by Paul Monette
Which I badly needed, for I felt like a fugitive turning his ass in. I had to talk my way through an answering service and two nurses, explaining again and again that I had to speak with Dr. Robison now, since I had no number to leave. They all acted deeply offended, as if I was worse than a welfare case. I hated to use the word but finally bit the bullet: emergency. On hold for half a minute, I put out my tongue and flicked it obscenely at Gray, who laughed, a billow of smoke in the morning chill.
When Robison came on, I felt an instant flush of shame. Haltingly I chronicled my symptoms, the random blanks and then the bad event of the night before. Hearing myself now, I experienced the most peculiar memory trace—recalling the sweaty confessional in Chester, mumbling my boy's impurities through the grille to Father Donegan. I felt the same claustrophobia, even with the door open to the ocean air. And when Robison cut me off, directing me to report for tests to the neurology unit at Brentwood Presbyterian, I felt the same Catholic emptiness, punished without being heard. A lost soul, unforgivable, knowing it in my gut when I was twelve, because what the good Father was calling mortal sin would be my life.
I walked to the truck in a stupor. I told Gray where we were going, then slumped against the door in a daze of dread. None of it was any kind of surprise. We'd both known when we left the beach house, cutting out before anyone else was up, that a gauntlet of tests was in the offing. But now it was real. Gray let me be as we headed down the coast road, beating the rush hour. I had my own horrors to face, just steeling myself to walk in the doors at Brentwood Pres. The place where Mike Manihan died, eighty-five pounds and purple with lesions all over, like a rotting eggplant.
But then, there wasn't a hospital in the county where I hadn't sat one vigil or another. They dotted the city like the torture centers of some deranged tyrant. Nothing about them spoke to me of healing or sanctuary. Once you passed those portals it was all downhill, a delirious descent into the magma of pure suffering. Everything you ever loved was checked at the door, exchanged for a suit of prison grays. Later they sent somebody around to pry the gold from your teeth. Sorry, but they were out of local anesthetic.
We parked underground, in B-13. Carefully Gray jotted it down on the back of the parking ticket, as if there was any way out. In the elevator to the third floor he slipped his arm around my shoulder, and the orderly riding up with us instinctively stepped aside, fearing contamination. At Neurology Reception, I filled out about thirty-five forms, attesting to my abject poverty and formally begging the state to underwrite my care.
Twenty minutes later I was in a peach-flocked johnny gown, sitting in a wheelchair waiting for a CAT scan. The chair was mandated by hospital regulations, in case I had a foaming seizure. Gray waited on a bench beside me, grazing a finger along the back of my hand. I looked to the side and caught sight of us in the mirror steel of the double doors that led to X-ray. Already we seemed transformed, rocketed into the last stage, invalid/inmate and caretaker. My mood alternated black and blue.
By the time they'd run me through the Frankenstein maneuvers, zapping me with rads enough to light up Santa Monica, I felt as if I'd been disappeared. When they wheeled me out of X-ray, Dr. Robison was standing there in his white coat talking to Gray. They were almost exactly the same age, except Robison tipped in at two-seventy-five, a coronary waiting to happen. I'd always been oddly touched by Robison's girth, since it was so clearly a stress response to losing a patient a week. It was no picnic being a gay doctor. He'd pulled three plugs on friends of mine, so we'd known each other in combat.
"I can still count backwards," I announced grandly, wheeling into their midst, "and I can name you every Best Actress back to 1935, which should've gone to Garbo for Camille. My role model, I might add."
Robison grinned. "Sounds like end-stage dementia to me."
"Just start the morphine drip and let me sail, Doc."
Gray seemed more disoriented than I, hearing this manic banter. He didn't understand that I'd roped the good Robison—a Westside doc in a silver pearl Mercedes, not known for his care of indigents—by the fact of my small fame as a fringe comedian. Jocularity was de rigueur in all of our encounters. I fully expected to be gagging out one-liners around the ventilator tube when we got to the short strokes. Perhaps I was just overcompensating, guilty at being treated free, but I felt like Robison's last laugh.
"I think we better do a spinal," he said gently. At which my jaw locked involuntarily, and the free-floating anxiety seemed to hiss out of my ears. "You'll just be in overnight."
I licked my dry lips and nodded yes, unable to think of a quip. But even as Robison squeezed my shoulder and toddled off, all I could really see was my nephew. Two days left, and I would be spending one of them here. The beach house seemed impossibly distant from this place of torments. To get back there I would have to run away, change my name, go underground as deep as Brian. And something in me berated myself for losing it, as if this had all happened because I'd taken my desert island too much for granted.
"He says it could be nothing," Gray observed mildly.
"I want to die at the beach house. Not here."
"You're not going to die."
He said it without really thinking. In the silence that followed, as I raked him with a baleful look, I had no wish to punish him. It was only that we needed to share an awful moment of reality, eye to eye, the same unwavering gaze we had exchanged last night by firelight. Yes, I would die. Not today, unless the spinal technician was wired on uppers and let the needle slip. But this morning was the beginning, here in this castle whose only law was pain. Gray's eyes were suddenly sharp with an inexpressible mix of rage and grief. He must have wondered, now if not before, what he had signed on for.
Yet the moment served to help us catch our breath, honing our priorities. I stood up from the wheelchair like a cripple at a Baptist revival, and embraced him fiercely. "Just get me through this one," I whispered in his ear, as if I wouldn't be asking the same the next time and the next. What I meant was he should walk me through it a step at a time, because I couldn't put another foot in front of me alone. His arms gripping tight around me were all the response I needed to shake off the ghosts who roamed these halls.
As we turned toward the elevator a nurse called out, "You have to stay in that chair!" Gray and I swiveled our heads together, looking down our combined noses. She stood imperiously by her cart of meds, tipping two hundred herself. And we laughed more or less in her face, as if her bark had pricked a private joke in us—indeed, as if we had diplomatic immunity. She didn't repeat her command as we proceeded chairless into the lift.
The small victories get you through.
Fifth West was the AIDS wing. Here the smell of disinfectant was twice as pungent, as if the green-suited janitors went for overkill when they swabbed these floors. A black kid at the nurses' station, twenty-five and rail-thin, clearly on the bus, grandly assigned me to 509, purring like a concierge. Room 509 seemed far enough away from 531, where Mike Manihan had ridden out his last convulsions. As Gray and I headed down the hall, I pointed out the coffee closet and, farther on, the day room. Rigorously I averted my gaze from the open doors to patients' rooms.
But we paused at the door to the day room, with its shelves of videotapes and New Age bromides postering the walls. A frail and ancient boy in a gown just like my own looked up from the card table, where he was doing a jigsaw. I tried to stare at the puzzle, not David this time but a stupid Norman Rockwell barn on an autumn hillside. Tried to turn away without connecting.
And the boy took a labored breath and said: "Tom?"
His hollow face was bright with recognition, which only made it worse that I hadn't a clue who he was. Gray seemed to draw closer to me, blindly protective. "Ed Bernardo," said the wraith, pointing a bony finger at himself, and the worst of all was that I recognized the name and nothing more. The dwindling body before me was still a stranger—or no, he looked just like everyone else before the end.
"We got arrested
," he said, persisting, more and more animated. "Saint Vibiana's."
I gasped, I hope not in horror. "Of course," I blurted, a ghastly grin on my face, my temples pounding with the memory of the real Ed Bernardo. "Gray, this is Ed. We laid down in front of the archbishop's limo together."
Ed Bernardo laughed, sending himself into a fit of coughing. He looked as if he would die in front of us. Now I saw the tubes trailing out of his gown to the IV pole beside him. Not a friend at all, really, just a buddy from ACT/UP. Off and on over the last two years we'd picketed and railed together, our little band of urban guerrillas not going quietly, thank you. This was before the last wave of fatigue had beaten me down and my knee began to throb, rendering me too bitter and solipsistic for activism. Now I just wanted to turn and bolt, pressing myself against Gray.
But Ed had somehow segued from coughing to laughing, practically holding his sides with mirth, or trying to keep his tubes in. "Tom," he gasped, "I heard you were dead!"
Oh it was priceless, how black the humor could get. I gave out with a chortle in response, and then the three of us were whinnying merrily at the absurdity of keeping track of who was still alive. When in doubt—no Christmas card two years running—assume the worst. And as for the gray areas, the half-dead, look at Ed Bernardo, for Chrissakes. Was I really so sick I could laugh at that? The fifty pounds he'd shed, the straggle of thirteen hairs on his head, where he used to sport a ponytail. His mottled face, at once gray as a dead fish and weirdly ruddy, as if he'd stood downwind of a hydrogen bomb. Yet we laughed like kids in a graveyard.
Swearing we would compare notes later on, I shunted Gray and me out of there, and we careened down the hall to 509. If I had just seen the shadow of where I was going, it was no more than what I already knew from a hundred other nightmares. What was there for Gray and me to say about it? Everything and therefore nothing. I ordered lunch instead, every dish on the gimpy hospital menu, as if we were staying at the Beverly Wilshire. Myself, I was not allowed to eat before the procedure, but I had this crushing desire to take care of my lover.
As it happened, the food arrived at the same time as a tiny
Filipino nurse who wanted blood. So Gray had to negotiate his minestrone and greasy Monte Cristo while tube after tube of blood was milked from my arm. Gallons of it, it seemed to me, who wilted against the pillows, Garbo-like. By the time Miss Manila left, I felt as if I'd been ravaged by a vampire.
I closed my eyes and pretended to doze, not wanting to vent my gathering despair on Gray. Unbelievable how fast the world was lost in here, how trapped I was already in the system. I used to swear I'd end it all before they'd ever check me in, my small final protest against the stealing of the real Tom. No Ed Bernardo dwindling for me.
But I hadn't done it, had I? I'd walked in here on my own power, freely giving up my name and self. And all because I'd been ambushed by love, and would do anything now to squeak through. It wasn't Gray's fault, yet I couldn't help but feel a certain helpless sorrow, to think I'd surrendered my chance to check out early.
Next came the blinking intern—Dr. Polluted, I thought he said. Looked about nineteen. He bristled with excitement, ready to reel off his minilecture on spinal taps. Airily I waived this last chance to hear my rights. I knew every raunchy detail of the procedure, because in my circle people had spinals more regularly than civilians had their oil changed. My jaded attitude severely cramped his budding bedside manner, but hey, we might as well cut to the chase.
"Just get me my Demerol, will you, Dr. Polluted?"
"Dr. Belushi," Gray corrected, as the intern scurried out. Which struck me even funnier, as if I were about to be spinal-tapped on "Saturday Night Live." Then Gray moved to the bed and engulfed me in a hug, admonishing me to take it easy, swearing he'd be right outside. Over his shoulder I watched a nurse wheel in the instruments on a cart. She sported a plastic oversuit worthy of a nuclear plant at core meltdown.
"I love you," I whispered to Gray, but couldn't shake the feeling that we were fated to different orbits from here on, barely able to touch as we passed, tracing our doomed parabolas. But I snookered a hand between the buttons of his shirt and pinched his nipple, for his sake swallowing the whole third act of Camille. "Now don't you dare try to fuck me while I'm under," I warned him in my smuttiest tone.
The nurse/astronaut moved in as he stood away. She untied the gown and bared my butt, jabbing the left cheek, my best side. The swooning began almost instantly. Belushi's entry in his own spacesuit was already a kind of dream. A stickler for protocol, he stood over me and gave me the lecture I'd just refused. I didn't care, my own muzzy brain having taken refuge at the beach house, flying there swift as a bird. I remember being arranged into a fetal crouch and told I must hold very still, an irony to someone who was wheeling over the Trancas bluffs.
Then I heard the doctor say, close to my ear, "You'll feel a prick." And that made me want to make another smutty quip: Prick has to be pretty big these days for Miss Jesus to feel it, Doc. Then I felt the sting, which wasn't funny at all.
It was hours later that I surfaced, one eye blearing open, feeling more than a little amphibious, not yet ready to leave the sea and walk upright. Hazily I saw Gray across the room, hunched over the telephone and murmuring low. It seemed to me that if he was all right, then I was. And back I went under. When next I groped awake, hours later still, the TV in the ceiling corner was on at whispering volume, Gray standing before it watching. Local news: I recognized the bimbo making happy talk. So it was evening.
But another cloud of nap intervened before I grogged up on one elbow and spoke: "Water." From Garbo to Helen Keller in a single day—what a range.
Gray cradled me in his arm and gave me sips. "Mona insists I leave a message on her machine, every hour on the hour," he said. "I feel like CNN."
I flashed him a doofus smile. "You're still here," I woozily observed, by which I meant not that he might have fled, but what a relief it was to find I hadn't dreamed him.
He stroked my hair. "Spinal fluid's clear. I talked to Robison. He ticked off about fifteen things you don't have."
"Good. Let's get out of here." I started to swim out of the covers, forcing him to pin me. No, not yet. Blood tests wouldn't be in till morning, still a chance I had some alien protozoa space-stationing in my brain. Besides, I had to stay prone for so many hours after the spinal, or else I'd get a migraine. I incidentally discovered I liked the feeling of being pinned, and made a blurry note that we ought to try some naked wrestling. I pouted my lips, and Gray obliged me with a kiss.
"Kathleen's been up at the house all afternoon. Brian called from the Chevron. He said to tell you he loves you."
Exactly. We all loved each other now, and nobody would get hurt anymore. And because my head was cradled so securely in the crook of his arm, I swooned under again. When I woke from that, there was only a nightlight on. I felt as if I'd been sleeping for months. My head was finally clear of drug, and I knew exactly where I was. Alone. Get used to it, I told myself, because when the black carriage finally came, there would be room for only one. And I felt for a long moment as if there had been no Gray at all. That whole delicious interlude of passion, the best week of my life, seemed like a movie I'd left in the middle of.
Grunting softly, I rolled up onto my elbow and reached the water glass from the bedside table. There was in fact a knot of dull pain behind my eyes, twin to the stinging pinprick at the bottom of my spine. I knew they were connected, brought on by the tiny leakage of fluid when the needle was withdrawn. The rest of my body felt wrung out, strung on the throbbing clothesline of my nervous system. I sipped from the glass and swallowed wrong, choking and spraying the pillow with water. I leaned my forehead against the siderail of the bed—
And there was Gray, curled on his side and sleeping on a low cot, about two feet below the level of my sickbed. I felt an instant flood of protectiveness, the tables turned, as if I were the one on guard here. Then castigated myself for not having told him to
head on home for the night. There was no reason at all for him to be keeping such close watch, and giving up his comfort in the bargain. No reason except the preciousness of time. It was nothing but false bluster, my wishing him home in his comfortable bed. I was punchy with relief that he was here.
I reached a hand through the bars of the siderail, stretching toward the cot below. I couldn't quite see his face, turned toward the pillow, the softest whistle of breath regular as a distant horn at sea. I could just touch his hair with my fingertips, ever so light, not wanting to wake him. But I really believed, now for the first time, that I'd make it out of there. I didn't need the test results to tell me I was still alive. This had all been a test, like a lifeboat drill.
I don't know how long I watched, hovering there above him like a guardian angel. After a long stillness, maybe an hour, I saw the first gray outline of the window as the dark began to evaporate. I grew drowsy again and fought it, not wanting to leave behind the safety of the night. But even as I glided under, I knew what the secret was. We didn't require the beach. We were an act you could take on the road, a string of colored lights and a trunkful of costumes in the back of the pickup. Not the time or the place but the two of us were the whole show.
We bolted awake at the same time, when a nurse came brawling in, barking reveille. I squinted up as she stood beside the bed, holding what looked like an enema bag for horses, the nozzle on the hose about the size of a forty-watt bulb. "Turn over," she said with menacing glee, as I gaped in protest. Then she twisted her head and gave a puzzled look at a dangling tag on the bag.
"Wait—you're not Barton," she declared, a withering accusation, then stormed out as abruptly as she came.
"And so Alice stepped through the looking-glass," I said, by way of good morning.
We'd hardly washed up, sharing the skimpy towel in the bathroom, rough as a cheap motel. Robison walked in as I stood there naked, having just shed my johnny gown. I cocked my head defiantly. "Nothing, right?"