Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath (3 page)

I asked how Cosmo’s lover had taken it; the voice explained that he could never have spoken this way had John not been out of the office at that moment. But John was getting better. I said, “Do you still get calls like this, asking for Cosmo?” and he replied, “Not as often.” I thanked him and hung up, and wandered into the next room with the words
Cosmo died
repeating in my mind, thinking Cosmo was not like everyone else. Cosmo was special. Sure, everyone is special in one sense; in another, everyone is not. I sat down at the table and stared at the
Times
I was reading before I made the call—the headlines describing the nuclear accident at Chernobyl; the radioactive cloud drifting across Europe; the story in section B that said that by the year 2000, New York City could be 60 percent Hispanic, black, and Asian American. In other words, the world, and the city, would go on evolving, developing, without Cosmo. And I sat there for some time until I decided, later that evening, to go back to the gym, as if in motion, exertion, the cool, athletic use of the body, I would let this shock dilute itself.

Downstairs the weather had changed; after a warm couple of April weeks—Cosmo had died in September—it was nippy again, like a fall night. The World Trade Towers twinkled in the blue dusk. The crowds surged down St. Marks Place. There was an enormous NYU dormitory going up on Third Avenue. The city was booming. Yet a small part, an individual cell, of Manhattan had been extinguished. Out of the huge honeycomb of the city I walked through, one chamber was empty. Okay. By now we are so accustomed to obituaries, they have become a literary genre—and the fact is, the thirtieth death of a friend does not shock you as much as the first did. While much may be behind us (the initial shock, confusion, blame, numbness), one thing is not—everything may be over but the dying. That will go on. Even so, Cosmo’s death horrified me. What a waste! What an insult! Having heard so many theories by which people explain what is still the inexplicable (why some die, others do not), I could only think they were utterly inapplicable to this one. I didn’t think his death fit any theory, or moral judgment, or pop-psychological hypothesis (that those who die hate themselves, or are emotionally blocked, or unable to love, or ashamed of being homosexual—or any of the other current placebos circulating with increasing seriousness). It’s not surprising, as science putters away in laboratories we have no access to, dropping, on the community far below, articles in journals and newspapers, that the two worlds—one of the lab, the other of the frightened heart—separate further from one another. But Cosmo loved life, treasured his body, was only thirty-five, succeeded in his career, and had much to look forward to. He didn’t hate himself, sex, or life. His death did not illumine anything that leaves us morally edified, or superior, or enlightened—it was just part of the vast human waste that is occurring; just mean and nasty.

And though I knew that eventually I would recover from the shock of calling him to return his book and learning that he was dead, and though I knew this evening I would enjoy my visit to the gym, my optimism—my feeling it was over—was gone. I walked through Union Square up Broadway with a grim expression compressing my lips. All the half-baked theories that ostensibly applied to Cosmo swirled in my mind. None of them worked. I felt more and more despair. And then (as if to supply a literary symmetry to the day), when I got on the track at the Y, I glanced down and saw the gymnastics group working out on the floor beneath—including one handsome Hispanic man doing circles on the pommel horse. Circles are hard to do: You grasp the handles on the pommel, lift yourself up, and swing your legs around above the handles. When it is done well, it looks effortless; the legs themselves seem to be propelling themselves around, faster and faster, as the gymnast moves his hands and travels up and down the horse. It is fluid, graceful, exhilarating. I never learned to do more than one or two, which is to say I never learned circles—though Cosmo did. When I came to New York this spring, I felt we were moving forward—the worst behind us—but now, as the words
Cosmo died
play over and over again in my mind, I think, running ovals around the man doing circles on the pommel horse beneath, in the gym Cosmo loved,
we are
getting nowhere at all; we are going in circles.
A pun Cosmo would have liked.

“T
HERE IS NO difference between men so profound,” wrote Scott Fitzgerald, “as that between the sick and the well.” There are many thoughts that fill someone’s head as he walks across town on a warm July afternoon to visit a friend confined to a hospital room—and that is one of them. Another occurs to you as you wait for the light to change and watch the handsome young basketball players playing on the public court behind a chicken-wire fence: Health is everywhere. The world has a surreal quality to it when you are on your way to the hospital to visit someone you care for who is seriously ill. Everyone in it, walking down the sidewalk, driving by in cars, rushing about on a basketball court with sweat-stained chests, exhausted faces, and wide eyes, seems to you extremely peculiar. They are peculiar because they are free, walking under their own power, nicely dressed, sometimes beautiful. Beauty does not lose its allure under the spell of grief. The hospital visitor still notices the smooth chests of the athletes in their cotton shorts as they leap to recover the basketball after it bounces off the rim. But everything seems strangely quiet—speechless—as if you were watching a movie on television with the sound turned off, as if everyone else in the world but you is totally unaware of something: that the act of walking across York Avenue under one’s own power is essentially miraculous.

Every time he enters a hospital, the visitor enters with two simultaneous thoughts: He hates hospitals, and only people working in them lead serious lives. Everything else is selfish. Entering a hospital he always thinks,
I should work for a year as a nurse, an
aide, a volunteer helping people, coming to terms with disease and
death.
This feeling will pass the moment he leaves the hospital. In reality the visitor hopes his fear and depression are not evident on his face as he walks down the gleaming, silent hall from the elevator to his friend’s room. He is trying hard to stay calm.

The door of the room that the receptionist downstairs has told the visitor his friend is in is closed—and on it are taped four signs that are not on any of the other doors and are headlined, WARNING. The visitor stops as much to read them as to allow his heartbeat to subside before going in. He knows—from the accounts of friends who have already visited—he must don a robe, gloves, mask, and even a plastic cap. He is not sure if the door is closed because his friend is asleep inside or because the door to this room is always kept closed. So he pushes it open a crack and peers in. His friend is turned on his side, a white mound of bed linen, apparently sleeping.

The visitor is immensely relieved. He goes down the hall and asks a nurse if he may leave the
Life
magazine he brought for his friend and writes a note to him saying he was here. Then he leaves the hospital and walks west through the summer twilight as if swimming through an enchanted lagoon. The next day—once more crossing town—he is in that surreal mood, under a blue sky decorated with a few photogenic, puffy white clouds, certain that no one else knows . . . knows he or she is absurdly, preposterously, incalculably fortunate to be walking on the street. He feels once again that either the sound has been turned off or some other element (his ego, perhaps with all its anger, ambition, jealousy) has been removed from the world. The basketball players are different youths today but just as much worth pausing to look at. He enters the hospital one block east more calmly this time and requests to see his friend—who is allowed only two visitors at a time, and visits lasting no more than ten minutes. He goes upstairs, peeks around the door, and sees his friend utterly awake. The visitor’s heart races as he steps back and puts on the gloves, mask, cap, and robe he has been told his friends all look so comical in. He smiles because he hopes the photograph that made him bring the copy of
Life
to the hospital—Russian women leaning against a wall in Leningrad in bikinis and winter coats, taking the sun on a February day—has amused his friend as much as it tickled him.

“Eddie?” the visitor says as he opens the door and peeks in. His friend blinks at him. Two plastic tubes are fixed in his nostrils, bringing him oxygen. His face is emaciated and gaunt, his hair longer, softer in appearance, wisps rising above his head. But the one feature the visitor cannot get over are his friend’s eyes. His eyes are black, huge, and furious. Perhaps because his face is gaunt or perhaps because they really are larger than usual, they seem the only thing alive in his face; as if his whole being were distilled and concentrated, poured, drained, into his eyes. They are shining, alarmed, and—there is no other word—furious. He looks altogether like an angry baby—or an angry old man—or an angry bald eagle.

And just as the hospital visitor is absorbing the shock of these livid eyes, the sick man says in a furious whisper, “Why did you bring me that dreadful magazine? I hate
Life
magazine! With that stupid picture! I wasn’t amused! I wasn’t amused at all! You should never have brought that dreck into this room!”

The visitor is momentarily speechless: It is the first time in their friendship of ten years that anything abusive or insulting has ever been said; it is as astonishing as the gaunt face in which two huge black eyes burn and shine. But he sits down and recovers his breath and apologizes. The visitor thinks,
He’s angry because
I haven’t visited him till now. He’s angry that he’s here at all,
that he’s sick.
And they begin to talk. They talk of the hospital food (which he hates), of the impending visit of his mother (whose arrival he dreads), of the drug he is taking (which is experimental), and of the other visitors he has had. The patient asks the visitor to pick up a towel at the base of the bed and give it to him. The visitor complies. The patient places it across his forehead—and the visitor, who, like most people, is unsure what to say in this situation, stifles the question he wants to ask,
Why
do you have a towel on your forehead?
The patient finally says, “Don’t you think I look like Mother Teresa?” And the visitor realizes his friend has made a joke—as he did years ago in their house on Fire Island, doing drag with bedspreads, pillowcases, towels, whatever was at hand. The visitor does not smile—he is so unprepared for a joke in these circumstances—but he realizes, with relief, he is forgiven. He realizes what people who visit the sick often learn: It is the patient who puts the visitor at ease. In a few moments his ten minutes are up. He rises and says, “I don’t want to tire you.” He goes to the door and once beyond it he turns and looks back. His friend says to him, “I’m proud of you for coming.”

“Oh—!” the visitor says and shakes his head. “Proud of
me
for coming!” he tells a friend later that evening, after he has stripped off his gown and mask and gone home, through the unreal city of people in perfect health. “Proud of me! Can you imagine! To say that to me, to make
me
feel good! When he’s the one in bed!” The truth is he is proud of himself the next time he visits his friend, for he is one of those people who looks away when a nurse takes a blood test and finds respirators frightening. He is like almost everyone—everyone except these extraordinary people who work in hospitals, he thinks, as he walks into the building. The second visit is easier, partly because it is the second, and partly because the patient is better—the drug has worked.

But he cannot forget the sight of those dark, angry eyes and the plastic tubes and emaciated visage—and as he goes home that evening, he knows there is a place whose existence he was not aware of before: the foyer of death. It is a place many of us will see at least once in our lives. Because modern medicine fights for patients who a century ago would have died without its intervention, it has created an odd place between life and death. One no longer steps into Charon’s boat to be ferried across the River Styx—ill people are now detained, with one foot in the boat and the other still on shore. It is a place where mercy looks exactly like cruelty to the average visitor. It is a place that one leaves, if one is only a visitor, with the conviction that ordinary life is utterly miraculous, so that, going home from the hospital on the subway, one is filled with things one cannot express to the crowd that walks up out of the station or throngs the street of the block where he lives. But if the people caught in the revolving door between health and death could speak, would they not say—as Patrick Cowley reportedly did as he watched the men dancing to his music while he was fatally ill, “Look at those stupid queens. Don’t they
know?
” Guard your health. It is all you have. It is the thin line that stands between you and hell. It is your miraculous possession. Do not throw it away for the momentous pleasures of lust, or even the obliteration of loneliness.

Many homosexuals wonder how they will die: where, with whom. Auden went back to Oxford, Santayana to the Blue Nuns in Rome. We are not all so lucky. Some men afflicted with AIDS returned to die in their family’s home. Others have died with friends. Some have died bitterly and repudiated the homosexual friends who came to see them; others have counted on these people. Volunteers from the Gay Men’s Health Crisis have cooked, cleaned, shopped, visited, taken care of people they did not even know until they decided to help. We are discovering the strength and goodness of people we knew only in discotheques or as faces on Fire Island. We are once again learning the awful truth Robert Penn Warren wrote years ago: “Only through the suffering of the innocent is the brotherhood of man confirmed.” The most profound difference between men may well be that between the sick and the well, but compassionate people try to reach across the chasm and bridge it. The hospital visitor who conquers his own fear of something facing us all takes the first step on a journey that others less fearful than he have already traveled much further on. As for the courage and dignity and sense of humor of those who are sick, these are beyond praise, and one hesitates where words are so flimsy. As for a disease whose latency period is measured in years, not months, there is no telling which side of the line dividing the sick and the well each of us will be on before this affliction is conquered. We may disdain the hysteria of policemen and firemen who call for masks, and people who ask if it is safe to ride the subway, and television crews who will not interview AIDS patients. For they are not at risk—those who are, are fearlessly helping their own.