by John Boyne
“I don’t go to the theater much,” I said.
“Then you’re a philistine. I bet you go to the movies, though, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “Quite a lot.”
“You got a boyfriend?”
I nodded. I didn’t mention that my boyfriend was the Head of Communicable Diseases at the hospital, had probably met him dozens of times and was the doctor in charge of his treatment. Bastiaan had made it clear to me from the start that I should reveal nothing about our personal relationship to the patients.
“You fuck around on him?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Never.”
“Sure you do.”
“I really don’t.”
“What kind of fag doesn’t fuck around? It’s the 1980s, for Christ’s sake.”
“I told you,” I said. “I’m not a fag.”
“So you keep saying,” he replied, waving this distinction away. “If you don’t fuck around, then my advice is for you to stay that way and hope that he doesn’t fuck around on you either. Then you’ll probably both be safe. But if you’re not doing it, then he probably is. There’s no chance the only two monogamous fags in New York City found each other.”
“He’s not like that,” I insisted.
“Everyone’s like that. Some are just better at hiding it than others.”
He started to cough and instinctively I reared back in my seat, reaching for the mask that was hanging around my neck and placed it across my face. “You little shit,” he said, looking across at me contemptuously when he’d recovered his breath.
“I’m sorry,” I said, taking it off and feeling my face redden a little in shame.
“I’m kidding. I’d do the same if I was you. Actually, I wouldn’t even be here if I was you. Why are you here anyway? Why do you do this? You don’t know me; why do you want to come inside this room?”
“I wanted to do something to help,” I said.
“Maybe you want to watch someone die. You get your kicks from that, is that it?”
“No,” I said. “That’s not it.”
“Have you ever seen anyone die?”
I thought about it. I’d seen several people die, of course: the priest who’d fallen out of the confession box on Pearse Street; my first fiancée, Mary-Margaret Muffet; and Ignac’s father, of course, on that terrible night in Amsterdam before we’d decided to leave Holland for good. But I’d never seen anyone die of AIDS. Not yet anyway.
“No,” I said.
“Well, stick around for the show, buddy, because I don’t have much time left. None of us do. The way I see it, this is the beginning of the end of the world. And it’s you people who my people have to thank for it.”
Three Types of Lies
The restaurant was located on 23rd Street, near the Flatiron Building, and from where we were seated I could see couples making their way through Madison Square Park, where, only a few weeks earlier, an old woman had spat in my face when Bastiaan, in a spontaneous moment, had put his arm around my shoulder and kissed my cheek.
“Fuck you,” the woman, who was old enough to remember the Great Depression, had snarled at us, and there was so much invective in her voice that the other people walking nearby had turned around and stared. “Fucking AIDS carriers.”
I would have happily avoided the area for a while, but Bastiaan’s friend Alex, one of the doctors who worked under him at Mount Sinai, had made the booking not knowing what had taken place there.
I tried to put the memory from my mind now as Alex’s wife Courteney, a journalist, drowned her sorrows, having been passed over for promotion earlier that day. The dinner had been intended as a celebration—both she and Alex had been certain that the job would be hers—but it had turned instead into something of a wake.
“I think I should quit,” she said, looking downcast as she swept her fork ineffectively through her food, taking only the occasional bite. “Do something useful with my life. Become a brain surgeon or a garbage collector. My whole career has been building toward becoming lead White House correspondent and for what? I’ve put so much time into getting to know all the people there. And instead that bastard gives the job to some guy who hasn’t even been at the paper for a year and probably couldn’t name the Secretary of Agriculture without looking it up. It’s just fucked up is what it is.”
“I couldn’t name the Secretary of Agriculture,” said Alex.
“Yes, but you don’t need to name him,” she said. “You’re not a political reporter. And it’s Richard Lyng,” she added under her breath, as I knew she would.
“Did you talk to him about it?” I asked.
“Of course I did. Well, it was less of a conversation and more of an argument. Voices raised, name-calling, the whole nine yards. And I may have thrown something.”
“What?”
“A plant. At the wall. Which just gave him the ammunition to say that he didn’t think I had the right temperament for such a responsible position.”
“What could have given him that idea?” asked Bastiaan, taking his life in his hands with his sarcasm.
“It’s not funny,” said Courteney, looking across at him angrily. “He couldn’t even give me a good reason why I didn’t get it. Well, he could, but he chose not to. But the truth is I know exactly what happened. The White House put pressure on him not to appoint me. They don’t like me over there. Reagan’s people think I’m trouble. I just can’t believe that he caved, that’s all. Whatever happened to journalistic integrity?”
“Sometimes, if you can’t believe something,” said Alex, “it’s because it’s not true.”
“But it is true,” insisted Courteney. “I know it’s true. I said as much to him and he didn’t deny it. He couldn’t even look me in the eye, the little prick. He muttered something about the paper having to maintain important relationships with powerful people, but when I challenged him on this he just clammed up.”
“What’s he like anyway?” asked Bastiaan, who was far more interested in these matters than I was. He even read a newspaper every day, which was something I almost never did. “Is he as stupid as people say he is?”
“He’s not stupid at all,” said Courteney, shaking her head. “No one gets to be President of the United States if they’re stupid. He might be marginally less intelligent than anyone who has ever held the office before him, but stupid? No. Actually, I think he’s quite smart in some ways. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He uses his charm to get himself out of difficult situations. And people love him for it. They’ll forgive him anything.”
“I can’t even imagine having a run-in with Reagan,” I said. “The closest I ever got to something like that was being punched in the face by a Press Officer in the Irish parliament. The woman who ran the tearoom had to pull him off me.”
“So what did you do to Reagan that was so wrong?” asked Bastiaan, who had heard that story before.
“Maybe we shouldn’t get into all of this right now,” she said, lowering her voice. “You and Alex don’t want to talk work tonight. I’m just venting.”
“Work?” he said. “Why, what has it got to do with our work?”
“She challenged him about his response to the AIDS crisis during a press conference,” said Alex. “And reporters are under strict instructions never to bring that word up with the President.”
“And what did he say?”
“Nothing. He pretended that he hadn’t heard me.”
“Maybe he hadn’t,” I suggested. “You know, he’s a very old man. I think he’s like eighty or something.”
“He heard me just fine.”
“Did he have his hearing aid in?”
“He heard me just fine!”
“Did it have its batteries in?”
“Cyril!”
“So he just ignored you?” asked Bastiaan.
“He stared down at me and gave me that little smile of his that he uses whenever his mind is drifting away and you just know he’d rather be rid
ing his horse over the prairie in Wyoming than standing in front of a bunch of reporters, and then he just pointed at someone from the Washington Post, who asked some boring question about the Iran-Contra affair. No, what I was asking about was something far more controversial. Something that hasn’t been written about enough yet.”
“Look, Reagan’s never going to do anything to help us in this fight,” said Alex. “Eighteen months from now we’ll have another election and Dukakis or Jesse Jackson or Gary Hart or one of those guys will be in the White House, guaranteed. After that, there’s a lot more chance of our voices being heard. Reagan can’t stand gays; everyone knows that. He doesn’t even like to acknowledge that they exist.”
“Society can’t condone that lifestyle and neither can I,” I said, quoting the President in what I thought was a pretty good impression, and for the first time I noticed a table of four sitting at the table next to ours staring over at us with utter disdain on their faces.
“Fuck society,” said Courteney. “What has society done for any of us lately?”
“Margaret Thatcher says there’s no such thing as society,” I said. “That there are only individual men and women, and there are families.”
“Fuck her too,” said Courteney.
“The strange thing is,” said Bastiaan, “Reagan worked in movies and television for years before he went into politics. He must have been surrounded by homosexuals.”
“Yeah, but he probably never even realized that any of them were gay,” said Alex. “You ever hear the story of how Charlton Heston didn’t know that Gore Vidal was writing a love story for Ben-Hur and Messala? He thought they were just old pals from the Jerusalem kindergarten. Reagan was probably just as clueless. It’s not as if anyone would have ever made a pass at him, is it?”
I had the misfortune of taking a drink from my wine glass as he said this and it was all that I could do not to spit it all over the table. Once again, I noticed the table next to us and a woman seated there, shaking her head in contempt.
“A truly great American,” I heard her husband say in a loud, aggressive voice.
“Well, what about Rock Hudson?” asked Bastiaan, who was oblivious to our neighbors. “They were friends, weren’t they?”
“When Rock Hudson died, Reagan said absolutely nothing despite decades of friendship,” said Alex. “Look, as far as the President is concerned this is a gay disease wiping out gay people and that, by its very nature, is not the worst thing that he can think of. It’s been six years since the first case was identified in America and in all that time the man has said absolutely nothing. He hasn’t even uttered the words HIV or AIDS once in public.”
“Anyway, I went to see the Chief of Staff afterward,” continued Courteney, “and he made it clear that the subject wasn’t even on the President’s agenda. Off the record he told me that the government would never put any substantial funding into research for a disease which was seen by the majority of the population as something that primarily killed homosexuals. Normal people don’t like fags, he said, grinning at me as if he couldn’t understand what I was getting so worked up about. So what does that mean? I asked him. That they should all die because they’re not popular? The majority of members of the House of Representatives aren’t popular either, but no one’s suggesting that they should all be killed off.”
“And what did he say to that?”
“He basically shrugged his shoulders as if he didn’t care. But later that same day I was coming out of the press room and making my way toward the West Wing to check a quote about something else entirely when Reagan just happened to pass me in the corridor and I pigeonholed him. I guess he’d forgotten me from earlier in the day, ’cause I got him to stick around by throwing a few softballs at him to get his attention, and once I had him hooked I asked him whether he was aware that since he had first come into office over twenty-eight thousand cases of AIDS had been reported in the U.S. and that of those twenty-eight thousand people almost twenty-five thousand had died. More than eighty-nine percent. I don’t know if that’s entirely accurate, he said”—and here she did an even better Reagan impression than I had done—“and you know what they say about statistics, don’t you?”
“What do they say about statistics?” I asked.
“I interrupted him, which you’re not supposed to do with a President, and asked him whether he thought the administration should be responding in a more serious way to a pandemic of such enormous proportions and one that showed no sign of slowing down anytime soon.”
“There are three types of lies,” said Alex, looking at me. “Lies, damn lies, and statistics.”
“And did he give you an answer?” asked Bastiaan.
“Of course not,” said Courteney. “He just grunted a little and smiled and his head twitched a bit and then he said, Well, you gals in the press room know all the gossip, don’t you? And then he asked me whether I’d seen Radio Days yet and what I thought of Woody Allen. He’s a leading man? he asked me, scratching his chin. In my day he would have been working in the mailroom. Basically, he just ignored my question and before I could drag him back to it, the Press Secretary came running down the corridor and told the President he was needed in the Oval Office. Once Reagan had gone, he gave me the mother of all dressings-down and threatened to take my press pass away.”
“And you think he spoke to your editor about your promotion?” asked Bastiaan. “You think he was punishing you for that?”
“Him or someone else in the administration. The fact is they don’t want anyone asking questions on this subject. Especially not someone so closely connected to it, someone who just happens to be married to an AIDS doctor and has the inside scoop on what’s actually happening on the ground.”
“Please don’t call me that,” said Alex, grimacing. “I hate that phrase. It’s so reductive.”
“Well, it’s what you are, isn’t it? Essentially? It’s what you both are. There’s no point in sugar-coating it.”
“The fact is, until the heterosexual community accepts that this affects them too,” said Bastiaan, putting his knife and fork down, “nothing is ever going to get any better. There’s a patient in Mount Sinai at the moment, Patient 741. You know him, Alex, right?” Alex nodded. “Have you volunteered with him?” he asked, turning to me.
“No,” I said, for I had a pretty good memory for patient numbers, they seemed to tattoo themselves into my brain, and I hadn’t encountered anyone in the seven hundreds yet.
“He was first referred to me last year by a doctor at the Whitman-Walker clinic in Washington. This guy had been getting terrible headaches for a few weeks and then he developed a cough that he couldn’t shake. He’d tried antibiotics but they hadn’t done any good. His local doctor ran some tests and she had her suspicions about what it might be, so she sent him to me for a consultation. I knew when I saw him that she was right, I could tell just by looking at him, but I didn’t want to alarm the poor guy unnecessarily by saying anything until I was absolutely certain, so of course I ran the usual tests.”
“How old is he?” asked Courteney.
“Around our age. No wife, no children, but not gay. He had that sense of entitlement and arrogance that goes with really good-looking straight guys. He told me how he’d spent a lot of his life globetrotting and was worried that he’d picked up a bug along the way, malaria or something, and I asked him whether he was sexually active. Of course I am, he said, laughing as if the question was ridiculous. I’ve been sexually active since I was a teenager. I asked him whether he’d had many partners and he shrugged and said that he’d lost count. A couple of hundred at least, he told me. Any men, I asked him and he shook his head and looked at me as if I was crazy. Do I look like I have sex with men? he asked, and I didn’t bother answering him. When he came back in for his results a week later, I sat him down and told him that I was very sorry but that I’d identified the HIV virus in his bloodstream and although he had yet to develop full-blown AIDS and we might be success
ful in warding it off for some time, there was a distinct probability that the virus would mutate into the full-blown disease within a few months and of course, as he probably knew, there was no cure at the moment.”
“You know how many people I’ve had that conversation with this year alone?” asked Alex. “Seventeen. And it’s only April.”
I had a sudden flashback to a moment I hadn’t thought about in years. Sitting in a coffee shop in Ranelagh on the morning of my wedding and somehow finding myself looking after a nine-year-old boy, the son of the woman who ran the tearoom in Dáil Éireann, while she tried to phone Aer Lingus to book a flight to Amsterdam. You’re a bit of an oddball, Jonathan, I’d said to him. Has anyone ever told you that? / Nineteen people this year alone, he’d told me. And it’s only May.
“So how did Patient 741 take it?” asked Courteney. “You know, I feel like I’m in a science-fiction movie calling him by a number. Can’t you just tell us his name?”
“No, of course not,” said Bastiaan. “And he didn’t take it well. He looked at me as if I was playing some crazy practical joke on him, then he started shaking, visibly shaking, and asked me for some water. I went out to get some and when I came back he’d taken his file off my desk and was reading through it like a madman. Not that he would have been able to understand a word of it, of course, he wasn’t a doctor, but it was as if he wanted to prove to me that I was wrong. I took the file back and handed him his water but his hands were trembling so badly that he spilled it all over himself when he tried to drink it. When I finally calmed him down, he told me that there was no way I could be right in my diagnosis and he wanted a second opinion. You can have one, of course, I told him, but it’s not going to change anything. There are very specific tests in place today for how we identify the virus and there’s simply no doubt about it whatsoever. I’m very sorry.”
