The Wild Swans

by Peg Kerr

  Patty pursed her lips and absently rubbed the mole at the corner of her mouth with one finger. “This may sound strange, but I believe in reincarnation, you see,” she said slowly. “I believe that sometime, in a previous life, someone turned to me for help ... and I didn’t give it. I was afraid to help then, I think. Something about Mikel’s death made me remember that. And I decided I just couldn’t be afraid this time. I couldn’t make the same mistake again. You have to return to your mistakes and correct them. Even if it’s several lifetimes later.”

  “If I knew ...” Elias paused and then sighed. “If I only knew why this is happening to us.”

  Patty gave him another one of those unsettlingly penetrating looks. “Why do you think?”

  Elias hesitated, remembering the conversation he’d had with Sean the night before Sean had told him of his diagnosis. “A friend of mine, Gordy, says ... it’s a curse,” he said slowly.

  “Interesting theory.” Patty smiled crookedly. “Sounds like something out of a fairy tale.”

  Elias shrugged and began sorting and pairing socks.

  “Hmph. Goodness and virtue always win out in the end in fairy tales, don’t they? A very simple idea, really: the powerful AIDS witch, going around, zapping the wicked.” She assumed an evil leer, flourishing an imaginary magic wand. “Whap! Take that, naughty boy! An appealing idea to those who prefer their morality ... uncomplicated.

  “Too bad for them real life ain’t so black and white.”

  The following afternoon Rick appeared at Elias’s elbow as Elias clocked out. “Got a minute?” He jerked with his chin toward his tiny office.

  “Sure,” Elias said, surprised, and followed him in. “What’s up?” he asked, sitting down as Rick closed the door.

  Rick picked up his coffee cup, fingered it absently for a moment, and then seemed to realize it was empty and put it down again. “The shop’s been sold. To a chain. They have their own manager they want to bring in and ... well, Friday’s my last day.”

  Elias felt cold delicately creeping in the pit of his stomach, like the first sheet of ice spreading over the Pond in early winter. “Oh, shit. Rick.” He stopped, tried to collect his thoughts. “Are you ... ? Do you ...

  ?”

  “S’okay.” Rick shook his head and gave him a little wave of the fingers. “It was my decision to go, really. I could have stayed on for a bit in sales if I’d wanted to.”

  “After managing the shop for thirteen years? Oh, c’mon, Rick!”

  “Exactly.” Rick’s smile looked more like a grimace. He looked around at the walls of his office, as if noticing them for the first time in a long time. “It’s probably a good idea for me to get off my goddamn butt and do something different. Jenny’s job’s going okay, so we’ll be all right until I find something.” He hesitated. “Elias, look ... if I find another job in management and I’ve got an opening on staff, I’ll let you know about it. In case you ever get into a jam. I mean, I hope things’ll work out for you with these new people—”

  “But... ?” Elias raised an eyebrow.

  Rick sighed. “I don’t want to poison the well. I’ve tried to smooth the way for you—told them you were my best on staff. But when chains buy independents, they like to clean house, so your chance of hanging on to this job may be slim to none, anyway. And I think you should know that the guy who’s going to be the manager, Carl—well, he strikes me as kind of a bigot.” Rick shifted uncomfortably, avoiding Elias’s eyes. “I heard him make a couple of fag jokes.”

  “Oh.”

  “So you’re gonna have to do some thinking about how badly you want to try to hang on to this job. If you do, you might need to play your cards close to the vest. For your own protection.”

  “Stay in the closet, you mean. Keep my mouth shut.”

  “Not with me.” Now Rick met his angry stare steadily. “Never with me. But I’m not the manager anymore.”

  “I see.” Elias sighed. “I understand. Thanks for telling me. And I’m sorry, Rick. About your job, I mean.”

  “Yeah.” A gloomy silence fell. Rick broke it after a moment, his gaze going to the picture on the wall of Sean, playing his guitar. “How’s Sean doing?” he asked gruffly.

  Elias looked down. “Not good.”

  Rick nodded, the drawn lines around his mouth making him look strangely older. “I’m sorry, too.”

  The conversation with Rick was the first in a whole series of incidents that began soon after Sean fell ill.

  “What’s wrong with your roommate?” Elias heard a voice say behind him one morning as he went out into the hall to run out the garbage.

  Elias looked around and saw their landlord staring at him, the little sour-faced man Sean called Dick-the-dick. “Uh ... what makes you ask?” he stammered, startled out of his private thoughts.

  “He looks damn sick.”

  “I... He’s just kind of run down,” Elias said lamely. He stuffed the bag of rubbish down the incinerator chute, feeling his face heating up. He hadn’t meant to lie, hadn’t even thought about what he would say if asked about Sean by someone who didn’t have any business to know.

  “Huh.” The other man bounced up and down on his heels, his stare uncomfortably measuring. “That better be all there is to it. Don’t want people to have any reason to be afraid to come into the building.”

  “What?” Elias said stupidly, unable to understand the implication at first. Once he did, he felt trapped, furious, afraid. What did the man think, that he’d lose all his tenants if it became known that someone who had AIDS lived in the building? He just stood there, unable to think of any retort stinging enough. Finally, the landlord shrugged. “There better not be any trouble about the rent getting paid on time.”

  He walked away to his own apartment, slamming the door behind him.

  Then there was the time he came home to find Sean just hanging up the phone, his face red and grim.

  “That was Leo,” Sean said, “passing along a message from Nick.”

  “What, is the music party canceled tonight?”

  “It is,” Sean said bitterly, “for me. Leo says Nick doesn’t want me to come. Amy’s afraid to have me there.”

  It took a moment before Elias could bring himself to speak, for the blow seemed so unexpected, not to mention cruel. He knew how Sean loved the music parties and husbanded his scant strength for each one; sometimes the contact with other musicians seemed to be the only thing that kept him going. “I... can’t believe ... can’t believe that Nick—”

  “Amy’s pregnant,” Sean broke in, his voice trying to sound matter-of-fact, although the bleakness in his eyes showed what it cost him. “I... can understand it. She’s scared.” He looked over at his guitar case in the corner. “But the bloody bastard didn’t even have the guts to tell me himself.”

  Something vital seemed to go out of Sean after that. The guitar and harp cases began to gather dust, too, like the weight machine, and he stayed in bed more and more. The fungal infection in his mouth that had bothered him since August worsened, and the fever he ran every day crept up higher. Then he began to complain of pain when he swallowed, and to Elias’s alarm, his weight loss started accelerating. Prompted by Patty and at Elias’s insistence, Sean reluctantly went back to the doctor, who recommended hospitalization to start him on an antibiotic IV. After almost a week of arguments, Sean finally consented to be admitted.

  But despite the antibiotics, Sean’s difficulty eating continued, even with a range of drugs prescribed by a gastroenterologist. So the next step was an endoscopic biopsy, in which a flexible fiber-optic tube was inserted down Sean’s throat to examine his esophagus. The doctor looked serious when he gave them the diagnosis: the thrush had developed into severe esophageal candidiasis.

  “I recommend,” he said carefully, “that you have a catheter inserted into your chest. The surgery to install the catheter is relatively minor; we can use a local anesthetic. It will give us better access to your blood system to continue the an
tibiotics to fight your fever, and we’d need it, too, for the antifungal drug I have in mind that I’d like to try.”

  “How long will I need to keep the catheter in?”

  There was a short pause. “Perhaps indefinitely. We have to get those ulcers in your esophagus under control or you’ll keep losing weight. You’ll need to be in the hospital, on the drug for at least six to eight weeks to start.”

  “Six to eight weeks!” Sean exclaimed, exchanging a stunned look with Elias. “And then what?”

  The doctor hesitated. “You do understand that since your immune system is suppressed, if we stop giving you the drag ...” His words trailed off and Sean winced.

  “So there’s no guarantee I’ll ever get off it again?”

  The doctor shook his head.

  Sean looked at his feet, stony-faced, for a long moment. “Okay, okay,” he said finally. “Do whatever you have to do.”

  The doctor nodded and stood. “I’m going to go speak with my P.A. to start the process of setting up the surgery.”

  After he left the room, Sean said, “Well, there goes the world tour. The penguins are going to be so disappointed.”

  “Not necessarily,” Elias managed. “It’s ... a temporary setback. Maybe ... maybe, if you get the drug, soon you’ll get better enough that they can discharge you. Or we could learn to give you the medicines at home.”

  “Huh. I’m no expert, but it doesn’t sound from what he said like I’m going home anytime soon.”

  Elias swallowed, not sure where to find die line between reassurance and meaningless lies. “We’re in this together, Sean.”

  “Sure,” Sean replied. His face had the expression of a man overtaken by disaster, like a mountain climber who steps in a place he thinks is solid that instead turns out to be a thin snow crust over a bottomless crevasse.

  Two days later, when Sean had the catheter installed, Elias took the day off work to be with him. During die surgery, Elias sat in the small adjoining waiting room, staring out the window at rain-drenched gray and barren rooftops. It was depressing. The air stank of hospital disinfectant and stale cigarette smoke. The drone from the wall-mounted television in the corner mingled with the murmur from the nurses’ station and the thumps and mechanical groans from the ancient elevator down the hall. The view from die window didn’t change, however, and so after a while he turned his attention to the people passing in the hall. Orderlies trundled oxygen equipment by, followed by housekeepers pushing linen carts. Patients shuffled up and down the corridor in their bathrobes, their slippers making flapping sounds against the scarred linoleum. A resident stepped outside a room across the hall, made a notation on a chart, and dropped the cupboard back into the rack with a clatter. A man and woman got off the elevator and went to speak with someone at the nurses’ station. Visitors, maybe. Other workers walked by briskly on other mysterious errands, badges clipped to their hospital uniforms. Were they doctors, nurses, medical students, dieticians, social workers? Or something else? It occurred to Elias that he would probably be learning more about hospitals in the next several months than he could possibly ever want to know.

  “You’re waiting to hear about Mr. Donnelly, aren’t you?”

  Elias turned and saw the woman in surgical scrubs standing in the doorway, eyebrows raised in inquiry. She looked tired.

  “Yes. He’s out of surgery?”

  “Uh-huh. Everything went fine. They’ll be wheeling him down to room 408 in a few minutes, if you’d care to wait for him there.”

  He went to the assigned room, where he lingered impatiently in the doorway, looking up and down the hall, watching for Sean’s arrival. Finally, two orderlies came around the corner, pushing a litter carrying Sean.

  “Look—there he is.”

  “John!”

  The man and woman he’d seen at the nurses’ station suddenly broke into a half run, following the litter. The woman seized Sean’s hand and held on to it tightly. Her eyes eagerly searched Sean’s face with such avid attention that she almost tripped over her own feet as she hurried alongside. Elias stared. He had never seen them before.

  Sean turned his head woozily to squint up at her. “ ‘lias?” he rasped.

  Elias cleared his throat and stepped aside from the doorway. “I’m here, Sean,” he said. The woman stopped abruptly, brought up short by Elias’s voice. She allowed Sean’s hand to slip out of hers and stared at Elias with an expression of unreadable intensity as the orderlies turned the litter to push it into the room. The man came up beside her and stared at Elias, too, his hand creeping up to touch the woman’s shoulder.

  “Wha‘ you two doing here?” Sean said, managing to sound at once accusatory and rather groggy. The man cleared his throat. “Rick called us.”

  “I’ll have his hide.” Sean coughed, a long hacking spasm, as the orderlies lowered the bed rail and transferred him to the bed. “No reason f you to come from Boston for this.” One orderly transferred the IV bag to the pole by Sean’s bed and then both orderlies left, taking the litter with them.

  “John. Please. Of course we wanted to come.” The woman appeared to be on the edge of tears.

  “I told you. I go by Sean now.” Sean lay back wearily and pulled the sheet up, hiding the place where the new tube emerged from his chest.

  “I’m ... I’m sorry,” she stammered. “Of course ... I’ll try to remember.” She bit her lip. These people must be Sean’s parents, Elias realized, thunderstruck. Well, his father and stepmother, anyway. He felt suddenly, deeply ashamed: he hadn’t even thought of contacting them to let them know Sean was in the hospital, nor had it occurred to him to ask Sean if he had. The woman looked at Elias. “May we come in?” she asked him humbly, with a tone that suggested she rather expected him to refuse.

  Entirely alarmed at being asked to make this decision, Elias stammered, “Well, of course ... but you understand Sean hasn’t been feeling ... uh ...”

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” Sean said pettishly. “You didn’t make the trip down here to stand outside in the hall. Come on in.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, they all filed into the room and found places around Sean’s bed. The woman took the only chair, and Elias and Sean’s father found places to lean against the wall. The other bed was empty. An awkward silence fell.

  Elias broke it finally, holding out his hand to Sean’s stepmother. “I’m Elias Latham. I’m pleased to meet you, Mrs. Donnelly.”

  She accepted the handshake without hesitation. “And I’m glad to meet you at last, Elias. But please, call me Janet.”

  “Sorry,” Sean said, apparently belatedly recalling his social duties. “And Elias, this is my father, Jim Donnelly.”

  Another pause, and then Sean’s father stuck out his hand, too. “Hello, Elias.” His smile looked strained around the eyes. He glanced at his son and the smile disappeared. This is surreal Janet didn’t seem to know where to look. She stared down at her hands, twisting in her lap, then at Sean, with little darting glances at Elias. He had the impression she was bursting to talk, but his presence somehow made it impossible for her to begin.

  “Sean,” Elias said impulsively, “I’m going to step out for a few moments to ... urn, smoke a cigarette.”

  Sean raised an eyebrow at this patent lie but he merely nodded. “You really gotta give up those cigarettes, Elias,” he said with a straight face. “They’re gonna ruin your health.”

  Elias escaped out of the room, a bubble of something semihysterical welling up inside him. He walked quickly down the hall, past the nurses’ station, and collapsed on the battered couch set by the elevators. There he sat, doubled over with laughter for a long time, until the laughter spent itself out, leaving behind only bitter residue that twisted itself into hiccuping sobs. Pulling off his glasses and covering his face with his hands, he fought to control himself, as tears and snot ran down his hands. People passed by, getting on and off the elevators, but no one stopped or paid the slightest attention to him. He found tha
t obscurely comforting.

  Finally, he lowered his hands, wiped them on his jeans, and slumped against the couch back, curled up in misery. Bleak light shone through the grimy window, making him blink. His real name isn’t even Sean. He watched the dazzling motes of dust in the air for a long time and then finally closed his eyes against the glare, his head hurting, and tried to think.

  He remembered a play he’d seen once—the main character had a speech about how each person was made up of layers, like an onion. And if you peeled away each layer, trying to find an essential core, all you ended up with in the end was nothingness. The idea had made him angry at the time. What was the name of that play again? Somebody Danish had written it—no, Norwegian. Ibsen, wasn’t it? He’d remember the name of the play eventually.

  A stark picture of Sean’s wasting body and sunken eyes hovered in his mind. Well, Sean was certainly being peeled away, layer by layer of flesh now, he thought numbly. Stripped down to a shell, literally. Soon, very soon, he was going to find out whether anything was really beneath that shell.

  “Elias?” a soft voice said beside him.

  He opened his eyes. “Mrs.—uh, Janet.” He straightened up self-consciously and put his glasses back on.

  “Sean seems tired, and so Jim and I are about to leave for the hotel—here’s the name and number if you need to reach us. We’ll be back tomorrow.” She handed him a slip of paper with the hotel information scribbled on it, hesitated, and then sat down beside him. She didn’t ask for permission this time. “Rick told us how you’ve been caring for him, how much you’ve done for him. I just wanted to say

  ... thank you.” She smiled, but her mouth trembled. “Since we haven’t been here to be much help. I’m sorry for that. It’s not... It’s just that we didn’t know.”