When the Nines Roll Over (27 page)

“Who's we? You and me?”

“No—”

“Alexander and me?”

“Figure of speech,” said Kislyany. “Alexander's pills are working; he'll stick with those. For you it's antibiotics for the pneumonia, antifungals for the thrush, whole new regimen. I've got a room reserved for you on the eighth floor, nice room, sunlight.”

Hector fought off the pneumonia in three days, to Kislyany's astonishment. The hospital released him and Hector returned to his rehearsals, weakened but eager to dance. He slowly gained his strength back. In August he was reinstated as danseur, a noble but doomed gesture on the company's part. A few weeks after that, limbering up at the studio, Hector's heel slipped off the barre and he crashed to his back. Three ballerinas came to our apartment that night; they teased Hector for his clumsiness and we all laughed, but I saw that the ballerinas were frightened. Hector never fell.

The following Monday I came home with a bag of groceries and found Hector sitting at the kitchen table, staring at his hands.

“Rehearsal canceled?” I asked him, putting the milk in the refrigerator.

“I'm taking a leave,” he said, his eyes dry and dark and unknowable.

It made no sense to me that Hector's body was quitting, that my own kept battling and holding its own. It seemed stupid to me. It seemed criminal.

Things got worse. I would find him standing in the living room and ask him what he was looking for. He would stare at me blankly and then blink, half-smile, and shrug. Once, while I was painting in the guest bedroom, I heard a thud from the bathroom. I ran in there and found him kneeling naked in the shower, the water beating down on him, a red bruise already darkening his forehead.

“What happened? Are you okay?”

He picked a tangle of my hair out of the drain and held it up to me. “You're going bald, Alexander,” he told me sadly.

When he watched the television sitcoms he no longer laughed; he stared at the TV as if he were waiting for someone to step through the glass. When I turned the power off he did not seem to notice; he'd continue to gaze at the empty screen for minutes.

I woke up on a rainy October morning to a strange moaning; turning over in bed I saw Hector lying facedown, his right arm twitching. I thought he was having a nightmare and poked him in the side. He did not wake up. I rolled him onto his back and saw that his eyes were open, twin trails of drool leaked from the corners of his mouth.

I called for an ambulance and the paramedics came, lifted him off the bed, strapped him into a stretcher, and drove us to the hospital. Dr. Kislyany met me in the waiting room, a manila folder in his hand, a pencil behind his ear. He led me to his office and closed the door.

“It's bad, Alexander.” He pulled a sheaf of transparencies from the folder. “He has lymphoma of the brain. We ran a few CAT scans.”

I looked down at the black-and-white images of Hector's brain. Kislyany indicated a white blur with the eraser of his pencil. “See that mass?” He indicated another one. “That one? They're all over. Lesions.” He exhaled loudly and tapped his desktop with the pencil.

“What do we do?” I asked. The pencil-taps sounded loud as bombs.

“We'll start radiation treatment tomorrow. I've reserved the same room for him, the one on the eighth floor. Listen, Alexander, how are
you
feeling?”

I did not understand what he wanted.

“Your viral count was very low last time,” he said, nodding approvingly. “Under four thousand. We're headed in the right direction.”

The next day hospital technicians began blasting Hector's head with X-rays. As the weeks went by his body started to wither, the muscle melting from his bones, the bones surging against his skin, the skin sagging and fading until it seemed no more than cheap paper hastily wrapped around last-minute gifts.

For two weeks in November he seemed to improve. He would lie awake for a few hours at a time, and nod at me as I spoon-fed him custard and applesauce, and half-smile as I wiped his lips clean.

On one of those occasions he asked me to bring his portrait into the hospital.

“I never finished it,” I told him. “It never looked as good as you.”

“Bring it,” he said. “I want to see it.”

The next day I brought him the painting, the frame sandwiched between two sheets of corrugated cardboard. I had painted Hector nude and didn't want people on the street, in the subway, to stare at his unclothed image. Hector nodded when I showed him the painting, and directed me to rest it on the windowsill.

“You want everyone to see it?” I asked, looking at the painting. The muscular, healthy Hector stared back at me. But that was a stupid question. I placed the painting on the windowsill and stepped back.

“No,” he said, closing his eyes. “I don't like the frame. Not black. Get something in wood, a pale wood.”

Later in the week, when the painting was newly framed, he nodded. “That's nice. I look good.”

“You do,” I told him. “You look good.”

“What's not finished?”

“Your feet,” I said. I pointed at his painted legs that ended at the ankles. In the painting Hector floated, nothing but space between the butcher shop's concrete floor and where he began.

Hector smiled and closed his eyes. “Feet are hard.”

On New Year's Eve I smuggled a bottle of champagne into Hector's eighth-floor room. He had lost consciousness a week before. I filled plastic cups for both of us, sat beside him and watched the television, watched the ball drop, watched thousands of small bulbs light the giant number
1994
, watched fireworks explode on the small screen. A nurse came into the room to check his breathing and pulse; she wagged her finger at me but then accepted a drink. She stayed with us for ten minutes and joined me in a chorus of “Auld Lang Syne.”

“Happy New Year,” she said as she was leaving the room. “I'll be back in two hours.”

When she left I pulled my chair close to Hector's bed and leaned forward to kiss his forehead. His skin was hot and damp. I was used to that; the fever had come and gone for months. His body was collapsing upon itself. If I placed my palm against his chest-bone and pushed, he would crumble like ash. His yellow face rested on a white pillowcase, his lips dry and blue, partly open. A patchy stretch of beard grew along his jaw. His lower lip bulged like a ballplayer's with a wad of chewing tobacco; I pulled the lip from his teeth and saw the wine-grapes of Kaposi's sarcoma jutting from his gums.

I stood wearily from the bed and walked into the bathroom, turned on the hot water, and waited until it steamed from the faucet. I wet a hand towel, lathered it with liquid soap, returned to Hector, and daubed his face gently with the cotton cloth. I drew the tortoiseshell handle from my pocket and opened the blade. While fireworks continued to flare on the television, I shaved the coarse whiskers from Hector's face. After I was done, after I had sponged off the soapy residue and patted his face dry with a clean towel, I stood above him with the razor open in my hand. I thought how easy it would be to cut his throat, how good it would be for him, something in the way of mercy. But I could never do it; I could never raise my hand against Hector, not even for mercy.

That night I understood the old story for the first time, that the wooden horse is Love, allowed through the gates against all warnings, bearing its cargo of killers, men with long knives who crawl from the dark belly and burn the city down.

One week later he was dead and buried with the winter dead.

The new antiviral therapy, of course, was hailed as a great success. Beaming doctors graced the covers of magazines, test tubes in hand, beneath jubilant banners:
Hope for the Hopeless, The Virus Hunters, Man of the Year, A Cure at Last?
I read story after story lauding the scientists' ingenuity, their exhaustive research and testing, how they sprang back from each defeat to renew the attack.

I looked at diagrams of the drugs' molecular composition; I read the dates of FDA approval. I scanned charts that listed percentile scores for the drugs: their efficacy in lowering the viral count or raising the T4 count, their rates of specific toxicities. The numbers were ordered in two parallel columns, statistics for people given the drugs lined up against statistics for people given placebos. I read that nevirapine caused nausea in forty-seven percent of the patients, against three percent for the placebo group. Breathing hard, I read two years of drug-induced symptoms in a single row of italics, side-effects I had suffered and many more I had escaped: kidney stones, bilirubin, abdominal pain, fatigue, flank pain, diarrhea, vomiting, acid regurgitation, loss of appetite, dry mouth, back pain, headache, insomnia, dizziness, taste changes, rash, respiratory infection, anemia, peripheral neuropathy, hepatoxicity, pancreatitis, ulcers, dry skin, sore throat, fever, indigestion, muscle pain, anxiety, depression, itching, painful irritation, gallbladder inflammation, cirrhosis of the liver. I believed I could hear a rhyme-scheme in the procession of words, a rhythm, and I thought:
These words mean nothing to whoever typed them, they are mere collections of letters, unburdened of pain.
I thought:
These are the miseries of the lucky, of the survivors
. I read the percentiles for the placebo-users: two percent, two percent, zero percent, one percent—and something made sense. I dropped the journal to the floor and shut my eyes.

The next morning I banged on Kislyany's office door. A nurse, carrying a clipboard in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, walked by and smiled.

“How you feeling, Alexander?”

I banged on the door again and Kislyany opened it. Two young men sat by his desk, one black, one white, their heads bowed together, speaking in low, urgent tones. They held contracts in their hands.