by Susan Conley
Truffaut buzzes me in. I sit with Gita in the common room and try to stay focused. HIV. HIV. I’ve got to go find Luke. It’s quiet at nine in the morning on Sunday at the center. Most of the girls are working in the kitchen or in their rooms. Gita stands in front of the couch and smiles shyly. She’s holding the typed pages of what we’ve written. “Speak as loudly as you can,” I say. “Look the judge in the eye, if possible. Look the attorneys in the eye. We need to make them realize how believable you are.”
“Speak the truth,” Sophie says from the door. “Only the truth. They know lies when they hear them.”
Gita repeats the story five times. She keeps standing up and sitting down and pacing to the windows. “I will not do it well. I am too nervous. I will forget what to say.”
“But that’s okay,” I say. “The judge and Mr. Ventri will have the written version—copies of this very one we’ve typed on paper, Gita. Mr. Ventri can help you if you lose your way.”
Sophie smiles. “You have everything you need right there on the paper.”
“I am not sure I can do this,” Gita says again. “Mr. Ventri said I will need to stand in the courtroom and that I will be doing a lot of talking, and I cannot talk for very long without becoming nervous.” She starts to cry.
Oh, God. We are all falling apart today. “You came to France legally,” I say. “This is going to be okay, Gita. This is going to be good. Please don’t cry. You are great at talking, Gita. Talking isn’t a weakness of yours. Mr. Ventri will hand the judge a copy of your story. Then you get to recite it out loud. This is your chance to tell them. You’ve been waiting so long to explain.”
“I think you should go take a break now,” Sophie says. “I think you’re tired, Gita.”
We work through her testimony two more times. Her story sounds convincing and true. Because it is true. I stand up from the couch. I’ve got to go find Luke before the hospital calls him. “You are good.” I smile at her. “You are so good at speaking this.” No one will be able to deny her asylum. Her story is irreproachable.
She reaches for my wrist. “Do you mean that? Do you really mean what you say?”
“I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t believe it, Gita. Go rest now. Go have lunch. I’ve got to go see my brother.”
“He is unwell?”
“He is sick today, yes. He is not good today.”
She widens her eyes. “I am so sorry to know this. You must go to him. You must go now.”
ON MY WAY DOWN Boulevard de Strasbourg, I pass the market on the corner and buy broccoli. Luke will have an onion in the drawer below the toaster, and milk and butter and cheese in the refrigerator. The sun is still high and bright and menacing. It follows me when I get into the cab. Sometimes my mother made soup when Luke didn’t get a part he wanted in a school play or when I was going to be up late writing a paper. She’d leave it warming on the stove for us when she went to bed. Cream of mushroom. Clam chowder. Cream of broccoli. I loved her soups. I want to make one for Luke. It will help us. We need help.
I get to his apartment, let myself in, and yell, “Hallooooo!” He doesn’t yell anything back. I tiptoe into the bedroom. He’s asleep. This is good. This means no one at the hospital has called him yet. I go back to the kitchen and cut the broccoli and wash it and slice the onion and grate the cheese. I don’t think of anything except how to make the soup.
When the soup’s done, I get the ladle out of the drawer and fill two bowls and walk them into my brother’s room on a tray.
“You knew all along, didn’t you?” he yells at me. What’s he talking about? There’s spit in the corners of his mouth. His nose is red and swollen from where he’s pressed it against his hands. “I keep calling Gaird in Amsterdam, and he doesn’t answer. I think he’s moved there. He’s left me and you’re just not brave enough to tell me!” He rolls from side to side on the bed, banging his head against the headboard and scraping the skin on his scalp with his fingernails.
I stand frozen on the rug. Is he losing his mind? Is this dementia? How have we gotten to this place so quickly? He’s unhinging. Jesus, what do I do? I have no idea where Gaird is. Why isn’t he calling? Where the hell is he? Luke screams again, and I can see the tendons strain in his neck. “You just let me think he’d come home!” He punches his pillow. “All those kids in Tiananmen Square are about to be dead. What government would do such a thing?”
“A depraved government.” It’s the only question I can accurately answer.
“And I’m alone now. Don’t you see? Don’t you even begin to understand?”
“You’re not alone.” I mean it as much as it’s possible to mean anything I say. Even when words feel insufficient, I still believe they matter. They save lives. Offer a rope. A foothold.
“You can’t save me. I know what’s wrong with me, Willie.” His sobs shake his whole body and come from his chest, not his throat. I sit down on the bed and rub his back. I want him to feel my hand on him. I can’t bear that he’s so alone. “They called with the lab results this morning. It’s HIV. It’s fucking HIV.” He starts to sob again.
Shit. “You’re not alone,” I whisper again. It’s all I can think of to say. Why did they fucking call him? Why didn’t I come sooner? “I’m right here, and Gaird hasn’t left you. He’s just slow coming home.”
“It’s AIDS, Willie. I have AIDS. You have to see that.” He can hardly speak, he’s crying so hard. “I’ve dreaded it and now it’s here.”
“Oh, Luke, hang on. Hang on. Please. Slow. Slow down if you can. You don’t have AIDS.”
His best friend in high school was a boy named Roger, who came to our house to draw cartoons with Luke almost every day. They made really good graphic novels at our kitchen table about space travel and life on the moon. Roger got sick five years ago in San Francisco. The doctors called it pneumonia. It happened quickly. That was the most terrifying part. I went with my brother to see him over Thanksgiving, when Luke was back from Beijing. We drove to Noe Valley and walked up the hill to Roger’s apartment in the morning fog. He’d set up his life on the pullout couch in his small living room because he was too weak to make it upstairs. It was dark inside the apartment. Any kind of light hurt his eyes.
This was 1984. They didn’t have the name for it yet, so they kept using the word “pneumonia.” It was shocking to see how sick Roger was. Luke’s dear friend. The gorgeous boy from high school, skeletal and going blind. His eyes swam in his thin face. He looked mournful, too, like a child but with the wisdom of a very old man.
I start crying in Luke’s bedroom. “I’m listening,” I say. “I’m right here.” We are just the two of us, away from our home. My mind moves to doctors’ appointments and hospital visits and how is Luke going to manage?
“Gaird’s always come back to me. But it’s been more than a week. I only got to talk to him the one time. He didn’t sound like himself. He sounded guilty, Willie. Like someone who was leaving without saying good-bye. It was his idea to live here in Paris. God, I truly hate this apartment now. His clothes are in that dresser, and his reading glasses are on the sink in the bathroom, where he forgot them. How could he just leave me?”
I rub Luke’s neck and between his shoulder blades, and the muscles in his back. He stays quiet while I do this. My mother would have been calm. She would have told Luke that he wasn’t going to die, and he would have believed her. He made her laugh in a way that no one else did, and he understood her sarcasm and her curiosity and how she was a mix of those two things.
My mother was attracted to urgent people. She would have liked Gita because of this. What would she have made of Gaird? Is he really on a tugboat somewhere near Holland? Can that be? Who will love Luke the way Gaird loved him? It’s the middle of the afternoon now and the sun is thankfully gone, replaced by a gray rain that a new batch of wind has brought in.
Luke falls asleep on the bed, and I begin all over again in my mind: Where’s my mother? What would she say to Luke? What would she say to Gita? I fi
nally get up and call Macon at the apartment. “I’m here with him.”
“How is he?”
“Over the edge. He thinks Gaird’s left him for good. He thinks he’s dying.”
“It’s too much.”
“I’m sleeping here. I’ll take him to the hospital in the morning.”
“Should I meet you there? Do you want me to come?”
“I think I’m okay. I have to be okay, right? This is just the start.”
THE CHINESE ARMY opened fire on the protesters in the square last night, and Luke screams about this the whole ride to the hospital. He was on the phone at dawn, talking to his people there. This time the nurse takes us down a different hall. She’s the same woman with the copper-colored perm who took Luke’s blood last week. She wears a blue face mask and has on purple latex gloves. I can tell by the way her eyes widen that she recognizes us. And that she’s scared. HIV. We’re put in the old part of the hospital, where it feels almost deserted. Almost quarantine. The room is cold and ancient. The concrete walls are a dirty cream color and bare. The gray stone floor looks cold, which is how I imagine all the floors in medieval convents must look. A wooden desk sits in the corner next to a black metal scale.
She hands Luke a blue cotton robe. I can’t stop staring at her and her face mask. I can’t tell what her mouth is doing. Is she smiling, even faintly? Frowning at us? Disapproving? I’ve heard of doctors who’ve gotten the virus from their infected patients. But they’ve been surgeons. Dentists. I understand the fear. But the mask heightens things. There’s something about it that screams emergency. We Have An Emergency. When really we don’t. We just have Luke. Sitting quietly up on the high examining table covered in crinkly white paper. And me. His neurotic sister perched on the metal chair next to him.
“My name is Joséphine.” This time she speaks in French. “I’ll be back to do more blood work while we wait for Dr. Picard.”
Luke takes off his shirt. There are two red sores under his right collarbone the size of quarters, scabbed and inflamed. I try not to show my shock. The sores are terrifying. Roger had those sores.
Joséphine scans Luke’s arms for good veins and slides the needle in, saying “I don’t mean to hurt you” through the face mask. She takes two vials of his blood.
Dr. Picard walks in while she’s putting on the Band-Aid. He’s got the lab coat, unbuttoned over a blue-and-white thinly striped shirt. The tie is polka-dotted. His hair is in a short bowl cut that makes his face look wider and rounder than it really is. He doesn’t sport the face mask. But he’s wearing the gloves. His are the pale skin-colored ones I’m used to from the States. He shakes Luke’s hand. “Hallo, hallo,” he says in English with his thick French accent. “I am disappointed in your labs. We didn’t want the T cell count to plummet.”
“The numbers aren’t so good, are they?” Luke smiles, but I see tears pooling in the corners of his eyes.
“The numbers will vacillate. But you have the immune system of a very compromised person now. You must take every precaution. Do you know what that means?”
“I’ve had friends die of AIDS, Dr. Picard. Good friends. They were alone at the end of their lives because their families worried that the disease was contagious. Please don’t sentence me to that kind of death.”
“Luke,” I say. “Stop. You’re not dying.” I sound strong and convincing. It’s all show for him. The disease scares me completely.
“Your sister is right.” Picard puts down the file he’s been holding. “You will be pleased to know that I want you surrounded by as many friends and as much family as you can stomach. You have a lot of living left to do. We are not talking about dying today. We are talking about how to lengthen your life. But HIV is very contagious in certain bodily fluids. Not saliva, for example. But blood, yes. Start by using clean needles if you take intravenous drugs.”
“I don’t ever.”
“Use condoms whenever you have sex. Do not practice unsafe sex no matter who your partner is.”
“I do practice safe sex, and I only have one partner.”
“He should be checked right away.”
“I would tell him that if I knew where he was. He left me.”
Picard nods as if he hasn’t understood. “Please step on the scale.” It seems too much for any of us in this starkly lit room to acknowledge that this man, my brother, who has so much fighting to do, will have to do it alone without the person he thought loved him most.
Luke gets down off the examining table carefully, slowly. The scale is one of the old ones with the sliding metal arrow and numbers etched in ascending order by fives. “Just what I suspected,” the doctor says. “One hundred and fifty pounds for someone your height isn’t what we like to see.” He turns to me then. “His weight has fallen. C’est mauvais,” he adds in French for emphasis. “This isn’t what we want.” He asks Luke to open up his robe so he can listen to his chest with the stethoscope. The scabs look awful. Picard circles the area around each of them with his finger and bends to examine them more closely. “These sores are called Kaposi’s sarcomas,” he says matter-of-factly while he studies them. “They are a form of fairly benign cancer.”
“I thought so.” Luke closes his eyes. “Oh God, that’s just what I thought.”
“That’s what Roger had,” I say out loud. Then I look at Dr. Picard. “Luke’s best friend from high school.” No one I’ve known who’s had AIDS has lived long with it. Not my gay Chaucer professor from college, who got sick in 1987, or my grad school friend Blake, who fell in love with the man who ran a bike shop in Berkeley. They ended up ghosts of themselves. One with colon cancer. One with the scariest neurological disease I’ve ever heard of.
I want to take Luke’s hand and run. Where are we, really? Why France? Where is our father? I need to call him. I need to call Dad. “Is Kaposi’s a sign of more aggressive cancers we can’t see?” I ask, trying to keep myself together. I need to be the strong one here.
“We are monitoring everything. His T cell count is at five hundred. If we can keep him there, then we will ward off other opportunistic infections. We will be looking at his kidneys and liver. Luke has to gain more weight. It is one of the ways the body can fight off infections.”
“We’re all trying to get him more calories.” I look over at my brother. “Sometimes he doesn’t want to eat. Sometimes he can’t eat because he’s constipated or has diarrhea. Other days it goes well. I’m not sure where the food goes, though.”
“Well. He is certainly not gaining weight.” Picard pushes his bifocals up on his nose and takes in Luke’s thin face.
“If you had any suggestions for weight gain?” What I want to say is, give us some good news—some breakthrough, or something we can leave here with today.
Picard writes down the name of what he calls a high-calorie French vanilla drink. “You are to buy this at the pharmacy. It comes in cans by the case.” Then he closes Luke’s file. “Eat all the foods you ever wanted to eat, and then eat more. We will start AZT in a week or so once we have run our full battery of tests on the blood. AZT has shown some very good results in patients at slowing the disease.”
That’s it? That’s fucking it? A vanilla drink? I don’t want Luke or Picard to see my tears. I brush them off with my sleeve, and they slide down the sides of my face and under my ears. Luke changes out of the robe. Then I take my brother’s elbow. We walk down the hall to the elevator, then through the bright lobby with the colored seats and out to the parking lot—all without speaking. There’s nothing funny to say today.
Luke keeps his eyes closed in the car on the way home. He’s in pain. But I’m not sure exactly where it comes from. The sores on his chest? His lung? There’s a Nina Simone song in French on the radio that my mom used to play when Luke and I were young. “Music for lonely people,” I say out loud in the car.
Sometimes Mom would go to bed the morning after Dad left for a map trip. She didn’t like him to leave her. She fed off people. Luke and I were suppo
sed to play outside on those bad days. If we went inside, we had to whisper. Her bed looked out over the front yard and the eucalyptus tree and the gravel and a slice of the bay. We couldn’t go into her room, and I hated that separation from her. I hated that in missing Dad, she couldn’t receive me. I had so much to give her. I’d peek on my way to the bathroom and see her under a pile of blankets, and it was confusing. I wanted to help her brush her hair.
I turn down Boulevard Haussmann and drive toward Avenue Victor Hugo in the drizzle. Luke says, “I want to go to church.” I can’t look at him because there’s too much traffic. “I want to go to Chartres on the train. The famous cathedral.”
“Do you for some reason think I live in a small hole in the ground and don’t know what Chartres is?”
“I want to see the stained-glass windows. I’ve lived in France for five years, and I’ve never been to Chartres. How did I let that happen?”
“We can go. We can get you to Chartres. It won’t be a problem.” My hands are sweaty on the steering wheel. My heart’s beating faster again. He’s thinking about dying. How do I distract him?
“I’m going to throw up.”
“Hold on. Almost home. I’m so sorry, Luke. I’m so, so sorry.”