With or Without You (28 page)

At one thirty a.m., Davis, in an oversized shirt and pants that came from God knows where, is led into the waiting room through a swinging brown door. The thin doctor has a hand on Davis’s shoulder. The doctor looks tired. Davis still looks dazed. I wave and the doctor brings Davis to me, guiding him to an adjacent chair.

The doctor must believe the “we’re brothers” line I put on the admissions form because he addresses us both very frankly. Results of the STD screening will be available in two weeks. A tear in the anal wall, risk of infection, prescribing antibiotics as a precaution.

“We don’t have PEP,” the doctor says.

“What?”

“Post-exposure prophylaxis treatment. If there’s a chance he’s been exposed to HIV, it needs to be treated with the urgency you’d treat a gunshot wound. In other words, immediately.” He yawns. “We don’t have PEP here but he should get it and soon. The longer you wait, the greater his chance of contracting HIV.”

This is a hospital! Why don’t you have it?
I want to scream. Then, instead of telling me where we can find it, the doctor narrows his tired eyes.

“Your brother is not responsive so I’ll ask you: Was this consensual?”

I don’t know what to say so I nod.

The doctor brandishes a small pill bottle filled with antibiotics for the possible infection from the tear in Davis’s skin. I must have taken it; it’s in my hand. I’m only half there. I won’t let my eyes leave the swinging brown door. The one keeping me from my boyfriend.

“Erik,” I half shout, when the doctor tries to walk away, “the other guy I came in with. How is he?”

What lie had I told about Erik? Another brother? A friend? Or had I finally stopped telling lies about Erik?

Thin Doctor holds up his hands helplessly and I’m sure he thinks that look is sympathetic. But he really looks empty. He disappears behind the brown ER door. Swing, swing. I get two quick glimpses into the room beyond. No Erik.

Forty-five minutes pass. Davis’s head droops and I can’t tell if he’s doped up on pain pills or just being a dick. I spare him a handful of glances at times when I’m not eyeballing the brown door.

“Why are you here?”

This might actually be the second or third time he’s asked. Davis’s voice is low, unrecognizable.

“We’re waiting for Erik.” My voice wavers when I say Erik’s name. I can’t believe he’s asking.

“Why are
you
here?”

“I am here,” I return in anger, “to stop you from making a stupid fucking mistake.”

A serrated grin carves Davis’s face. He giggles softly to himself. “Oh. Of course.”

I stand and try to peer through the diamond-shaped window in the brown door. I only see a paper curtain. I wonder if Erik’s behind it. I want to paint that window.

Turning back, Davis is staring at me. Or rather, through me.

“You know what we should do? You know what we should do, Ev? Find a tattoo parlor. This is New York. There’s got to be a twenty-four-hour tattoo parlor.” He rolls up his sleeve, exposing his skinny left wrist. “A big cricket. Right there. That’s who I want to be. That’s my bug. A cricket.”

My stomach implodes.
He only thinks he got the bug,
I tell myself. He doesn’t know for sure. There’s still a chance he wasn’t infected. Still a chance that nothing happened.

But something happened.

As Davis’s laughter gets louder, the cop I talked to earlier steps into the room. He glares at Davis. I smile weakly. This sort of attention is the last thing we need. I grab Davis’s face.

“Listen,” I whisper, “I need you to just calm down. Okay? Erik will be out soon, we’ll all go back to Shan’s
for the night, and tomorrow we’ll head home.”

“Home? What is that exactly? Home to Mommy and Daddy’s store? Home to a secret boyfriend? Home to what, Ev?” he seethes.

I don’t have an answer to this. I swallow. “We’ll figure that out.”

Davis guffaws loudly. The cop starts toward us and I shrug an apology to him. I hold up the bottle and give it a shake, hoping this says,
I just need to give him his meds
. Cop nods but doesn’t take his eyes off Davis. I make like I’m opening the bottle.

“Oh, that’s fucking great, Ev.
We
will figure it out. You, me, and … Erik? He into threesomes?”

“You and me,” I reply evenly. “We will figure this—”

“Why? Why would I want to figure anything out? Especially with you? What is there to figure out, Ev? Better yet, just tell me what it is that you have to contribute?”

His hands ball, his breaths escape in howitzered bursts. As he shifts in his seat, he winces in pain, favoring his right side.
Tear in the anal wall. Risk of infection.

“C’mon, Ev,” he continues through bared teeth, “I want to know why you came here. What you thought you’d save me from.”

“Sable—”

“
Sable
saved me!” he spits, cauterizing what remains of our friendship. “From Madison. From my dad. From you.”

Just like that, I’m back at the Orpheum, in line for
Rocky Horror
, being rejected. Back then, it stung. Tonight, it decimates.

“Sable,” Davis says, “gets me. He knows a lot and he’s got a lot to say and you just never wanted to listen to him. He could have saved you too if you’d given him the chance. We could have come to New York together, you and me. But you had your little secret.
Erik
.”

Never say Erik’s name with that tone again.

Davis leans forward. “I got saved. What did you get?”

“Sable is weapons-grade crazy!” I finally retort. “He hates the world. He’s pissed off that he got HIV and all he wants to do is infect everybody he can.”

I’ve given him what he wants. Davis eats my fury and regurgitates a smile. “God, I feel so stupid. You know, I stood up for you. Sable said you didn’t understand HIV, what a gift it is.”

“It is not a gift!” Cop shoots me a look when I shout. I’m shaking with rage. More softly, I say, “And deliberately infecting someone—”

“I wanted it!” Davis is calmer than ever now, as if some sedative has kicked in. “I asked for it, Ev. He didn’t trick me into coming to New York. I asked for what you and I always wanted. Acceptance. And now I got it. Having HIV means I’m
somebody
.”

He puts his hand on my knee. I nearly jerk away.

He whispers, “It’s what we wanted, Ev. You can still have it.”

I think about Mr. Benton, choking down countless pills, doing whatever it takes to fend off the virus. This was nothing Mr. Benton asked for. It was not a gift, a status symbol.

I make one more attempt to reach Davis. “Did we want the same thing? Did we really?”

Davis slinks down in his chair, shaking his head. “I can’t believe I tried to tell Sable you’d come around. He read you better than I could. I told him you’d get it. But you don’t. You won’t. This is just like you.”

He waves his hands in front of his face and makes an explosion sound.

“What are you talking about?” I ask.

He jerks his thumb toward the ER. “How soon before you screw things up with Lover Boy? Wanna take bets? I mean, if you haven’t already. He didn’t seem too happy back in the park in Madison.”

“You don’t know anything about Erik,” I counter.

He holds up a hand. “But I know you, Evan. You’re going to do what you always do. Hide behind your paintings, your windows. ‘Look at me! I make pictures so I don’t have to deal with real life! I copy other people’s work and that makes me special.’ Hell of a lot of good it did you. At the end of the day, you still don’t belong. You’re pathetic.”

I can’t respond because a short doctor pushes through the swinging brown door and surveys the room. He’s gripping a clipboard. Dark stains mar the front of his purple scrubs.

“Evan Weiss?”

I go numb and I hear every TV medical drama I’ve ever seen play out in my head.
I’m sorry.
We did everything we could. He lost too much blood.

I stand, trembling. The doctor smiles and motions me over with a nod of his head. When I approach, he shakes my hand and for the first time in this hellhole, I feel reassured.

“I’m Dr. Munro,” he says with a bass so potent I could swear it’s James Earl Jones. “Sorry we kept you waiting so long. Erik begged me to come tell you he’d be out soon.”

My lungs ache and I realize it’s because I’d momentarily stopped breathing.

“He’s okay?”

Munro nods. “He’s got quite a deep gash. Took a lot of stitches to patch him up.”

“He lost … a lot of blood.”

Munro scrunches up his face in a “naaah” sort of way, which makes me love this man. “I’m not saying it wasn’t a nasty wound but it looked a lot worse than it was. I’m sure it hurt like hell, though. But I’m supposed to tell you that he was very manly and didn’t cry or anything.” Then
he mimes crying as if to say,
Erik bawled like a baby
.

I laugh and that’s when I notice a set of rainbow-colored rings on a chain around the doctor’s neck. He gives my elbow a squeeze and says, “Give us about ten more minutes and I’ll have your boyfriend back where he belongs.”

At the end of the day, you still don’t belong.

Goosebumps prickle my skin and the color seems to spring back into the room. I plop down in a chair across from Davis, relieved and exhausted.

“When we get home,” I say softly, “you should go see your mom. She panicked when you didn’t pick her up at Mendota. She misses you.”

An aborted retort catches in his throat. It’s possibly the only bull’s-eye I’ll score tonight.

As promised, Erik emerges from the emergency room minutes later, walking stiffly and wearing an ugly plaid shirt I’ve never seen before. But he’s got a tired smile on his face. I march up to him and say the only thing I can think of.

“You suck at jiujitsu.”

He shrugs. “Yeah, I’m thinking there’s a reason I never brought it up. Couldn’t have you thinking I was less than perfect, right?”

I glare at the hideous shirt, yellow and green intersecting like a thousand crosshairs around his chest. It’s
completely clean but I’m convinced that if I stare long enough, I’ll see the blood again. Erik’s blood. Sable’s blood?

Erik models the shirt with a labored runway twirl. “You like? They gave it to me to replace my old shirt. It’s the newest from Milan. The pinnacle of hospital lost-and-found-box haute couture.”

“Did he … ?”
Bleed on you
. I can’t even say it.

I don’t have to. Erik gives my shoulder a weak squeeze. “I don’t think so. I don’t even know if he got cut. But I’ll get HIV tests for a while, just to be sure.”

I throw my arms wide. He points at his wounded side.

“Evan, I love you, but hugging me now is grounds for—”

“Breaking up?”

“Vivisection.”

He hands me his cell phone.

“There are, like, thirty messages from Shan. I would have answered but I’m on pain meds and might have accidentally told her what I think of her. Didn’t you call to tell her where we are?”

No. No, I didn’t. When we get back to Shan’s place, we’re boned.

The three of us catch a cab. My eyes never leave Erik, who winces every time he shifts to get more comfortable. Davis doesn’t say anything the rest of the night. We make
it back to Shan and Brett’s around two in the morning. After a tongue-lashing from Shan, we bivouac down. Erik gets the spare bed to himself. My tossing and turning would aggravate his wound. Davis and I get sleeping bags on the living room floor. Davis is out cold when his head hits the pillow. I flash back to any number of nights we did this in my bedroom. I wonder if he’s dreaming the same thing.

No. He’s not.

As I drift to sleep, I keep hearing Davis tell me that I’m going to blow things with Erik.
Like you always do.

I think about Oxana.
Where are you, Mr. Weiss? Where are you?
Everything she said shoots through me. I’m a prism, each word splintering out in a spectrum of colors I alone can see. All this time I’ve been following. Painters. Chasers. I never stopped to think where it all led. Now it finally makes sense.

At the end of the day, I can sweep my brush across the glass and capture a moment, but I’m stupid to think I’m in control. In shaping my art, I’m the one who’s shaped. In distilling what I know and what I want to be, I’m forming a path. To art. To yoga. To Erik.

At the end of the day, the picture creates me.

TITLE:
You Are Here

IMAGE:
A street map of Madison with a large star
labeled
YOU ARE HERE

INSPIRATION:
Picasso’s
Composition with Skull

PALETTE:
Background = dun
Street lines = helio blue
Street names = raw umber
Star/YOU ARE HERE = magenta

From early in Picasso’s Cubist period, the street blocks are deliberately misshapen, crooked and angled. By contrast, the streets themselves are almost unerringly straight. The star’s girth is exaggerated, the words are slanted and harshly sketched.

When I was nine years old, I met Davis George Grayson.

Not like we should have: in a class or on a playground. But in a gutter. Where he found me crying.

I had run away. My one true rite of passage: the patient
zero of childhood clichés. An impulsive decision over something Shan and I had fought about. Who knows what it was anymore? At the time, it was world ending. Mom sided with Shan so I stuffed a backpack with clothes and left.

Tears in my eyes, I marched off into the August heat wave. I zigzagged down side streets and alleys, trying to lose anyone who might follow me. Not that anyone would, but I had an active imagination.

Then I lost myself. In a strange neighborhood and getting hungrier by the minute. I tried to head home, but I had no clue where I was.