by Lucas Rocha
“Are you my friend or his? For God’s sake, Sandra, put yourself in my shoes and think about what you would do!”
“I’d give it a try! My God, Victor, what are you so afraid of?! I remember you telling me the two of you had a really great connection and that you’d like to see him again. And after the second date, you were even more excited for the third. Dammit, Victor, he waited until the third date to kiss you! And you like him! Do you know what the odds are of finding someone you click with right away? Of having a date where you don’t have to force conversation, where you want nothing more than to keep talking? Please, Victor, don’t let fear loom over everything you two have. Henrique takes good care of himself, there’s plenty of information out there, and it all agrees that a serodiscordant relationship can be as healthy as one between two negative people, if the two of you take precautions.”
Sandra is being rational, but I don’t want to hear anything she has to say. Maybe because she’s expressing exactly what I’ve been thinking, and because she’s using all her arguing power to disarm me.
Of course I was excited after the first date with Henrique, and not just because he was good-looking, with his copper hair that changes color under the sun, or the freckles that spread across his face, or his smile with slightly crooked teeth, or the awkward way he puts his hands in his pockets when he’s feeling shy, shrugging a little.
All great points, but none count more than the conversations we had. We talked about the things we both enjoy (Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, Sense8—why, Netflix, why???—Hitchcock, Stephen King, RuPaul’s Drag Race, and Diablo Cody), things we disagree about (he hates The Lord of the Rings, Woody Allen, and Fringe, while I hate Lost, The Walking Dead, and Björk), and things we both hate (Johnny Depp, Michael Bay, Legends of Tomorrow, and The Secret). We spent hours talking about movies and TV shows and directors, and he seemed interested when I started talking about cinematography, film editing, sound mixing, and other technical aspects of filmmaking besides screenwriting and acting. I paid attention when he talked about his job at the advertising firm, about his long hours in the office with pizza and Coke, and how he loves and hates all of it at the same time.
Next thing I knew, we were exchanging messages about a second date, and I couldn’t stop thinking about him. When the day came, he showed up with a gift-wrapped package. I was so embarrassed for not having brought him anything, but he said I didn’t have to worry about it. When I opened the box, I found an anniversary edition Blu-ray of Pet Sematary, probably my favorite horror movie of all time. Inside, a folded piece of paper said, The greatest horror movie of all time. My heart still jumps whenever I think about how I felt in that moment. I laughed and gave him a hug, thanking him, and he asked me to text him as soon as I was done watching it. He wanted to know if the Blu-ray edition was any different.
I started watching the movie as soon as I got home, maybe so I could spend a little more time with the Henrique that was starting to take form in my mind. I stared at his careful, round handwriting and was startled when the movie began.
It wasn’t Pet Sematary, but Transformers. I laughed out loud when I reread the note. Yeah, this was definitely the greatest horror movie of all time.
And in that moment, I knew I had fallen for him.
But all that is behind us now. I’m not the guy with his head in the clouds from after our first, second, or third date. I am the guy who got into a relationship with someone who is HIV-positive, and I don’t want that to define my life.
“I don’t want to take precautions!” I rebut her last point, getting my thoughts back in order. “I don’t want to spend my time thinking about all the things that could happen and about how I’m always at risk every time I kiss him!”
“You cannot be serious!” Her eyes widen. “You know that kissing won’t give you anything but herpes, right? Stop being such a hypocrite, Victor! When we go out, you’re more than happy to make out with people whose names you don’t even know, and now you’re giving me this ‘I’m gonna get HIV from a kiss’ bullshit? I thought you were smarter than this.”
Of course I know that, and I feel my ears burn for letting my prejudice get the best of me. I’m frustrated with this whole situation, and Sandra pressuring me only makes me more upset.
“Victor, I know you really like this guy.” Her tone, subtle as a knife, makes me swallow. “When are you going to let go of this denial?”
“I’m not in denial!” I say, getting up from the bed. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore, Sandra. I mean it. From now on, let’s put this behind us and be done with it! He was a mistake, and there are plenty of fish in the sea.”
“There are other people who may or may not be cool, who may or may not like you, who may or may not have HIV! And you know this guy is special. I’ve never seen you like this.”
“I’m like this because I’m annoyed with this unnecessary conversation. Is your life really so boring that you need to insist on me getting a boyfriend?”
“I’ll insist until you realize the best thing you can do is text him and tell him how you really feel.”
“Oh, so that’s what you want, is it?” I say, grabbing my phone and unlocking it.
I quickly remove his number from my contacts, then delete all our conversations.
“There, I deleted his number! Now there’s zero chance I’ll get in touch with him ever again!” I roar, throwing the phone on my bed.
“Why would you do that?” She seems shocked. “Undo it, Victor! Have you lost your mind?”
“I don’t want to hear another word about this guy, Sandra. That’s enough! It will never work, and I don’t want to hear about it anymore. The end.”
“You’re going to regret this, and you know that.”
“I started regretting it the moment I realized what I had gotten myself into. But now everything is back to normal.”
“Great!”
“Great!”
She gets up from the bed, too, and she’s clearly mad. “You’re a judgmental moron, you know that, Victor?”
Without another word, she storms out of the room, slamming the door behind her.
I close my eyes at the bang and take a deep breath. I hear her opening the front door after saying a quick goodbye to Caíque and Raí, and then I see my mom’s head poking into my bedroom.
“What happened?” she asks.
“Nothing,” I respond impatiently. She just shrugs and leaves, knowing I’m not in the mood to talk.
Alone in my room, I sink into the bed and start thinking about what Sandra said. I grab my phone and check my messages, knowing that there’s no way I can get Henrique’s number back. But I also know that if he sends me a new message, I’ll be able to see it.
I don’t want to admit it—not even to myself—but I hope he will message me.
WHEN I HAVE TOO MUCH on my mind, there’s no better distraction than cleaning my apartment. I finished a project at work early, so they let me off, and I came back home, where the usual chaos of multicolored clothes was waiting for me.
Eric isn’t home, so I take this opportunity to put on a Metallica album at maximum volume, then find a broom, some rags, and bleach to clean up all the mess in this house and to set my thoughts in order.
Organizing gives me a certain kind of power, as if arranging the objects on my nightstand by size were a way of sorting out my own life and all its chaos. Not that I’m complaining. Things are way better now than they were three years ago, when my parents were always around me, HIV was a scary novelty, and Carlos still professed his eternal love for me.
But it’s not him I’m thinking about right now. Of course, Carlos still roams around my thoughts and, once in a while, makes a point of haunting me; I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to get over him. But at this moment I can only think about the two guys who came into my life recently and how they both claimed space inside me, each in his own way.
Victor is immature, but for some reason, he’s the kind of person who
makes me happy. The age gap between us isn’t huge, but it feels like a wide chasm that I need to cross if I want to decipher all his fears. There’s some alluring beauty in his awkwardness, in his dyed hair and preppy outfits, in how very slim he is and his preference for sad songs and strange movies. If things were different, I’d say he wasn’t ready yet and try to convince myself he was just another disappointment and he wasn’t worth it.
The problem is … I can’t stop thinking about him.
At first, I thought it was because he uncovered my vulnerabilities and liked them—not the HIV, but in the other parts of my life. Not just that, he also exposed his own scars and anxieties about who he wanted to become in the future.
We didn’t just talk about TV shows, movies, and music, but, thanks to all those things, we got along so well that it was easy to get into more intimate details. When I told him the story of how my mom had reacted to what she now refers to as my “life choice,” Victor looked incredulous. He couldn’t believe that she’d called being gay a perversion, that she had said there was no way she could respect someone as despicable as me, and that she couldn’t even bring herself to imagine what people would say about her son and how he’d been raised, as if the conversation were about her and not about me. He went completely still as I told him about the weeks of silence, my frustrated attempts at reconnecting, and all the times I’d heard my mom cry, locked in her bedroom.
My own search for happiness was at stake, but it broke my heart to think I was hurting the most important person in my life like that. I told Victor I had tried to convince myself that it would pass, that in time my mother would talk to me again and look past the elephant in the room, but that didn’t happen. The distance between us only increased as time went by, and she found new opportunities to hurt me with her unbearable comments, to the point where the only solution I could find was to fill my largest backpack with all the clothes I could fit and get the hell out of there.
And then, after I finished my story with the embarrassed smile of someone who has just delivered an unexciting conclusion, I asked Victor what it had been like for him to come out to his parents. He smiled, a bit shy, and said he had never had that conversation with them.
“They kind of know, you know?” Victor said, in that childish way of answering a question with a question. “Every time they talk to me about my love life, they ask about ‘the boys.’ The way I was raised was never too tied to the obligation of falling in love with someone of the opposite sex.”
“Whoa” was all I could say. “You are so, so lucky.”
“Yeah,” he said with a smile. “I know.”
It was always that way: Our conversations, dark as they were, always ended up with the two of us smiling like fools. Our dates left me with a good feeling, a sweet taste in the back of my throat that made me believe that I could in fact be happy and not consider it charity from the universe. Because HIV did that to me. Even after three years, it still has me believing that any amount of love I receive from another person is out of pity, that it isn’t truly reciprocal.
But little by little, this worry is fading from my list of fears. I don’t know how much Victor has to do with this change. I don’t even know if he actually facilitated that process, or if my life adjusted and he just happened to be there, in the right place at the right time.
Here’s what I do know: I like him, and I know he likes me, despite the combination of all these insecurities. And I’m tired of letting go of relationships that could be good out of a fear of rejection.
And that’s where Ian comes in. This other guy, almost a fluke in my life, with whom I had a conversation that somehow made me reveal so much about myself and events that I hope will never happen again.
It’s so strange how certain people seem to have an impact on your life all of a sudden and make you remember the things that happened to you and how you’ve evolved over time. Ian is me in the past, complete with all the anguish, uncertainties, fears. He’s part of what I’ve been and of what I still am, and part of what is not worth going back to being.
The loud music and James Hetfield’s deep voice are not enough to make me stop thinking about the two of them. The album is almost halfway through and the house has been officially turned upside down. Sweat trickles down my forehead, and my throat is dry from the effort of squatting to try and get to the places where the broom won’t reach.
It’s more or less then that Eric enters the room.
“YOU’RE THE WEIRDEST GAY MAN I’VE EVER MET!” he shouts above the music, scaring me half to death, and I whip my head around. My heart is beating fast, threatening to burst from my ribs. “FOR GOD’S SAKE, PLAY SOME BEYONCÉ!”
When I turn, I’m face-to-face with his six-foot-tall slender body wearing a handmade shirt that reads DADDY’S LIL MONSTER, orange-rimmed sunglasses, and braided hair hidden under a flat-brim hat with golden ornaments and a glitter dollar sign.
“You’re cleaning up on a Friday afternoon? What’s gotten into you?” Eric asks, throwing bags filled with shiny fabrics on the floor and sprawling on the couch.
I lower the volume and sit down next to him, sweaty and tired.
“I can’t stop thinking about Victor.”
“Still? Jeez, that guy really got in your head, huh?”
“I’m as surprised as you are.”
“And what are you going to do about it?”
I shrug. “He’s not interested.”
“And you know that because …?” He lets the question hang in the air.
“Because he stopped texting. Because he got scared and is probably thinking that dating an HIV-positive guy is be too complicated.”
“You’re doing it again, Henrique.”
“What?”
“Accepting it. Letting your fears get the best of you, letting them paralyze you.”
“I don’t do that.”
“Of course you do. You pretend like you don’t care because it’s the easy way out. I know you.”
“You know me, but I don’t do that. He doesn’t want this, so why should I insist?”
“Because you don’t know that. What you do know is that he’s scared, and I get that. You know what you need to do.”
“I do?” I ask.
“Getting over your fear is the right choice. Allowing fear to get the best of you is also an option, but not the one I’d recommend. You can just drop it—of course you can—but there’s a bit of advice that my mom used to give me, and I repeat it to myself almost every day.”
“Hope for the best and expect the worst?”
He stares at me with a look of contempt. “It’s better to suffer for something that you did than to suffer for what you didn’t do.”
“Was your mom a specialist in useless advice?”
“She baked cakes,” he answers. “And she had to throw out many a dud when the recipe went wrong. But she’d never say, ‘This recipe seems too complicated, so I won’t even try.’ She would just mix it all up and put it in the oven, and when it went wrong, she’d try again until she got it right.”
“But the problem isn’t getting something wrong. The problem is when the cake starts screaming, ‘YOU GAVE ME A VIRUS! YOU DESTROYED MY LIFE!’ Or when you start getting attached to the cake and it disappears without so much as a text, and next thing you know, the cake’s getting all funny with a blackberry cheesecake.”
“At least you got to eat the cake before it started screaming,” Eric says with a devilish smile.
“You’re the worst.”
I lean my head on Eric’s shoulder, and he doesn’t mind that my hair is all sweaty from cleaning or that Hetfield’s voice is still bellowing out of the speakers, though not as loudly as before.
“When did life become so complicated, my friend?” I ask him.
“When we decided we weren’t happy enough being unicellular organisms, thought we’d start walking on earth, and evolved over billions of years to end up sitting on a couch, talking about relationships that won
’t move forward,” he answers quickly, as if I asked an obvious question.
“Maybe.”
“We make things more complicated than they are,” Eric says. “Why don’t you invite Victor to the party tomorrow? You’ll get to talk, and he’ll get to see Bibi Montenegro in her amazing Cleopatra performance!” Eric raises his arms in an exaggerated pose, chin jutting upward as if he expects a photographer from Vogue to show up at any moment.
“He won’t answer.”
“You’re throwing out the ingredients before the cake even has a chance to bake,” he answers, getting up from the couch and grabbing the bag of fabrics. “Well, your free therapy appointment is now over; I still have a lot of work to do. You’ve got a full living room to clean up, and don’t go expecting my help with that. It’s Friday afternoon, for God’s sake!” he says, then heads toward his bedroom. He spreads the fabrics around the sewing machine and picks up the tin where he keeps the needles before closing the door. “AND PUT ON SOME BEYONCÉ!” he screams from the other side.
I change the music to “Formation,” then look at the last two texts I sent to Victor, both unanswered.
I think to myself that this is stupid, but my conversation with Eric was, weirdly, very effective. So I type the name of the party, the address, the time, and how much tickets cost to Victor, and I press send. Then I copy the info and forward it to Ian, who could also use a distraction and might want to go out.
Both see the text almost right away. Ian sends me a thumbs-up and a wink emoji.
Victor doesn’t respond.
I GET HENRIQUE’S TEXT AS I’m waiting for the doctor at my appointment. I’m wondering if I should say yes or no, but the receptionist at the clinic calls my name, and all I can do is send two emojis before I get up and walk into the freezing office.
It’s a small and somehow sad room. There’s nothing but a poster on one wall, depicting two people—one is extremely thin and sickly looking, and the other has a perfect smile, tan skin, and a carefully trimmed beard—and underneath, the words HIV DOESN’T HAVE A FACE: A CARRIER CAN BE WHO YOU LEAST EXPECT. To the left, there’s an exam table with a disposable cover on top of a thin mattress, an analog scale, and a sink, plus a small liquid soap container and a tissue dispenser drilled to the wall. To the right, the doctor’s desk with two chairs in front of it extends from the wall across from the door to the other half of the room. There’s a stethoscope on the table, a blood pressure monitor, a plastic pencil holder from Buenos Aires, and a beat-up book that, surprisingly, isn’t medical, but a copy of Howl by Allen Ginsberg.