Michael Thomas Ford - Full Circle

by Michael Thomas Ford

  "Yes," Jack said. "I remember looking at the stars."

  "And remember how we promised we'd go to space together? And how we went to the museum in Washington after not speaking for so long?" "I remember all that," Jack said as we walked into the planetarium. Above us, the map of the universe was projected onto the dome. Looking up at it, I felt as if we were 10 years old and in the backyard.

  "What does it have to do with right now?" Jack asked.

  I tried to calm my nerves before I spoke. "I figured it out," I told him. "The other night, while I was walking home." "You figured what out?" he said.

  "What it all means," I said. "The dream. Everything that's happened. All of it." "What dream?" said Jack. "Ned, I don't know what you're talking about."

  "I had a dream," I explained. "Years ago, when we were kids. You were dying, and I asked the angel why—"

  "Back up," Jack said, interrupting. "What angel?"

  "The angel in my dream," I said. "It doesn't matter. What matters is that she showed me that you were dying, and it was because of love."

  "Love?" Jack repeated.

  "Yes," I said. "I didn't know what she meant, but now I do. AIDS. Love. Dying. Don't you get it?"

  "No," Jack answered. "I don't."

  I ran my fingers through my hair. What I wanted to say wasn't coming out the way it had in my head. Jack wasn't understanding me. I tried again.

  "You were dying of love," I said. "In my dream. But it wasn't really love, it was AIDS." "You think you dreamed of me dying from AIDS when we were kids?" said Jack. "Ned, that's nuts." "Why?" I said. "Why is it any more nuts than people really dying from AIDS? Why is it any more nuts than people who dream about talking to their dead parents, or about finding something they've lost, or anything at all, really?"

  "Okay, so maybe you had this dream," said Jack. "What about it?"

  "She was telling me that I'm supposed to save you," I told him. "I'm supposed to save you from dying." "And how are you supposed to do that?" Jack asked. "By bringing me to the museum?" "By loving you," I said. "By loving you and making sure you never get sick."

  I took Jack's hands and held them while he stared at me, not speaking. I could see that he thought I was crazy, and I desperately wanted him to understand how terribly serious I was. "I love you, Jack," I said. "I always have, since that very first time. Even through everything else—Andy, Brian, all of it—I've loved you. But it took all that for me to see it." "I love you, too, Ned," he said.

  "That's why we need to be together," I said.

  "Together?" said Jack. "What do you mean together?"

  "Lovers," I explained. "Partners. Like we were before."

  Jack took his hands away from mine and put them in his pockets. "That's not possible, Ned," he said. "I'm with Todd."

  I shook my head. "You can't stay with him," I said. "If you do, you'll get sick." "We're both negative," Jack said. "And we're going to stay that way."

  "That's what Alan and I thought," I said. "And look what happened to us. That's what the angel was saying. We're only going to be safe if we're together, you and me."

  "People don't die from love, Ned," Jack said. "They die because they make bad decisions. They decide to have unsafe sex. They decide to shoot drugs. They decide to put themselves at risk." "Brian didn't know," I countered. "None of us knew then."

  "But we do now," said Jack. "We can't use that excuse anymore."

  "So it's Alan's fault he died?" I asked. "Is that what you're saying?"

  "I'm saying he made a choice," Jack answered. "He made a choice to go into that theater. He made a choice to have unsafe sex with a stranger. I'm sorry about what happened to him. I'm sorry about what happened to you. But he made a choice, and it's a choice I'm never going to make."

  I was stunned. I didn't know what to think, and certainly not what to say. All I could do was stare at Jack, waiting for him to take back what he'd said. A long time went by before he spoke. "AIDS isn't about love," he said finally. "I'm not sure it ever was, but it's certainly not now. It's about a virus. And staying alive is about keeping that virus out of our bodies. Love doesn't do that."

  "Then what does?" I asked him. "Rubbers? Dental dams? Covering our cocks and protecting our assholes even when we're fucking our own lovers?" My voice was tense with anger. "Is this what you've learned from your work? To blame people with AIDS?"

  "I know what you're feeling," Jack said, ignoring the question. "I see it in my patients all the time. They want to go back. They want to live in a time when things were easier, when we didn't have to worry about all of this shit."

  "I'm not one of your patients," I said.

  "I feel it myself sometimes," he continued. "It would be great to be ten years old again. Christ, we didn't worry about anything then."

  "You mean you didn't," I said. "I worried enough for the both of us. You just never noticed." "People change," said Jack. "We grow up. I grew up. But I don't think you have, Ned. I think you're still that same ten-year-old boy, thinking you can make everything okay if you just try hard enough."

  "Fuck you," I said, resorting to the basest of insults. "You don't know what I feel. I'm trying to help you, Jack." "By telling me to leave my boyfriend and become yours?" he said.

  "Because some angel told you that you need to save me? Do you know how this sounds?"

  The thing was, I didn't know how it sounded. At least not to him. To me it made perfect sense. But I couldn't get Jack to see that. I sat down on a low wall that ran around the hall and stared at the floor. Jack sat down next to me. "Have you been taking anything?" he asked. "Pot? Coke? X?"

  I didn't answer. I had smoked some pot earlier in the day, but I knew that had nothing to do with how I was feeling. The dizziness I was experiencing was purely the result of realizing that Jack was telling me no. My stomach was churning, and I was afraid I might vomit. I stood up. "Good-bye, Jack," I said.

  He stood and reached for my arm, but I pulled away. "Please don't follow me," I said. "Where are you going?" he asked.

  "Home," I told him.

  "We'll talk later?"

  "Sure," I answered. "I'm sorry," I added. "About everything." I walked quickly out of the planetarium. An elevator had just emptied a group of schoolchildren into the hallway, and I waded through them, getting in and sighing with relief as the doors closed without anyone else joining me.

  I didn't go home. Not right away. First I went to a bar—the Works on Columbus Avenue—where I drank four Seven & Sevens. Then I went home with a man who looked to me like he could conjure up the Devil. I made him fuck me without a rubber, hard and fast, and when he came inside of me, I prayed that what I hoped he carried would find its way into my blood. I made one final stop before going home, walking through Washington Square Park and pausing long enough to purchase an eight-ball from a skinny skateboard punk whose hooded sweatshirt hid his face as one nimble hand quickly shoved my money down the front of his jeans and emerged with my bag of coke. He was gone a second later, disappearing into the shadows beneath the trees, the drugs in my pocket and the raspy sound of his board's wheels on the asphalt the only proof that he hadn't been a mirage. I left him to his nightly wanderings and returned to my apartment, my journey completed. I did half of the coke while watching a tape ofPee-Wee's Playhouse Christmas Special , numbing my brain until I forgot all about the disastrous meeting with Jack. I howled when Pee-Wee opened a gift box to find Grace Jones inside, and sang along with the crazy Del Rubio Triplets and Dinah Shore. The manic energy of Pee-Wee Herman and his wild holiday extravaganza matched the twirling of my brain. It all seemed perfectly normal and ordinary to me, and I imagined myself living forever in that world, where Miss Yvonnne would be my neighbor and nothing would happen that couldn't be fixed. I can laugh now about how insane I was, but the truth is, I came very close to dying that night. I snorted cocaine until I couldn't feel anything, washing it down with old reliable Jack Daniels. My heart was probably close to stopping, or exploding, as the cocaine and alcoh
ol were distilled by my liver, releasing cocaethylene into my system and increasing the effects of the blow until I heard Pee-Wee tell me to go find the skateboard punk and invite him home for a three-way. I must have gotten up and tried to pull on my jacket. When I woke up hours later, I was facedown on the floor, one arm through the jacket sleeve and the other trapped beneath my body. I tried to move it, but it had gone numb and was useless. I managed to roll myself over, only to find that my face had been stuck to the carpet by a combination of blood and spit. My nose had bled profusely, leaving a large red stain on the beige carpeting, and I couldn't breathe through my nostrils. I raised my hand to wipe away some of the blood, and only succeeded in banging myself with my dead hand. I lay on the floor for a long time, first fearing that I had done irreparable harm to my arm, and then wondering if I'd had some kind of aneurysm from the coke. I felt strange, and I was a little concerned that if I tried to move, I might do further damage to my brain, which still didn't feel quite right. Then my arm began to tingle painfully as the blood flowed back into it, and one worry was crossed off my list. As I waited for the tingling to stop, the phone rang. I let the machine take it, groaning when I heard the chirpy voice of the school secretary leaving a message asking if I was all right. I had no idea what time it was, but I'd clearly missed getting to work. I would have to invent some plausible excuse for my absence, and my failure to alert anyone to it.

  Finally, I sat up, then slowly got to my feet. Everything seemed to be moving correctly, and I made it to the bathroom without further mishap. The mirror, however, revealed the extent of the damage I'd done to myself. Besides the bleeding nose, both of my eyes were black, a consequence of falling on my face. My lips, too, were puffy and bruised. Amidst all the swelling and discoloration, I congratulated myself that I'd at least managed not to break my nose.

  I got a washcloth, soaked it in warm water under the tap, and began to gently erase the marks of my binge. Every touch made me flinch, and even without the blood covering my skin, my face looked worn and defeated. I hurt everywhere, both inside and out. My asshole ached, and I remembered the man from the night before and what we'd done. I'd wanted him to fuck me so hard that I split open. I'd told him that, and he'd done his best to oblige. I saw myself on my back, his hands gripping my thighs painfully while he pumped in and out. I'd wished that I'd feel something inside of me burst, and that I would die on his bed, my heart failing as he emptied himself. But I was still alive, although I felt more dead than ever before. The man staring back at me in the mirror was no one I recognized, and no one that I wanted to know. I wanted to get away from him, leave him alone in his apartment with his sadness and anger while I ran far, far away. He wanted me dead, and I feared that if I stayed with him, I would let him have his wish.

  CHAPTER 57

  "And so I left," I tell Thayer. "Again. I probably should have expected it, since it was the end of another decade." "You didn't even tell Jack you were going?" Thayer asks me as he gets up for another cup of coffee. By now it's closer to lunch than it is to breakfast, but we're still sitting in the kitchen in our robes. Only Sam has moved, reluctantly, to investigate the bowl of food Thayer set out for him earlier. Having eaten, he's back to napping, sprawled across the floor, dreaming, his paws twitching as he chases rabbits. I lean down and scratch him behind the ear, reminding him that he is a good boy, and that he's safe.

  "No," I say, answering Thayer's question. "I didn't tell him. I didn't tell anyone. Except for school," I add. "I told them my mother had died unexpectedly and I needed to go take care of my stepfather. They had no reason not to believe me. There were only a few months left in the year anyway."

  He knows the rest of the story. I returned to San Francisco. I don't know why, really, except that I remembered how beautiful it was and had some notion that it would revive me. But when I got there, I found that its beauty had faded, at least for me. The friends I'd had were mostly gone, dead or left to escape the memories. I spent a year there, living in a house on Army Street, trying to bring the past back to life. It was to that house that Jack mailed the Christmas card with the photos. He got the address from my mother, one of the few times I ever regretted the closeness of our families. I never replied. In the spring of 1990, my mother found a lump in her breast, and by summer she was dead. Walter, unable to live with the ghosts of both his wife and her husband, sold the house and moved to Florida to be closer to Candace, who was pleased to finally have all of his attention. I received a sum of money in my mother's will, and decided to use it to start my life anew. I chose Maine because I had never been there, and therefore had no memories to face, and because I wanted to live in a place that had not been devastated by the plague.

  I arrived here the day of my 40th birthday, moving into a house that I'd bought sight unseen, reassured by the no-nonsense voice of a real estate agent whose thick accent convinced me that I was getting the place for abah-gin . At first I was frightened by the large, empty rooms and the smell of the ocean, so much stronger here than in San Francisco, where the sea's aroma is overpowered by the scent of the eucalyptus trees first planted in 1853 by W.C. Walker of the Golden Gate Nursery from Australian seeds. Where those foreign invaders had quickly made Northern California their home and waged a battle for control of the native landscape, the pine forests of Maine are happy to play second fiddle to the mighty Atlantic, keeping a respectful distance from the lapping waves and confining their redolence to the space beneath their branches.

  Soon, though, I filled the house with furniture and came to love the ocean's wildness. As the days passed, I breathed more easily as, bit by bit, I let go of the past. I threw out the last of the cocaine I'd brought with me from San Francisco, pouring it into the sea from the deck of a whale-watching boat while the other passengers were distracted by the appearance of a pair of minke whales, and I began to think about a return to teaching. When I read about an opening at a local school, I applied and was accepted.

  In the summer of 1991, I was walking through town and stopped to admire a painting in the window of an art gallery. It was an abstract, bursts of indigo and lemon against a cherry-red background. Curious, I entered the shop and met the artist, who was there delivering some new work. Thayer and I had dinner that evening, and when he moved into the house after a six-month courtship, we hung that painting over our bed.

  It was Thayer who encouraged me to return to school, Thayer who applied gentle pressure when progress on my master's thesis stalled, and Thayer who convinced me that, at 45, I was not too old to become the junior instructor in the history department of the University of New England. I owe a great deal of my current happiness to him, although I like to think that I have been equally supportive of his painting.

  I fear perhaps Thayer will be angry at me for never telling him the roles Jack and Andy have played in my history. If he is, though, he doesn't show it. He asks only, "You haven't spoken to either of them in fifteen years?"

  "Not until yesterday," I tell him. "Jack called."

  "After all this time?" says Thayer. "Why?"

  This is where I begin to feel the weight of the past pressing down on me. "Andy's dying," I tell Thayer. "Jack thinks I should see him."

  "In New York?" Thayer asks.

  "Chicago," I answer. "I guess he moved there a few years ago. Jack really didn't say much, and I didn't ask for details." Thayer is quiet, drinking his coffee as I look out the window. The rain has slowed, and again I think about finding the ladder and cleaning the gutters. It will be a good way to distract myself from the thoughts in my head.

  "You should go," Thayer says, and I look at him. "You should go," he repeats. "It's been too long." "But—" I begin to argue.

  "Ned, they're your family," says Thayer. "Like it or not."

  I fold my hands and tap my fingers against the backs of my hands, a habit I don't remember

  having when I was younger, but which I find myself engaging in more and more. Thayer puts his hand on top of mine, stilling the wiggling sp
ider of my fingers. I look into his face, and he leans forward, his forehead resting against mine.

  "Go," he says. He makes the calls, arranges the flight while I pack. I will be in Chicago in less than nine hours. Jack has agreed to pick me up at the airport. His voice when I told him I was coming was filled with happiness, but I feel only dread.

  When Thayer drops me off, he kisses me and says, "I love you." I don't want to leave him, but he assures me that we will both be fine. "Call me when you're settled in," he says as I take my suitcase from the backseat. When he drives away, I consider hailing a cab and following him. Instead, I face the glass doors and force myself through them.

  The flight itself is uneventful. We stop in New York, where I sit in the American Airlines waiting area at LaGuardia and try not to think about the fact that I'm once again moving backwards through my life. Thankfully, the city is far enough away from the airport that I can pretend I am somewhere else—Amsterdam, maybe, or Berlin. When the call to board the next flight crackles from the terminal's intercom, I am relieved that we are going.

  On the second and final leg of the journey, I find that the passenger before me has left a paperback tucked into the seat pocket. When I take it out, I am unnerved to discover that I am holding a copy of It , undoubtedly picked up at the last minute by someone desperate for something to read and forced to choose between either Stephen King or Patricia Cornwell, who seem to have a monopoly on airport bookstores. I have not opened the book since Alan's death, and therefore have never gotten beyond page 367.

  I'm tempted to put the novel back, but its appearance seems far too unlikely (the popularity of Stephen King as in-flight reading notwithstanding) to be accidental, and so I open it and begin reading where I left off twenty years before. I'm surprised that after only a few pages I can recall the plot with very few holes in my memory of it. As the story of seven friends who face a monster as children and return twenty-eight years later to do battle with it again unfolds, I can't help but feel a kinship with them. I, too, am returning to my past, to face a monster I believed to be dead and gone until a phone call drew me back. I am sixty pages from the end when the captain's voice announces that we are making our final descent into Chicago. I leave the six surviving characters (one, unable to face his fears again, has killed himself) as they enter the sewers in search of the evil, hoping that King will let them survive. I do not take the book with me when we reach the gate and disembark, feeling it belongs somehow to the world within the plane.