Revision of Justice (28 page)

“Yes, my mother’s death was quite a shock, Mr. Justice. After my father abandoned us, she was everything to me.”

“I’m surprised you kept the house, given the memories it must hold.”

“Grandmother wanted to sell it, but I begged her not to. She rented it out over the years, putting money into my trust. But she refused to set foot on the property. To her, the house represented…I’m not sure how to put it—”

“Sin?”

“You’ve heard her rantings, then.”

“They’re hard to miss.”

“She never approved of my father. From what I’ve heard, he was a violent man. He was older, my mother just a teenager. Then, after the divorce, Grandmother seriously frowned on my mother’s lifestyle.”

“From all accounts, she liked a good party.”

“She was fond of male company, Mr. Justice—let’s put it that way. After Mother’s death, Grandmother withdrew into her own world, spouting Bible verses, gradually losing touch with reality.”

“But you moved back in.”

“As soon as I could afford to keep it up. I always loved that house. I suppose, in a way, I consider it a shrine to my mother’s failed dreams.”

“Perhaps that’s why you’ve worked so hard to be a success—to find a place in Hollywood she never did.”

He brightened at the thought.

“You may be right—I never thought of it that way. I believe this magazine article of yours is developing quite nicely.”

He glanced at my plate.

“Shall we eat, Mr. Justice, before our meals get cold?”

He dug into his crab cakes, while I reached for my fork. As he ate, he raised his eyes to look out across the room. “I believe that’s Quentin Tarantino. Yes, yes, it is. I believe he’s looking this way.”

Cantwell raised his hand and waved tentatively to an odd-looking man with messy hair and a long, pointy jaw who was seated at a table in the center of the room. Cantwell raised his hand and waved more vigorously. The man appeared to be looking past us, to the rear booths or perhaps the big painting above them.

“Yes, he’s nodding,” Cantwell said, although the man wasn’t nodding at all. “We met a few years ago at Sundance. He speaks highly of my book.” He glanced at my open notebook. “That’s T-A-R-A-N-T-I-N-O.”

I dutifully wrote it down.

When I’d set my pen aside, Cantwell said, “What else would you like to know, Mr. Justice? Hopefully, something of a more upbeat nature.”

“You might tell me how you came to write
Nothing to Lose
, since it seems to be the screenplay of the moment.”

“It’s really a case of paying your dues, working hard at your craft, understanding the marketplace. And, of course, coming up with a dynamite concept.”

“That’s what makes it so perfect for our story.” I picked up my fork. “Why don’t you start from the beginning?”

Cantwell started talking, and I started eating.

I woke the next morning to the sounds of a hammer and saw, and looked out to see Fred fencing in the rear yard.

I poured some coffee, then helped him finish the fence and install a swinging gate, while Maggie watched from the patio with her head on her paws, looking melancholy.

By early afternoon, dry, hot winds were kicking up, shivering the brown fronds that drooped like broken wings from the shoulders of the tallest palms along Norma Place.

I showered off the sweat and dust of work, pulled on fresh jeans and a T-shirt, slipped into a pair of old running shoes, and set out on foot for the hospital. In a knapsack, I carried trail guides and topographical maps for the southern Sierra, a couple of pens, and my notes on the Reza JaFari story.

Half a mile later, due south, I stepped through sliding glass doors into the antiseptic cool of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. On the sixth floor, a nurse handed me the disposable latex gloves, face mask, and gown required of visitors to the infectious diseases ward.

I pulled on the protective garb in the corridor outside Danny’s room, while the able-bodied shuffled past me in robes and slippers, hauling their IV drips resolutely along with them the way tiny children clutch their favorite wheeled toys.

It was then that the reality of what I was doing hit me hard enough to awaken old terrors.

Last night I’d been at Morton’s, dining on chilled asparagus and grilled salmon, washing it down with good wine, finishing up with a rich crème brûlée, surrounded by the well-known and the
fab
ulously dressed as they chatted about net points and gallery openings and where their favorite chef had gone.

Now, three blocks away, I was face to face with a modern plague that had already infected more than 20 million people worldwide, killing hundreds of thousands, with the infection rate projected at more than 25 million by the end of the century. As I slipped into the disposable gown, I had trouble reconciling hundred-million-dollar movie budgets and five-hundred-dollar dinner tabs with the horror and the heartbreak hidden just around the corner, in places like this.

I shoved my hands deep into the latex gloves, stretching the fingers taut, fighting the emotional vertigo that comes with trying to straddle a fractured existence, suspended between the sanity of living a lie and the madness of accepting the truth. Harry Brofsky and Alexandra Templeton had lured me out of my isolation with the best of intentions. But now I felt myself teetering dangerously on the edge again, tempted to flee, the way I had seven years ago, after Jacques had passed and my world had imploded.

I wanted to be courageous, for Danny’s sake and for my own. But I didn’t feel courageous at all, not for a moment. I felt small and weak and cowardly. I wanted to run.

I took a deep breath, pushed open the door to Danny’s room, and stepped back into the world of the sick and dying.

Danny was propped up in a raised bed, wearing a thin cotton hospital gown, with the sheets pulled up to his waist. A needle was taped into a bruised vein in his left arm, connected by an IV tube to a hanging bottle. He had regained a little color but otherwise looked frail.

The bed next to him was empty and made up; someone had either just gone home, to ICU, or to a mortuary.

Danny smiled.

“Thanks for coming by.”

“I told you I would.”

“How’s Maggie doing?”

I lowered the railing on the bed and sat.

“She and Fred have bonded.”

His smile widened into a grin.

“No shit?”

“He dotes on her like she’s his first kid.”

“That’s great.”

I bent over and kissed him lightly on the lips.

“I brought trail guides, topo maps. I thought maybe we could plan a trip—for down the road, when you’re back on your feet.”

He looked at them as I held them out, then away.

“What is it, Danny?”

Even as I asked, I didn’t want to know. When he looked at me again, his eyes became steady with wisdom and resolve.

“It’s time you know what’s going on, Ben. It’s not fair otherwise.”

“I thought I did know what was going on.”

“Not all of it.”

“What, then?”

He gestured with his head.

“Pull the sheet down.”

I set the books and maps aside and took the edge of the sheet at his waist. As I drew it down, past his midsection where the hospital gown covered him, I saw what he wanted me to see—what he’d kept so well hidden until now.

His legs.

His grotesquely swollen, horribly disfigured, torturously infected, cancerous, black and purple legs.

I lowered the sheet all the way past his feet. The mass of lesions emerged from under his hospital gown and stopped at his ankles. His long, narrow feet were oddly unmarked; they were pale, delicate, almost pretty compared with the ugliness above.

The legs seemed like appendages from a different creature—elephantine in size and shape, lizardlike in texture, a lumpish mass of dying tissue and mottled blood aswirl in dark colors.

How long does one stare at such a thing? Where is the point between looking, as requested—and gaping?

I didn’t know. With all I’d seen in other hospitals—with Jacques and a dozen friends who’d died slowly, miserably—I had no preparation for this. It sickened me.

“Pretty gross, huh?”

Danny smiled a little, trying to make it easier.

“KS?”

He nodded.

I’d witnessed cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma, plenty of them. Jacques had developed the lesions toward the end, on his feet and neck, but relatively mild radiation treatments had eliminated them without much trouble. This was beyond anything I’d ever seen. With all the new drugs, the preventive therapies—I didn’t understand.

“How did it get so bad?”

He shrugged his slim shoulders.

“I let it get out of control.”

“You didn’t get treatment for it?”

“I didn’t get treatment at all, for anything. Not until it was too

late.”

“Why?”

“You know that word they use a lot—denial? Simple as that. I couldn’t face the damn truth of it.”

I understood how scared a man or woman could be, getting the diagnosis. Especially in years past, when it carried with it the surety of death. Medical science had never seen a disease quite so terrible, quite so devastating in the countless ways it could ravage and kill. I understood, as much as I raged silently against what he was telling me.

“I got nobody to blame but myself, Ben. After I tested positive, I went six, seven years without getting help. I did everything you’re not supposed to. Dope, booze—anything to stop feeling, you know?”

I knew.

“When the first lesions showed up, I just blew it off, man. Wore long pants and pretended I didn’t know they were there. When I finally got real sick and went for treatment last year, they’d spread almost all the way up.”

My eyes followed the lesions up to the hem of his gown.

“Go ahead. Take a look. It’s OK.”

I lifted the gown to his chest.

The tumors had spread halfway between his knees and his hips. His penis and testicles had been spared, like the rest of him above; they hung untouched and peaceful below a nest of soft, dark hair as if they belonged to someone else. Someone healthy. Someone touchable.

“If you’d gone for treatment right away—”

“I might not even have AIDS yet. You and me might be packin’ in right now to some choice lake up in the mountains.”

“If you’d gotten on anti-viral—”

“If. If don’t matter no more, Ben.” He let out a small, ironic laugh. “Woulda, coulda, shoulda. It’s too late for any of that shit.”

I pulled off my mask and latex gloves and put them aside. Then I pushed his gown up higher, above his chest.

I reached first for his right nipple, pinching gently until I felt it come to life, then the left one. I ran my knuckles across the fine hairs gathered at his breastbone, and traced a line under the gentle curve of his pectorals, watching his nipples grow harder still.

“Just this once, Danny, don’t ask me to stop.”

He said nothing, keeping his expectant eyes on mine.

I stepped away to draw the curtain shut around us. When I turned back to him, his penis had thickened, resting nervously against his thigh.

I lifted his testicles, letting their soft weight fill the cup of my hand before I teased and fondled them. His cock twitched, then rose, pulling up out of its foreskin collar. When it was full and firm, I closed my fist around it and stroked gently, more a caress than a tug, causing Danny to cry out my name and grab my wrist, while he kept his eyes riveted to mine.

What was happening didn’t feel like sexual desire to me, or even the sharp thrill of foreplay. It was something beyond that.

I wanted desperately to give him pleasure, to take him away from his discomfort and deformity for a while. I wanted him to remember for a moment that he was queer, and not to be ashamed of that, because that was a part of who he was and how he felt and it was nobody else’s business to tell him who he was or how he should feel, whom he should love or how, in what way he should give or receive pleasure or affection, what he should do with his own body, or someone else’s if they were willing.

Above all, I wanted him to know that someone still found him desirable, even if his body was no longer perfect.

I bent to brush his proud cock with my lips, to run the crimson head over the contours of my face like a caressing finger, to kiss the rigid shaft up and down until it quivered on the brink of spilling over, to let Danny know how much I cherished him, even as I was losing him.

The legs
. The lesions.

They were a part of him too. The part of him that represented the horror I had tried to distance myself from for so many years, but no longer could.

My hands abandoned his genitals, gliding between his thighs until they felt the smoothness give way to the hard, shiny mass of dark lumps that his legs had become.

I ran my hand down the encrusted skin of what had once been his strong hiker’s thighs, over a knee black with disease, down the cancerous ridges of his shins. Here and there, stray hairs had somehow survived, clinging like hardy weeds to the rugged landscape of his decaying flesh.

I cupped one hand under his calf, the other under his heel, and lifted his leg. I pressed my lips to the most hideous part of him, the most private part, which in some strange way had become the most beautiful.

Then I lowered his leg to the mattress and kissed my way back up to his lips, slowly, gently, savoring the taste of him with my tongue where it was safe. When I reached his midsection and upper body he was still hard, cock and nipples both still excited.

“I love you, Danny.”

“You’re a fool, then.”

One of his hands found mine, and our fingers intertwined.

The fingers of my other hand closed around the shaft of his cock, rising and falling faster now with a relentless rhythm, tightening each time it reached the sensitive ridges of the crown, my eyes gauging the anguished pleasure on his face.

I kept at it like that minute after minute, patient and steady, until the sensation became too much for him and his semen spurted out of him, spilling onto his belly, causing him to first gasp, then whimper.

He threw his head hack and clamped his eyes shut, wringing every bit of sensation he could from the moment, while tears squeezed from the corners of his eyes and ran in rivulets down his face to the pillow. Then he relaxed and I folded myself up beside him, my face against his chest, listening to the wild beating of his heart, feeling the warmth of his fever, the sweat.

He stroked my head, and his breathing gradually calmed. For minutes nothing was said. His melting semen trickled down, and I used a towel to catch it before it reached the sheets.

“Anything else I can do for you, handsome?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact.” His voice was solemn now. “But I don’t think it’s something you want to hear.”

“Try me.”

“Maybe you should get cleaned up first. Before a nurse comes in and gets an eyeful.”

I pulled his gown down and the sheet up, then deposited the towel in a laundry basket marked D
ANGER
-I
NFECTIONS
D
ISEASES
before washing up at the sink.

When I was done, he patted a section of the bed, and I took my place again beside him.

“I need you to help me die, Ben.”

I brushed the damp hair off his forehead and recited the convenient words I’d spoken before, to others.

“If it comes to that, I’ll be there for you.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

Suddenly, I was teetering on the edge again, and it was crumbling away beneath me.

“Maybe you’d better tell me what you mean.”

“They want to cut off my legs, Ben.”