Sensing Light

by Mark A. Jacobson

  “If rubbers aren’t put on the right way, they can break. Then germs can get from cum into your vagina. I’ll show you the right way.”

  She opened a box containing a life-size, erect silicon penis and set it on her lap. The two women hooted as she demonstrated the correct method.

  “The safest thing is for you to put on the rubber instead of letting the john do it.”

  She centered the condom over the tip of the penis, pinched the pocket at the center of the latex ring, squeezing the air out, and meticulously rolled it down the shaft.

  “You pretty good at that,” said the tall woman laughing. “Had a lot of practice, huh?”

  Dina smiled mysteriously and said, “Be sure there are no air bubbles. They can make the rubber break. If you see air bubbles, you got to roll it back up and down until they’re all gone.”

  Dina gave each one a safe sex kit, a ten dollar bill, and an appointment slip for a study visit at City Hospital. Moments after the women left, Gwen thought of another important piece of advice.

  She rolled down the window and shouted, “If you use a lubricant or jelly, make sure it’s says ‘water-based’ on the side.”

  A bus had stopped in front of the van. The exiting passengers were wide-eyed as this strange white woman yelled, “Oil-based lubes make rubbers break!”

  Gwen awoke alone in bed again on Sunday. Hearing Rick in the kitchen, she remembered a commitment she had made.

  “What time am I supposed to be at the twenty mile marker?” she called out.

  “I don’t know. What did they tell you?

  “Nine, I think. I wrote it down someplace. Guess I better start making lemonade now. Then I pick you up at the finish line at noon, right?”

  He came into the bedroom.

  “Gil’s girlfriend is taking us, and all I asked you to do, Gwen, is to pick us up at noon. You didn’t have to volunteer to set up a rehydration station.”

  “Rick, I said I would.”

  “I know, but I never heard you say you wanted to do it. Now you sound like it’s a big inconvenience.”

  “Wait a second. Don’t go into attack mode.”

  “Attack mode! That’s overreacting.”

  She paused, angry and also frightened by the direction this was going.

  “OK,” she said. “Sorry.”

  Rick refused to acknowledge that she was the one who had backed down. Gwen was peeved but didn’t have the stomach to continue. They had been through a similar script recently. She had challenged him, insisting he admit his resentment. His response had been, “It’s not for me to tell you how much time you should spend working.” Afterwards, she had pondered those words. Were they a veiled threat?

  Once Rick had left, Gwen looked at the clock and realized she actually had two hours before she needed to leave. There was time to work on a textbook chapter Ray Hernandez had gently coerced her into writing. She got out of bed and hunted through her briefcase for the outline she had made.

  An hour later, the noise of Eva giggling reminded Gwen of her daughter’s history essay. Eva had asked for help, and it was due Monday morning. Gwen skimmed through it. While she was displeased by the many grammatical and spelling errors, she did admire the cogency of Eva’s reasoning. She went through the essay again, using a red pen to circle mistakes and to praise Eva’s content in the margins.

  She knocked on Eva’s bedroom door and entered. Eva was in her nightgown, sitting cross-legged in bed, speaking excitedly into a coral green Princess handset. Gwen pointed to the essay, then to her watch.

  “Excuse me, I’m talking to Glenda. It’s important!”

  “I’ve got to go.”

  Eva scowled and hissed, “One more minute.”

  As she waited for the gossiping to end, Gwen surveyed the room. The carpet was hidden by a layer of clothes, torn notebook paper, magazines, and used tissues. Eva wasn’t winding things down, so Gwen interrupted her.

  “You’ve got some very good ideas about the Bill of Rights. All you need to do to make them clear is fix the grammar and spelling mistakes.”

  “Hold on,” Eva said into the phone.

  “I did what the teacher…..”

  Eva stopped as the compliment became apparent to her.

  “OK,” she said sullenly.

  Gwen was tempted to make a snide apology for intruding but opted to accept this offer of detente. With a tight smile, she set the essay on Eva’s desk, also covered by a layer of detritus.

  “I’ll be back this afternoon, if you have questions.”

  She expected no thanks and got none.

  Gwen was at her assigned location in time to prepare the table, pour cups of lemonade, and spike them with a pinch of salt before the elite athletes appeared. Seeing their powerful leg muscles contract felt like an antidote to the diseased and dying bodies she examined every day. None stopped for refreshment. Each had his own personal support team, friends or relatives who sprinted alongside the runner and handed him, relay style, a plastic bottle to drink from.

  She spotted Rick forty-five minutes later in a pack of recreational marathoners. Gwen grabbed two cups of juice and jogged onto the road, mimicking what she had just observed. Though most of the liquid had spilled, he gratefully gulped what remained. Watching Rick speed up, she was proud of him. He looked back and waved. She waved encouragingly in return. As the distance between them increased, he kept glancing back bemusedly at her. She kept smiling and waving.

  Once he was gone from view, Gwen was sad. How long has it been since he’s seen me look at him that way, she wondered. She forced herself to view their relationship objectively. They made love rarely. She rarely was curious about what he was thinking. Gwen couldn’t avoid the logical next question. Was he weighing whether to leave her? He must be asking himself whether staying was worth it.

  Dwelling on this possibility was too disturbing. She preferred dissecting the antecedents of their estrangement and recalled something Rick had said after she canceled a movie date because of an emergency meeting.

  “Will any of those people come visit you when you’re old and sick?”

  At the time, she thought he was being selfish. He didn’t appreciate how important her work was, how good she was at it. She hadn’t bothered to consider his question. Now she did. The answer was obvious. Only Kevin would come.

  Gwen woke up at six on Monday and typed a reference list for her chapter. She was dimly aware of Rick and Eva as they arose and left. At eight, she drove to Proctor, the middle school where Rick still taught. He had asked her to talk to his sixth grade students about AIDS.

  She intentionally arrived early to watch the kids. Proctor’s blurred racial boundaries delighted her. A tall, blond girl was chattering with a dark-skinned girl whose parents, Rick had told her, were black and Filipino. A boy whose mother was white and father Korean passed a note to a child whose parents were immigrants from Guatemala.

  From behind her, Gwen heard a girl’s voice her say, “AIDS is that kinky sex disease.”

  There was collective tittering. Gwen pretended to search for something in her purse.

  “No, it’s like the Black Plague in the Middle Ages. It’s killing thousands of people.”

  “It’s a weapon that orcs use in Dungeons and Dragons.”

  “Let’s settle down,” boomed Rick.

  The room was suddenly silent, which amused Gwen. At home, Rick was laid back. At school, he was nothing but business. Three months into the fall semester, these kids had capitulated to his authority.

  Gwen fantasized Rick being assertive outside of Proctor, more driven by purpose, more ambitious. She stopped herself. How could I want that? I detested it in Daniel. In fact, taking oneself too seriously was a flaw she saw in nearly all the men she knew. Rick had grown up in a small New England town near the Canadian border where he had been spared much of the indignity and damage that Jim Crow did to black men in the 1950s. Part of his initial appeal had been his open-minded, non-judgmental attitude. She felt co
mfortable with him, for the same reason she was comfortable with Nan. Despite occasional insecurities, neither ever behaved like they had something to prove. If this trait was appealing in Nan, why was she ambivalent about it in Rick? Did she really want him to be driven, or had she failed to root out the vestiges of sexist brainwashing she had been subjected to as a girl?

  Gwen heard conspiratorial whispers.

  “Quiet!” boomed Rick again.

  He scanned the room, a police photographer gathering evidence for future indictments.

  “We have a guest today,” he announced. “Dr. Howard is going to tell you about a dangerous new disease and how you can protect yourself from getting it.”

  Gwen began by asking if the sixth-graders knew what caused AIDS. Their answers included blood poisoning, cancer, and street drugs. She took a piece of chalk and made a single dot on the blackboard. Next to the dot, she drew a giant, crude microscope with a disembodied eye peering into the lens. That got her a laugh.

  “AIDS is caused by a virus so small it can only be seen by using the world’s most powerful microscopes.”

  She made a circle, slightly bigger than the dot.

  “Our bodies have defender cells like this one. They travel around inside us and kill invader bugs that can make us sick.”

  She drew an X through the circle.

  “The AIDS virus is different from other viruses, like the ones that cause chickenpox or colds, because the AIDS virus can destroy these defender cells.”

  She paused for questions. There were none.

  “OK, any idea how people might catch this virus?”

  Again silence, the typical response Gwen received from middle school children. She suspected some of them did know the answer, though to say so at their age and in front of adults could entail merciless ostracism. She had given these talks at high schools and knew many teens understood how transmission occurred. A few had the self-confidence to speak up about it. Behavioral scientists had told her peer education was the best strategy to prevent AIDS from becoming a world epidemic of unprecedented mortality.

  They believed sixth grade was the optimal time to encourage those with the potential to influence their peers’ opinions about sex.

  Gwen raised two fingers and said, “There are two ways you can catch this virus. One, have unprotected sex with someone who already has the infection. Or two, inject drugs into your body with a needle that’s been used by someone who is infected. If you avoid those two activities, the virus can’t get inside you. It’s simple.”

  Stone silence.

  “Now, what does ‘unprotected sex’ mean?” she asked rhetorically. “It’s when a man who is not wearing a condom, also called a rubber, puts his penis into a woman’s vagina…or into a woman’s anus…or into a man’s anus.”

  “Rubber” elicited smirks, but eyebrows furrowed each time Gwen said “anus.”

  “Or when a man puts his penis in another person’s mouth, or someone puts their tongue into a woman’s vagina.”

  “Eeeew!” shrieked the class.

  “Why would anyone want to do that?” wailed one of the girls.

  IV

  KEVIN SNEAKED INTO THE clinic building through a back entrance on Monday morning. When he was safe inside his office, he phoned his personal assistant, Freddy, who brought in an armload of mail, faxes, and phone messages. Kevin noticed the door had been left open. He stood up in alarm.

  “No one’s out there,” Freddy reassured him.

  “Not yet,” he said, closing the door.

  Kevin had been flirting with fame since the summer of 1985 when reporters verified the rumor that Rock Hudson, icon of wholesome American masculinity and friend of President Reagan, was in Paris to get an experimental treatment for AIDS. Before the movie star was outed, the media had viewed AIDS as inconsequential, a fatal illness limited to social deviants. Afterwards, any change in the who, what, or how of the disease made national news, and Kevin had become popular as a source for expert comments.

  However, once the AZT trial results made headlines, his celebrity became an affliction. The media wanted interviews in time to meet their deadlines, while the university’s public relations people insisted on controlling their access to him. Activists wanted any barrier to AZT availability eliminated immediately. They were under the delusion that Kevin had the power to make this happen. Worse, he was getting twenty or more phone calls a day from desperate patients, parents, siblings, and influential friends begging for the drug, which he had no means of obtaining.

  On the other hand, grants and private donations to his program had tripled in the last year, and the money wasn’t likely to plateau soon. Kevin was able to recruit additional faculty. He had hired Freddy, a godsend who screened phone calls, took care of scheduling, and generally ran interference for him. Kevin also bought decent office furniture after a visiting congresswoman had looked at his scarred, institutional desk and chairs as though they were a homeless man’s bedroll and shopping cart.

  The intercom on his desk buzzed. Kevin punched a button.

  “Are you still meeting David at nine?” Freddy responded.

  “I am.”

  “It’s nine fifteen. Shall I send him in?”

  “Yes, please. Thank you, Freddy.”

  He heard tapping on his door. David Ross, a man in his mid-thirties with a thick black beard, wire-rim glasses, and a halo of tightly curled hair, took a tentative step into his office.

  “Come on in. Making progress with the foscarnet protocol?”

  Kevin had hired David directly from his fellowship at UCLA with the immunologist who in 1981 had discovered the key defect of AIDS—an absence of helper T cells. As soon as David joined the AIDS program at City Hospital, Kevin assigned him responsibility for treating the clinic’s retinitis patients and urged him to develop a research plan for this complication of AIDS, a condition caused by a normally innocuous microbe, cytomegalovirus, which could infect the eyes of people whose immune systems were too weak to restrain it. The disease inevitably led to blindness, if the person survived long enough. There was only one medication that could halt the retinal destruction, and it often caused severe blood toxicity. Kevin wanted David to test a promising experimental drug, foscarnet, which had a very different side effect profile. David promptly found a pharmacologist on the Hill with the equipment to measure concentrations of foscarnet in blood samples. Together, they were designing a protocol to give the medication in escalating doses to retinitis patients.

  “I was in Angela’s lab,” said David excitedly. “We were talking about the case reports of seizures and cardiac arrests that have occurred in transplant patients treated with foscarnet. It’s going to be a major safety issue, right? Based on the drug’s molecular structure, it makes total sense it would bind serum calcium, doesn’t it? So that could be the mechanism by which it caused a seizure or a cardiac arrest, right?

  David wasn’t even giving Kevin the time to agree with him.

  “So I said, ‘Let’s get some plasma. You can draw my blood. We’ll spike it with the drug. If I’m right, the calcium will drop, won’t it?’ I mean, this won’t win a Nobel Prize, but nobody’s nailed down the toxicity mechanism. And if we know that, we can avoid killing people with the drug. Right? Right?”

  David was now bouncing on the balls of his feet. Kevin instinctively shrank back, afraid David might be having a manic break. Then he grasped David’s perfect logic. He patted his protégé on the shoulder.

  “Good job,” Kevin said. “Go for it.”

  David gave a clipped shout “Yes!” and bounded out the door.

  V

  KEEPING AN EYE ON the clock, Kevin typed furiously. It was one week past the deadline for turning in a review of the manuscript spread across his desk. Few things aggravated him more than waiting for a journal’s decision on whether they would accept one of his papers. Now he was the cause of delay for another author.

  The door opened slightly. He heard Gwen say, “You OK?”
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  “Yup,” Kevin replied, continuing to type.

  “Want to talk?”

  “Sure.”

  She closed the door behind her.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Marco’s the same.”

  The tension that often animated Gwen, especially when she had nothing left in reserve, subsided. She crept into a chair and watched his fingers fly over the keyboard like a concert pianist. She couldn’t type at half his speed.

  “One minute,” he said.

  “No problem.”

  Maybe this is how he escapes, she thought. It must be nice to be fully absorbed in data—all true or false, no shades of gray, no attachment, no pain or loss.

  Kevin turned off the computer screen and began complaining about the AIDS Action Committee.

  “Marco won’t meet the criteria for AZT. Are we whining? These people are such entitlement babies.”

  “Dealing with them must be so hard for you.”

  “It’s all hard,” he said, glumly.

  She got up and stood behind him to massage his neck.

  “You OK?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” she said in a soothing murmur.

  “Gwen, sit down. There’s something I need to tell you.”

  Terrified, she obeyed. Gwen had never asked Kevin if he had been tested. No one did that here. Anything other than self-disclosure was tacitly understood to be absolutely forbidden. And if someone were to out a co-worker as HIV-infected, she imagined no one would ever speak to her again.

  “I don’t want to keep this a secret any more, not between us. I’m positive.”

  Gwen didn’t move.

  “But my T cells are 400, and they’ve been pretty much stable since I found out.”

  Her color turned ashen.

  “I should have told you sooner.”

  “No, no. I understand…how difficult…When did you find out?”

  “Six months ago. Marco made me get tested.”

  “Who else knows?”

  “Marco and Katherine. That’s all I want, for now.”

  She nodded vigorously, hoping it would keep the flood of grief from seeping into her eyes.