Broken People

by Sam Lansky

  “Do you wanna get out of here?” Noah said and Sam looked around and said, “Yes.”

  And then they were on Sam’s couch making out for the first time when Noah pulled away and there was some nervous thing in the corners of his mouth and he said—God, how had he said it?—was it quick and anxious or was it labored and deliberate like a heavy sigh, steeling himself for rejection?—“I have to tell you that I’m HIV positive.”

  It didn’t surprise Sam; maybe he already knew that Noah was going to tell him this, on some level—so many of the men Sam knew in the rooms of twelve-step recovery, men who had spent their younger years blacked-out or sharing needles, were, and it never came as a surprise. Sam reached for Noah’s hand.

  “I’m negative,” Sam said. “But that doesn’t bother me, or freak me out.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m undetectable.”

  “It’s not a big deal,” Sam said. Then he corrected himself: “To me.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll get on PrEP,” Sam said.

  At the doctor’s office, a young physician wrote him a prescription. “You should come back once every three months so we can test your kidney function, just to be sure,” the doctor said. Then his face went a little funny. “You know, if the guy you’re with is consistently undetectable, then you don’t even really need to take this,” he said. “But if it gives you an added level of security, so be it.”

  How quickly, Sam thought, the world had changed. He had been so terrified of contracting the virus just a few years earlier. Now there was a once-a-day pill to keep that from happening.

  It felt unfair that it was just a matter of timing that now made it possible for him to stay negative when Noah had struggled through his diagnosis. It had been painful for him. Sam squinted. He remembered that conversation, on the way to Palm Springs. There he was in the passenger seat of Noah’s car, on the 10, the strip malls of San Bernardino streaming past them in a tannish blur, when he told Sam the story of what had happened.

  It was before Noah got sober, when he was still keeping it together. He didn’t look like an addict; you’d never have known he was one, he said. This was always the gruesome shock of modern gay life: how often they don’t look like tweakers at all, the men who do a little crystal meth on the weekend, so they can dance and feel free and then go back home to fuck without inhibition, to feel potent and virile and fearless. Sam remembered that high, too, the surges of euphoria, the sense of power and confidence, of his own desirability and arousal, of pleasure amplifying in radials like an underwater explosion. God, he had loved how it felt.

  That was how it was for Noah. He would party on the weekends, like so many other affluent London gays—“chemsex,” they called it. And then weekends bled into weekdays and then he was missing work and his life was crumbling but he kept chasing the party, the sex and the darkness and the thrilling wrongness of it. Maybe all gay men are made to feel, at some point, that they are wrong in the eyes of God, aberrations whose desires are dirty and shameful, and there is no more perfect reinforcement of this message than to fuck on crystal meth. It is both the escape from the feeling and the confirmation of it.

  The darkness took hold, Noah said. He had nothing left to lose. The shame of it. He started shooting up. He lost his flat. His job. Sam could see, so vividly, the look on Noah’s face as he told this story. “It is still my greatest regret,” he said.

  Noah could be so taciturn, but he wasn’t afraid to talk about this. The shame was radioactive. He had done the work. He had made his amends, after he got clean. But the shape of that shame still lived in him—it still occupied a space. Sam was grateful that Noah shared this story with him. He was grateful that he knew.

  And Sam wasn’t afraid of Noah. But he knew, on some level, that Noah was afraid of him. That he was afraid of doing to Sam what had been done to him.

  No, Sam thought, and he rocked back and forth in his body. He hated all of this, hated thinking about it, hated the clinical way he had to consider viral loads and medications and risk factors, and the language that gay people used to talk about this—“clean,” if they had no diseases, which was as ugly a slur as any Sam had ever heard. Noah’s blood was not unclean. His blood was good. His semen was good. His spit. His hair. Sam loved it. It was as good as Sam’s own. And when Sam felt Noah’s heartbeat, the muscle that kept all that warm blood running through his body, he did not judge it or fear it. Sam loved it instead, for keeping it alive when Noah did the same things he did—shooting up, fucking for money, trashing his body. He could not love his own body, but he could love Noah’s. It had never seemed sick. It was perfect to him.

  Risk—Charles had taught him about risk. There were so many things Sam hadn’t known when he had fallen in love with Charles, when his heart was wide and open. When he was afraid of his own blood, his own semen. A cut in his mouth. A tear inside him. Would he get Charles sick? Was he sick in a way that was transmissible, or sick in a way that only existed within him, between his two ears, in his spirit?

  Sam’s body worked just fine. It was his brain that was broken. Only it didn’t work fine, Sam suddenly remembered. It had stopped working that winter. After Vegas.

  Sam gasped for air on the floor of Buck’s den—he could not open his eyes, he was too deep—and in an instant he was back at urgent care, wheezing and gasping on the table as the doctor pulled up X-rays of his pneumonic lungs.

  “When was the last time you had an HIV test?” the doctor said.

  “A month ago,” Sam croaked. He took a deep breath. “I take PrEP.”

  She shook her head. “I want you to take a rapid test,” she said. “Just in case.” And inside, Sam was fuming at this, at the likely homophobia of it—he showed up as a gay guy to an urgent care in West Hollywood and they just assumed that he had HIV—but he submitted anyway, chilled by the suggestion and in some strange way curious, dread forming in his belly. She pricked the point of his finger and let a daub of blood form on the test. He rocked back and forth and shook from fever, and for a moment he could not remember if he was shaking in his memory or shaking on the floor of Buck’s house, but it didn’t matter.

  Why was she insisting on this when he was already so sick? Sam made his way to his feet and paced around the exam room. He steadied himself against a wall, wheezing. This was all so familiar. Nothing ever really changed.

  A few minutes later, she came back into the room. “This test is positive,” she said bluntly. And then, as if there was any confusion: “For HIV.”

  Sam looked at her dumbly. “But I’m on PrEP,” he gasped. Then, it dawning on him, as if it hadn’t even been a factor until just now: “My boyfriend is positive.”

  “Have you been taking your PrEP?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Sam said, and as soon as the word was out of his mouth he grew unsure. Had he been taking it? He had taken it in Vegas—he could see himself, standing in the bathroom, fishing it from his bag and swallowing it with a glass of water. Was it possible that he had missed a day, or even two? As he focused his attention on the memory, it seemed to grow blurrier in his mind’s eye, as if he had imagined it instead of experiencing it firsthand, as if his body had never even been there.

  “Well,” she said, “this test is positive.” She squinted at it. She showed it to Sam. “Do you want me to send it to the lab for confirmation?”

  Sam shook his head. “No,” he said. “I have to go to the hospital anyway, right?”

  “Yes.”

  He pulled on his jacket. As he rose to his feet, all the feeling disappeared from his head. The air was being sucked out of the room. He choked.

  Sick. He heard it in Charles’s voice. There’s something wrong with you. You’re sick.

  And then there were white curtains. A hospital bed. A thin institutional gown. Sam kept sweating through the sheets.

  He was at Cedars. When they admitted him,
he asked them to test him for HIV. They drew blood, the familiar prick of a needle in his arm. Then there was a bag of fluid running through his veins.

  They offered him painkillers. He took them gratefully. The fever rose and broke. Twice a day a nurse came by with a machine that looked like a pipe, and he held it to his mouth and inhaled a green medicinal smoke that was meant to heal the pneumonia. Pulling it into his lungs reminded him of smoking meth, but there was no speedy buzz, no shot of electric euphoria, just a heavy exhale.

  He was alone. He slipped in and out of slumber, the television left murmuring in the background. He woke up and Noah was sitting by the side of the bed. “You came,” Sam said, and then he remembered. This sickness made manifest, so handsome and seductive. Sam held his hand. He couldn’t tell Noah. It would kill him.

  “Of course I did,” Noah said.

  On the second day, Sam asked the nurse for the results of his blood work. “The HIV test,” he said. She said she would come back with them. But hours passed and she never returned. Then it was another nurse. Sam looked to the window and saw that it was nighttime. How long had he been here, he wondered. Had it only been two days?

  “My labs,” he said.

  “I’ll get to the bottom of it,” she said.

  After she left, Sam thought about Noah. He was the first guy Sam had ever loved with whom he could have the kind of sex that he might have with someone he hated, which was a compliment. With so many of the guys Sam had dated, including Charles, the sex was connected and intimate and sometimes erotic but it was relationship sex, not porn sex. With someone Sam had no affection for, he could have more interesting, experimental sex—rougher, more aggressive, exploring the limits of one another’s pleasure—but that was reserved for people Sam would hopefully never see again, certainly not for anyone who might stay until morning.

  But Noah was rough. His hand wrapped around Sam’s neck. He pinned Sam down. He spit in his mouth. He was verbal, assertive. To think of that now made Sam feel ashamed of his own desire.

  Had Sam liked that Noah was positive? He returned to his body in ceremony, shifting uncomfortably, pressing his head into the floor, working his jaw.

  It had made Noah realer, somehow. More dangerous, even if it posed no threat. What else had Sam liked about it? Maybe he respected the fact that Noah had been through something, that he had truly lived—so different from Charles, who had been so cloistered by his privilege. Maybe it was about Sam’s own worth, about a desire to manifest within his body a sickness that he experienced in his mind and spirit. Or maybe it was about forging some connection to the person Sam had been when he was tweaking and having unprotected sex with strangers. Maybe it was about forgiving himself for how he’d endangered Charles, even though that risk had only ever existed in his head.

  What was it—a moment that Sam was afraid to call up to the surface?

  He smelled smoke and he wasn’t sure if it was in the room or in his memory. Gold-striped wallpaper. Vegas. Their first night there. Noah was fucking him, pushing into Sam, grunting and heaving, sweat slick on his chest. He kissed Sam hard, and then Sam felt his mouth on his ear and Noah whispered, “You want this load, don’t you?” And Sam had exhaled, and he’d said, “Yes, deeper,” and they came together, so hard it felt like electricity rippling through them in glorious spasms.

  Deeper. He turned over again. Shame. It was so sick. He had wanted it. He had wanted it all the time.

  Sam tapped his head against the floor, feeling the pressure of the wood against his forehead. Jacob was beating a drum and singing again, but it sounded like there were many voices.

  Maybe it was a relief. Now Sam wouldn’t have to worry about getting it anymore. It had always felt like such an implausible miracle that he’d managed to avoid getting it while he was using. This was just karma catching up with him a few years late, he thought.

  And Sam knew that he deserved it. He deserved it for wanting Noah in the ways that he had. He deserved it for being so greedy, so reckless, so demanding, for all the unfed desires that lived within him.

  In the hospital bed, Sam rocked back and forth, shuddering as the fever took him again, and on the floor of Buck’s house, he did the same, splitting himself into two, his past and present, shaking in unison.

  And then Noah was there, in the hospital with him, sitting by the bench below the window. “Are you feeling any better?” he asked. It had been three days. Sam still hadn’t told him.

  Sam nodded. “I think the medicine is working,” he said.

  This will ruin your life, he thought.

  He intertwined his fingers and twisted them nervously.

  “What is it?” Noah asked, and Sam felt himself crack open, seams ripping inside him, all the things he couldn’t hold anymore.

  “When I first went to urgent care,” he said. He stopped. He couldn’t get the words out. He started over. “When I first went to urgent care,” Sam said again, “they tested me for HIV and it was positive.”

  Something flickered over Noah’s face, some darkness.

  “I’m still waiting on them to bring me my full blood work,” Sam said. “I wanted to wait to tell you until I was sure.”

  Noah looked at Sam, his face a mask of something terrible.

  “I’m okay,” Sam said. “I think all my years of obsessing about whether I had it or not prepared me for this, on some level. I know all the facts. I mean, I took PrEP every day, right? Now I’ll just...be taking something else every day. It’s not that big of a deal.” He believed this as he was saying it. He could almost will it to be true.

  Noah was shaking his head. “Were you taking your PrEP?” he asked. “Is it possible that you missed a day?” He rubbed his eyes. “We had sex so many times in Vegas.” He stood up. “It was Vegas, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” Sam said. “Yes, I was taking it. I don’t know what happened. I don’t—I don’t even know how this is possible.”

  Noah sat back down. He took his baseball cap off and set it down next to him. “We’ll sort it out,” he said, suddenly resolved. “This will be all right.”

  “It will,” Sam said forcefully.

  And then they looked at each other, and Sam saw it in his eyes—that Noah knew that getting involved with him had been a mistake. At that moment Sam knew he’d lost him. There would be no coming back from this.

  When Sam woke up again, Noah was gone and the doctor was in the room. Finally. “I’m sorry about the delays,” he said. “For some reason your blood was never sent out when you first came in.”

  He sat down next to Sam at the computer and typed at the keyboard for a minute, then tilted the screen to show it to him. “Well, it’s pneumonia,” he said. “A really nasty case.” He looked at Sam’s charts. “You’re doing better, though,” he said. “You’ll be ready to go home tomorrow.”

  “What about the HIV?” Sam said.

  He looked at Sam. “What about it?” he said.

  “They told me I have it,” Sam said.

  The doctor looked at the screen, tracing his finger down it. “No, you don’t,” he said.

  “What?” Sam said. It was the second time that he’d been certain that he was positive. Only this time it hadn’t been hypochondriacal anxiety—he’d had incontrovertible proof. Hadn’t he?

  The doctor pointed to the screen. Sam looked at it, squinting. There it was in plain English. He didn’t understand. It didn’t make sense.

  “But at urgent care, they said I was,” Sam said, hearing how stupid it was as it came out of his mouth—as if that made a difference now.

  The doctor looked sympathetic. “Those tests are about 97 percent accurate,” he said. “That’s why they need to send it to the lab to be sure. But you’re not.”

  “But the pneumonia,” Sam said. “I thought that was an HIV thing.”

  He shook his head. “Just regular,
run-of-the-mill pneumonia.” He stood. “Seen a lot of it this year. You gotta be careful out there.”

  He left the room. Sam stared at the wall. He knew what he was supposed to be feeling—staggering relief, the shock of absolution. He was so lucky. He should have been grateful.

  But instead he felt something bigger and stranger, a punch of loss in his belly.

  He pulled out his phone and texted Noah: They just told me I’m negative. Sorry to stress you out. The smallness of it felt pathetic. He looked at the time. How many hours had it been since Noah had left the hospital? How many hours had he spent thinking that he’d given it to Sam? He wasn’t sure. It was night now.

  Sam gripped the thin cotton sheets under him and began to cry, big cracked dry sobs that stuck in his chest, and the force of it made his lungs ache, and he was so weak and afraid he felt like he could disappear.

  What is it? He heard that question again, reverberating through his mind, and he knew the answer. This was it—the thing underneath it all, the thing Sam did not want to admit. When they’d told him he was positive, he was grateful. Because he thought it meant that now, Noah wouldn’t be able to leave him. That he would have to stay with Sam out of guilt, out of some sense of responsibility. That it would link them together forever.

  Permanence. That was all Sam had ever wanted, with anyone. Someone who wouldn’t have the option of leaving him. Someone who would have no choice but to stay. Better to be bonded in pain than to be alone.

  It wasn’t good news. Not because he wanted to be sick, or maybe because he did, but mostly because he didn’t want to be alone again.

  The drumbeat grew louder in Sam’s ears. He came back to his body. He touched his hands to his face; it was wet with tears, but he couldn’t remember crying. He sank back into the memory.