When the Nines Roll Over (26 page)

The boys noticed us. It started with smirks and whispered jokes. One of them lay his head on his friend's shoulder in imitation of Hector; the friend pushed him away with mock disgust. The ticket collector passed through the car and I bought our tickets. I watched his blue-shirted back disappear through the sliding doors.

They started throwing things at us. First a paper airplane glided over our heads. Then balled-up pages from a newspaper. I nudged Hector with my shoulder; I wanted to move, to get into a car with people. Hector opened his eyes just as a crumpled soda can flew into my lap. He grabbed the can, sat up, and hurled it at the largest kid in the pack, a blue-eyed beefy bruiser. The can hit the boy on the nose and ricocheted away. Before the boy could decide what to do, Hector stood and leaned forward, thick forearms draped over the seat in front of him.

“When was the last time you got your face broke by a man in a catsuit?”

The boy had no answer. At the next stop a large family stepped into our car, broke the silence with the blessed cries of toddlers, and we made it to Scarsdale without further event.

“We're taking a cab back,” I told Hector as we walked out of the station. “I'll pay.”

“You'd better pay,” he said. “You think I've got room for a wallet?”

As we walked out one evening, walking through Chinatown, dodging the swarms of rushing people, pointing at the hanging ducks, the suckling pigs spitted and roasted, the crabs peering out from their glass tanks, their pincers clamped in blue rubber bands, Hector opened his mouth to say something but coughed instead, and kept coughing; he stood in the middle of the sidewalk with his hands on his knees, his body convulsed by fits of dry coughs. I held his shoulders for a full minute as pedestrians veered wide of us, none of them slowing for an instant.

“I've got to get out of this city,” he told me when he could finally speak, his eyes red. “I swear to God I'm allergic to New Yorkers.”

It was a brave joke. We had our blood tested and we heard the diagnosis pronounced. So we learned a new language. We read every article we could find on the new treatments. I called friends I hadn't spoken to in years, sick friends who had quietly retreated from the desperate rounds of parties, dance clubs, and openings. I had dropped these men from my daily thoughts and it shamed me, it shamed me that I listened for signs of gratification in their voices when I told them the news.

Some of them snapped at me, berated me for never visiting, and I accepted their anger for what it was. When the gardener yells at you for trampling his grass, it's not just you he's yelling at. It's every shortcutting bastard for the past ten years, every shirtless boy stomping through the azaleas, every yellow Labrador clawing up the newly planted turf. You are the last in a line of trespassers, and you bear the blame for every offender that has passed this way before.

I quizzed all my infected friends, asked them for names of good doctors and hospitals. I listened to them speak, took notes, and realized how grateful they were for the chance to unleash their tongues. They raged against the government, against their insurance carriers, against the men who infected them and the lovers who left them, against the pretty boys who would not meet their eyes, against a country that wanted them to die and get it over with.

I won't get like that
, I told myself. I'd rather put a bullet through my mouth than end as a bundle of hatred and fear. Not all of the men, though, had slipped into this loop of recriminations. Some were more hopeful. They spoke with great intensity about experimental new medicines, powerful drugs that were rumored to work. Nothing had been feder ally approved yet; only test subjects had access to the drugs.

Hector nodded when I told him this news. He already knew, had already called his powerful friends (“Patrons of the arts,” he told me, winking) and arranged for both of us to meet with a renowned doctor currently conducting tests at a midtown hospital.

“What we're doing,” Dr. Kislyany told us, sitting behind neat stacks of papers and journals on his dust-free desk, “is trying to sterilize the bad guys. When we talk about a viral load, you know what that refers to?”

“I think so,” I said. Hector rolled his eyes at me. “But not really,” I added.

Dr. Kislyany smiled. He was a surprisingly young man, dark and trim and elegant. He wore wire-frame glasses; delicate butterflies winged across the yellow field of his tie.

“The virus clones itself, essentially. It replicates, makes copies. The number of copies floating through a milliliter of blood, that's the viral load. Now, the therapy we're studying here, you understand it was just born? This is an entirely new class of drug. We don't know yet what the long-term effects might be. And we don't know if the drugs work. Early results look pretty promising, but it's too early to tell. It's risky, is what I'm saying. If you decide to do this, if you volunteer, you're making yourselves human guinea pigs.”

Hector was staring out the window. I looked at him and then at the doctor. “If it was you,” I asked him, “if you were sitting over here, is this the best way to go?”

“I'm pretty sure it's the only way to go.”

He handed us long contracts that released the hospital, the drug companies, and everyone else in the world from liability. We read the clauses quickly and signed our names, asking no questions.

“Now we check your blood. If the viral load's below five thousand, we hold off. If it's above, we begin. And gentlemen,” he told us, removing his glasses, “this is aggressive therapy. It's not take a couple aspirin, call me in the morning. These pills, they're heavyweights.”

We nodded, impatient to begin. I could feel the virus spreading through my body, spawning one hundred offspring a second, each of them intent on rotting me from the inside.

A nurse wearing long rubber gloves and a facemask drew our blood. The next morning Dr. Kislyany called us. Hector's count was eighteen thousand; mine was twenty-five thousand. When we walked out of the hospital, into the cold winter sunshine, Hector asked me to move in with him.

“I want you around,” he said. “I'll never remember what to take when. And you're a better cook than me.” Being a better cook than Hector was no great compliment; all he ate were protein shakes and raw vegetables. But he didn't want me to putter around the stove; he wanted me to watch over him. As long as I was there to bear witness, Hector could not disappear.

So I moved in with him, leaving Tulip and the butcher shop and Red Hook for Hector and his two-bedroom apartment in TriBeCa. It was my first time living in Manhattan. I had always imagined that when I finally made it to the city I would have
arrived
, with a one-man show in a Soho gallery and a slobbering review in
Art Forum
. But Hector was the one with the scrapbook of magazine reviews, with newspaper photographs of himself onstage, with a bundle of fan mail from actual fans (though mostly, he admitted to me, from his mother).

We began the first of many drug cycles. “Cocktail hour,” Hector would say, arranging the amber vials of pills on his kitchen table into separate stacks:
Hector's Morning; Alexander's Morning. Hector's Evening; Alexander's Evening.

In those first days of living together we saw the pills as our little heroes, fresh-scrubbed American soldiers marching through Paris, waving to the cheering crowds. Nucleoside analogs, nonnucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, protease inhibitors—we pronounced the names reverently, adoringly. They had come to save our lives.

Our affection for the pills did not last long. We had to plan our days around our medication, to remember that di danosine must be taken on an empty stomach, saquinavir with a high-fat meal, indinavir with a low-fat meal; that ri tonavir tastes like acid and ought to be drunk with chocolate milk; that delavirdine must be mixed with eight ounces of water and swallowed rapidly, like a frat-boy chugging his beer. I learned that amivudine causes headaches, insomnia, and fatigue; that nevirapine triggers vomiting, diarrhea, fever, and violent purple blooms on the skin—the same symptoms as nelfinavir, except when nelfinavir is taken with saquinavir you feel that knives are carving through your ribs. Zalcitabine ate a hole in the lining of my esophagus. “Minor ulcer,” Dr. Kislyany told me, staring at a sonogram of my throat. “Painful, not dangerous.” Idovudine inhibits the production of new bone marrow, which meant nothing to me until I contracted pernicious anemia and lost forty pounds and the color from my skin, lost so much strength that for two weeks I could only walk with the aid of a cane. Every time I stood too quickly a swarm of bright flies flashed across my eyes. Painful and dangerous, but I recovered.

The first accident happened nine months into therapy, standing on a street corner, waiting for the light to change. I felt a tremor in my bowels and then the terrible wetness running down my thighs. My mind flashed an image of my four-year-old self, bawling on the overgrown lawn as my mother hollered at me. The light changed and I crossed the street.

Shame is black shit seeping into your pants' legs, into your socks, as you climb the backstairs of your lover's apartment building. Shame is bundling your dirtied clothes in a garbage bag and dropping them down the incinerator chute. Shame is standing in the shower, the water as hot as you can bear, scouring your skin with pumice, rubbing the skin raw, until stars of blood constellate the legs, and harder still, wanting to flay yourself, to step out of this hide, to slither free of this spoiled body.

Kislyany prescribed antidiarrheal pills and they worked too well; I could not move my bowels for six days. I stopped taking the antidiarrheals. Two months later I had another accident. I began wearing adult diapers. Kislyany gave me different pills, ones that allowed me to resume a natural rhythm, and after a few months I felt safe walking the streets without a diaper.

Hector remained unfazed by each new cycle of medication. I would lie in the darkened bedroom, counting to a thousand and promising myself that when I reached that number the migraine would disappear, while through the door I heard the television set and Hector's quiet laughter. He was unaffected by the nausea that plagued me. When I knelt before the toilet's open mouth, the ceramic bowl splattered with orange vomit, Hector would wipe my lips with a wet towel and squeeze the back of my neck. I would spit in the bowl and look up at him, at Hector as beautiful as ever, at Hector watching himself nurse me in the bathroom mirror.

A strange thing happened. Every three months we had our viral load checked, and despite the adverse reactions I began responding to the therapy. My count shrank to five thousand and hovered in that vicinity. The virus wasn't going anywhere for a while, but it wasn't able to replicate either. My body and the disease were engaged in a stalemate. But Hector's count increased, from eighteen thousand to twenty-four, twenty-four to forty, forty to fifty-two, fifty-two to fifty-four, fifty-four to ninety. He was still dancing, his body remained muscular and lithe, but the monsters were breeding.

Eighteen months after I moved in, on a bright June Sunday, he called for me. I ran into the bathroom, saw him standing before the mirror, his mouth open. His tongue was coated with a milky film. Thrush.

I called Kislyany at his home in Westchester. I could hear the screams of young children in the background, and the whine of a blender, and below everything Bach's great fugue for organ. I told him what had happened.

“All right,” he said, and I thought,
Please don't use that phrase, Doctor.
“It's been heading this way for a while. How are
you
feeling?”

“Me? Listen, should I bring him into the hospital?”

“How's his breathing?”

“His breathing's okay. Is this—Does thrush mean for sure?”

“Put that down, Julia,” he said. “Thank you, sweetheart. Sorry, Alexander. Say again?”

“Does thrush mean for sure?”

He sighed into the telephone and I could picture him removing his wire-frame glasses, rubbing his tired eyes with the back of his hand. “I could tell you nothing's certain until we do tests. But yes, it's for sure. He has AIDS. Bring him into the hospital tomorrow morning, we'll give him some antifungal for the thrush. It clears up quickly.”

“Tomorrow morning?”

“Unless you want to go to the emergency room. Come in tomorrow, we'll X-ray his chest, see if anything's in there.”

The next morning rubber-gloved, face-masked doctors and nurses subjected Hector to a battery of tests. A serpentine tube, a bronchoscope, was twisted down into his wind-pipe, where it scraped a small tissue sample for microscopic examination. They laid him down naked on a steel mechanized table and covered his groin with a lead pad, then X-rayed various parts of his body. Three different nurses jabbed three different needles into his arm for three different blood tests.

Afterward we sat next to each other in Kislyany's office. I tried to hold Hector's hand but he wouldn't let me; he stared out the window at the buildings across the way.

“You have to stay here tonight, Hector,” Kislyany said. “You'll have to stay for a while. You've got pneumonia.”

Hector slowly turned his head to look at the doctor. “Pneumonia?”

“Parasitic pneumonia.
Pneumocystis carinii
. We'll get you on pentamidine for that, but I need to keep you here. It's—It boggles the mind that you're able to move around so well. Most cases the patient can't walk across a room without help. That's a good sign. Here's a bad sign: Your T-four lymphocytes are at one-twenty. That's low; that's getting way too low. We're going to switch over to a new series of meds—”