declaration that “this turkey is never going to see the light of day.”

  “Earlier this afternoon,” she began, “we spoke with the director of the food system and one of the dieticians. I think we’re starting to grasp the enormity of the facility, but also some of the challenges it presents to its staff. This afternoon we’re in the infirmary talking with one of the physicians on staff. It’s called an infirmary, but it’s truly a hospital. This is a five-story building with four hundred and eighty beds. There are seven operating rooms, nineteen dental operatories, and, of course, a morgue.”

  Austin gave her an emphatic thumbs up after this last sentence. He had yelled “cut” twice on earlier takes when she had placed a dramatic pause before saying “a morgue.”

  The unpleasant reality that the people of Fallow Park all died at the park, and that many would pay a visit to the morgue, seemed relevant enough to Meredith to give the holding room an ominous reading. But she found she lacked the mental strength to press the point. She was anxious to get on with the interview.

  As prearranged, she now took five steps to her right. “This,” she said, “is Mona Haze, M.D. Doctor Haze, thank you for speaking with us.”

  “It’s my pleasure, Ms. St. Claire,” the thin, severely brunette woman said. Her standard-issue white coat and identity badge obscured and distracted, but Meredith was certain the rest of her was as lovely as her face, in the same compact, precise way. Meredith had been told she was forty. She looked twenty-eight. The clean living of a physician, Meredith surmised. The five words the doctor had just spoken were all Meredith needed to hear to know that Dr. Haze was comfortable and fluid in front of the camera. It would be interesting to find out what she had to say when Meredith interjected some of her own questions. This, she decided, had the potential to be a good interview.

  “Let me start out by asking how many of those four hundred and forty beds are occupied?”

  “Only one hundred and twelve today,” Dr. Haze replied. “That’s lower than usual. We tend to run between one seventy and one ninety.”

  “A lot of AIDS patients?” Meredith asked in a leading tone. Austin started shaking his head but said nothing. He had made it clear that with all the hospital footage it was essential that Meredith not go off script. Despite her promises to comply with this directive, she was once again taking the conversation in the direction of her choice. She repressed her instinct to smile. She had barked at the lateness of the hour to tie the director’s hands; he agreed there was no time for multiple takes. Her success was tenuous, however; it was entirely possible the director would stop her if she flaunted this triumph.

  “None, actually,” Dr. Haze answered without emotion. “We lost our last AIDS patient about eight months ago. She was eighty-four. And we lost her to a stroke—unrelated to her AIDS.”

  Meredith responded with surprise, making a big showing for the camera that it was a struggle for her to process this new information. “Are you telling me that no one at Fallow Park has AIDS?”

  “Yes, not one. And almost none of our residents are HIV positive.”

  Perhaps in response to Meredith’s silence, and the volume of implicit questions behind her silence, Dr. Haze ventured on. “The environment,” she explained, “is so controlled. New cases of exposure simply do not occur. Of course, a fair number of men, and some women, had AIDS fifteen years ago, back when the park opened. Most of them were fairly well along—age wise, I mean. They’ve all passed on.”

  “Well!” Meredith exclaimed at last, secretly chiding herself for overplaying the response, “isn’t that something? I suppose a good many people in our audience,” she made a quick, almost dismissive gesture towards one of the cameras, “will find some comfort in that, won’t they?”

  “I beg your…” the doctor began to say. “I’m not sure I—”

  “I mean there are many people out there who’ve said the best way to deal with the disease is to isolate it.”

  “I’m not sure I get your drift at all.”

  But Meredith wanted to beat the doctor to the punch on this point. “And yet,” she asked, affecting a naïve, quizzical, and almost lilting tone, “it continues to be a top health-care issue in our society.”

  The doctor thought about this for no more than a moment before saying, “Well, you can’t control the general population the way you can control the people who live in the parks. Here at Fallow Park, everyone who was HIV positive was identified and their behavior was monitored.”

  “Fascinating,” Meredith said. “I guess one gives up a lot of rights when one lives here?”

  “There is no expectation of privacy,” Dr. Haze answered. “Freedom of movement is obviously curtailed—constricted—but even within the park there are additional limitations that can be imposed on activities.”

  “Isn’t it interesting that some believed putting the gay population away would result in the decimation of the disease? Interesting, too, that after all these years, at least in this country, it has never shaken its image as a gay disease.”

  “For a myriad of reasons,” Dr. Haze explained, “not the least of which is that that was the first impression it made. That was its first identity in the U.S.—the gay cancer, almost. And then when gay men and women became so easily identifiable, there was a great deal of prejudice, a great deal of scapegoating of gays for everything under the sun. There are some people who believe the parks were initiated for the purpose of controlling the spread of AIDS.”

  “And that was likely an element of the conservatives…” She left the thought unfinished, trusting that the doctor would complete it.

  “Oh, I’m sure it was politically motivated,” the doctor said. “I don’t know that any one party deserves all the credit or the blame. In any event, if total eradication of the disease was the goal, there must be some very disappointed folks out there. Is
olating gay people certainly hasn’t isolated the disease. There are no gay people left in the general population in this country, yet AIDS remains, as you said, a serious health issue.”

  Meredith paused at this. Silence underscored Dr. Haze’s observations better than any follow-up questions could have. She knew it was necessary to appear that the doctor’s statements were unsettling, unexpected. It was best to let Dr. Haze’s blunt assessment speak for itself. Here, it would seem, was a topic that might survive the documentary’s final cut, should, of course, its producers decide to take it to such an illogical conclusion. Geared as the film was for a largely anti-gay, conservative element that was convinced their money was wasted on the parks and their presumably lazy, lazy, gin-soaked residents, the subject of AIDS, and the belief that locking away gay men was prudent, even justifiable, were subjects sure to hit a bull’s eye. Even if editorial handiwork removed most of the guts from the footage, the filmmakers would, after all, have to include something in the film, if only to fill the time.

  Only after Austin began vehemently gesturing to continue did she return to her prepared questions, underscored and highlighted on the nearby monitor. She continued to play the role of the somewhat shattered interviewer, devastated by Dr. Haze’s revelations, as she stammered through the next question: “How many doctors work at Fallow Park?”

  “We have eighty physicians, three hundred nurses—”

  “For one hundred and twelve patients?”

  Dr. Haze laughed at this. It was, to Meredith, a most knowing kind of laugh. “We have one hundred and twelve patients who are currently hospitalized; however, we have thousands of patients seeking emergency room treatment every year, or receiving out-patient care—including surgeries. Many patients with serious medical conditions—even some who are terminal—are treated in their homes. Obviously it’s easy to make house calls since everyone in the community lives on the compound. And, of course, most patients receive on-going preventive care.”