Borrowed Time

by Paul Monette

  A couple of days afterward we were eating a glazed breakfast before going off to UCLA. As I cleared the table—things in order if not life—Roger looked up at me and said: “It’s just the two of us.”

  “I know,” I replied, though of course we weren’t alone. Al and Bernice had left for the desert on February 1, but they were calling in regularly to check up on us, clearly very anxious. Roger had been looking forward all winter to his sister Jaimee’s arrival in Palm Springs with Michael and the kids, yearning to put this thing behind him so he could go play uncle. We had two doctor friends we ran the numbers by, and the phone was constant with friends’ concern.

  All the same, it was just the two of us lining up as the tests grew more harrowing, the corridors at UCLA more like a separate equal world every day. Forgive us the feeling now and then that the woods had closed behind us. In the most visceral way, with a taste like a ball of blood in our mouths, it seemed that life itself was pulling in like a tortoise. Inside its armor crouched the “group of two” that Freud calls a marriage. Not career, not the past, the waste of errands or the state of the planet. Just us.

  I was taking Roger’s temperature every couple of hours now, shaking down the thermometer till I had a twinge like tennis elbow. One crazed afternoon I accidentally broke the thermometer against a door and fell to my knees keening, trying to pick up the shards as the mercury beaded into the jade-green carpet. I was cooking in twice a day, shopping at Irvine Ranch, bewildered by the sunny vigor of what Randall Jarrell calls the “basketed, identical/Food-gathering flocks,” with their nine-dollar purple peppers and the BMWs in the parking lot. Already I went about in public as if I were on the moon. I had to ventriloquize my way through various meetings at the studio and with Alfred. I began calling my brother late at night in Pennsylvania, needing his constant reassurance after Roger went to bed.

  “Paul, it’s not AIDS,” Bob said over and over, though he knew the tragic randomness of things far better than I. He was born with spina bifida, and had been in a wheelchair all his adult life. Six years younger than I, he spent months at a time in hospitals as a child. I have a vivid memory of visiting him with my parents in Springfield at the Shriners Hospital. Because I was under sixteen, I had to stand in the bushes and peer in a window and wave at him, lost in a ward of suffering. He’s one indomitable character, my brother—an accountant’s accountant and a teacher, married to his high school sweetheart, Brenda. Throughout the skirmish over my novel, Bob had been the buffer zone between me and my family, the one who understood being gay, who understood being a writer. In the summer of ’83 a drunk plowed into his car head-on and put him in the hospital for a month. Oh, had he been there.

  All through the week of March 4, Roger’s calendar is full of precise notations: 2.0 Godino will, 0.3 Scott Redman. The hours of a lawyer are broken down into tenths, and he kept the record in his calendar because he was home in bed, but he wouldn’t stop working. The blood-gas results proved to be in the normal range, which was a relief, yet there was clearly some kind of infection in the lung. The issue at week’s end was whether or not that infection was “interstitial.” Pneumocystis carinii—the deadly AIDS pneumonia, so-called PCP—is an interstitial infection, which means it invades the interstices between the lung sacs. A battery of x-rays seemed to indicate no interstitial involvement, and this was taken to be good news, especially by our doctor friends, Joe Perloff and Dell Steadman. Joe is a research cardiologist, Dell an eye surgeon. We were pinning them down for opinions in matters that weren’t their field, but they were generous here as they would be throughout. Once I heard the interstices were clear, I tossed the pneumocystis file away. You become very primordial about data. What you need you eat whole, like a python consuming a rat. What doesn’t apply right here right now is moontalk.

  Thursday or Friday a letter arrived from Craig. The doctor in Houston had confirmed the diagnosis: AIDS by reason of KS, no treatment at this time. Craig was writing to eight or ten friends to break the news, but otherwise he wanted to keep it private. He would widen the circle at his own pace. It couldn’t have been more lucid or dignified, and I read it to Rog like a bulletin off the Kafka wire service. When is enough, I kept thinking, as if every tragedy mounting up would finally satisfy some savage god.

  Despite the positive sign on the interstitial front, Roger still wasn’t getting any better. Still not worse, but Cope decided it would only be prudent to have Roger come in for a bronchoscopy, in which a flexible tube is inserted in the lung for a specimen of tissue. The bronc has become such a fact of all our lives now, it’s hard to recall there was a time I’d never heard of it. Joe Perloff promised the test was remarkably negotiable, though I recalled Joel saying the doctor had managed to puncture Leo’s lung.

  Roger would have to go into the hospital overnight to have it. Neither of us had spent so much as a day in that nether place, not in our whole ten years together. Till then I affected to feel rather phobic about the whole idea. The previous fall, when Kathy Hendrix had been in for surgery, I told her over lunch a week later that I hadn’t been up to visit because I wasn’t good at hospitals. I think I still clung to the trauma of the past, pressed against the Shriners window, like a shield. I would learn now to put such bullshit behind me very fast, and afterwards would feel a kind of nuclear contempt for those who practiced it anywhere in Roger’s orbit.

  Over the weekend before he went in, we just hunkered down. I’d finished reading Forster and turned to The Golden Bough, as preparation for the powers of Egypt. Every night I would pore through Frazer’s laundry-list account of magic and fear and atavism. I kept beside me a folder of Nile cruises, which I would scribble with lofty problems: Did it matter if we booked port or starboard? Mostly what I was doing was repeating the interstitial news like a mantra, over and over, to drown out the week’s other blip of evidence. Roger had failed the scratch test for mumps—had shown no red or blistering when the patch was removed from his arm—and this was considered a crude sounding of weakened immune function. If the choice was either impaired immunity or an unreliable test, I was for betting the farm against the test.

  Roger was comfortable resting in bed, still no cough to speak of, animated with everyone who visited. Saturday night he convinced me to go out for dinner with the Perloffs and the Rankaitis/Flicks. These were the couples we saw most often, who gathered around them the most stimulating people, mind over Mammon. Marjorie Perloff was then at the University of Southern California, an encyclopedic and inexhaustible literary critic who knew every cusp of modernism backwards. Robbert Flick and Susan Rankaitis both make photographs, but the camera is merely the common denominator here. The light these two work by is opposite as sun and moon. Marjorie and Joe, Susan and Robbert, Roger and I—we had constituted an inner circle for many years.

  At the restaurant I made Joe explain the interstitial data all over again, and he tried to ease my mind about Tuesday morning’s test. Finally I lightened up enough to eat. Susan says she never suspected Roger had AIDS till I told her seven months later, so Joe presumably succeeded in reassuring somebody. When I got home, however, I found Rog sitting in the study coughing, and looking more drained, worn out and lost than he had all month. He was so glad to see me and be taken care of. At such a moment you move like an avalanche to oblige, for all the reasons of love but also just to keep busy. It was going to be fine, he’d be home by Tuesday afternoon, and after that there were no more tests. Then he would have to get better, I thought, as I kneaded his shoulders and curled him to sleep. I read The Golden Bough till 4 A.M.

  Al and Bernice had decided to drive in from the desert, even though we told them it wasn’t necessary. They agreed to hold off till Monday and just stay overnight till we got the results of the bronc. On Sunday evening I fixed the two of us as cheery a supper as I could muster. Roger’s appetite hadn’t suffered, at least. But in the middle of the meal he excused himself to go to the bathroom, where he had a twinge of diarrhea. This didn’t prove to lead to anythi
ng ominous on its own, and in fact through all his sickness Roger didn’t have to deal with much intestinal static. But as I sat at the dining room table waiting for him to come back, the food like ashes on my tongue, I had a sudden vision of what a flimsy wall we’d been building the last few weeks, brick by brick.

  He seemed so weak and overwhelmed by then, and the hardest thing to watch him lose in the early days was the spring in his step. He’d always had a quickness about him, a vigorous enthusiasm that I can still see in picture after picture out of the past, like a great store of potential energy. The wellspring of it wasn’t athletic; it flowed from a joy of life. In the steepening decline of the previous months he’d lost the physical edge of that delight—lost it for good. Though he had reservoirs of deeper and sweeter tones to compensate, I missed the boyish energy most. Perhaps because mine went with it.

  Sunday night, Vertigo happened to be on television. We’d both seen it decades ago but never since, especially not with the drift of learned exegesis that has developed around the fifties Hitchcock. We lay close in bed to watch it and were soon transported into its spiral subtext. The worry about tomorrow seeped away a little, or maybe it was just a relief to watch somebody else—in this case Jimmy Stewart—be torn apart by suppressed hysteria.

  On the way to UCLA on Monday morning, driving along Sunset to the west side, Roger asked quietly: “What if it’s really serious?”

  Despite the positive talk all week—all month—and despite the fact that my last nickel was riding on denial. I don’t know if I answered the right question, but I know my voice was steadier than I would’ve thought possible. Rog, I said, you have to understand how much everyone loves you. He had nobody out there even approaching enemy status; I’d never heard anyone say an unkind or quarrelsome word about him. The same could not be said of me, by a long shot. I gave a little encomium on his talent for friendship and loyalty, the idea being that everyone would be there for him if the going got rough. I’d learned this tactic of human grounding from Roger himself, who would always be saying as we drove away from a dinner party, about someone I hadn’t even noticed, “Such a nice man. So unpretentious.” Unless we were driving home from a migrainous Hollywood party, in which case he might grumble about some hustling producer or other: “Too noisy. So full of himself.”

  I can’t really separate the March 11 check-in on the tenth floor of the medical center from a dozen others. Amateurs still at the system, I expect we appeared like two meek refugees, with the overnight bag and a briefcase full of work. The tenth floor at UCLA is called the Wilson Pavilion, all private rooms and food prepared to order, the carpeted veneer of a hotel corridor not quite masking the naked high-tech sick gear. There was a waiting room across from 1028, dedicated to Nat King Cole, where we plunked the parents down with their thousand-page potboilers. I stayed with Roger throughout the day, working in fits and starts on The Manicurist, as the interns came in and drew his blood.

  We would both grow grimly accustomed to the first day of a hospitalization, with the interns sweeping in as if by revolving door, trying to look serious in spite of their comical youth, mad with backed-up things to do and racing like the White Rabbit. There would come a time when I would take over this phase, give the tedious history, answer the bald questions: Are you a homosexual? Are you or have you ever been an IV drug abuser? On March 11 I couldn’t tell one intern from the next, intern from resident. I didn’t realize that in a teaching hospital like UCLA every patient is one more unit to cover as they cram for the test of their budding careers. And here in the presence of a new disease, each kid doctor wanted an A. But remember, Roger was only supposed to be there overnight, so I held them all at arm’s length and resisted differentiating.

  Roger bore the process very well, and we seemed to be taking a proper stand of firmness in saying he was feeling not too bad. Not sick enough, not sick enough—I kept repeating Cope’s phrase. It was still so, wasn’t it? The pulmonary man came in to explain how the bronchoscopy worked. They would do it early in the morning, and we should probably have the results by noon. Home for lunch.

  Dennis Cope was a welcome sight late in the day, because he at least knew who we were, and more to the point, the interns knew who he was. That is one of the shocking things about a hospital: its leveling of you to your body’s weakest link. The Ph.D. in Comp Lit, the years in Paris, the wall of books—you do not wear these badges on your johnny gown. No wonder I was forever giving our résumés to doctors and nurses, as if to beg them to see us for real, see what happy lives we had left at the border, which waited still like a dog on the front stoop.

  I must’ve gone out for dinner with Al and Bernice, and I must’ve been full of reassurance and interstitial data. All the blood work was normal so far, but I don’t recall if an actual T-cell test was taken, or if we knew the results before the verdict. The T cells are a subset of the white blood count. Infection with the AIDS virus reverses the T-cell ratio, indicating an immune dysfunction. A test was available at that time, but it was still considered exotic and far down the line of inquiry. Today I know fifteen people who have their T cells tested every six or eight weeks.

  I also wonder now, in a sort of stupor, how it was we had no plan whatsoever if the news was bad. We hadn’t ever discussed who would know and who wouldn’t, how we would euphemize, indeed if hiding was even feasible. In a way it was like the whole last year, when we never talked about dying because we were fighting so hard to stay alive. I understand that in theory it’s good to have these matters out, to make one’s lifeboat plans and release the sum of one’s worldly goods. But we didn’t seem able to do that and forge ahead at the same time. Warriors in pitched battle do not make their last will; they become it.

  The final thing I remember from the night before was a visit from Michael Gottlieb, the immunologist who’d reported the first four cases of the disease to the CDC in the summer of 1981. Dr. Gottlieb was an intense man with darting foxlike eyes, who probably hadn’t had ten minutes to catch his breath in the four years since he grasped the iceberg’s tip. He spoke casually enough with us and said—I think I’m right about this, but who can sound the depths of my longing to hear a good omen?—it would all probably prove to be nothing. Then Roger asked him specifically: “Have you ever seen anyone with my symptoms who turned out to have it?”

  “Yes,” said Gottlieb.

  My brother and Sam, my therapist, concur that they talked to me late that night and gave me the final pep talk: It’s not AIDS, it’ll all be fine tomorrow, get some sleep. Did they really think that? I ask them, and they both say they don’t know anymore. They realize they were in shell shock then, to a lesser degree than I but with the same dazed sense of staring into headlights. How was I to know my very advisers were locked in a vertigo precipitous as my own?

  I was over at UCLA on Tuesday morning before the pulmonary team, and his parents and I gave Roger a bracing squeeze. I stayed with him till the doctor came in to administer the local anesthetic, and then I waited in the empty lounge with Al and Bernice, watching them as they dutifully read their books, refusing to leave my watch when the two of them went for coffee.

  Altogether it took maybe twenty minutes. I was in Roger’s room the second the team walked out. Roger was lying on his side, with an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. They’d told us he would need it till the anesthetic wore off. What they hadn’t said was that he would be coughing, almost without stopping and clearly in real discomfort. I patted him and talked a bit, but we really couldn’t communicate. Even if this was a predictable reaction to the procedure and nothing more, the reality was jarring in the extreme. For this was the very cough we’d always said wasn’t there. Could things have changed so fast? And who among my advisers would have me not worry now?

  I sat in the red vinyl chair in the window corner and worked on another half-page of dialogue. If comedy’s roots are pain, those must have been hilarious lines. Thankfully, Al and Bernice didn’t come into the room; we were better off al
one till we could talk again. I guess we had already arrived in that leveled place where nobody could follow, the only thing worse being the portal from which I would be barred myself, nineteen months and ten days later. I don’t think there was any magic left in me as the clock ran down its final minutes. I was struck with a fit of the metaphysical bends, equal at least in hollowness to that bruised and hacking cough.

  Finally it abated, and the oxygen mask came off. Roger was so debilitated from the trauma of the test that he lay back in an exhausted sleep. I don’t know how much time went by. When the doctors came in—a pair of them, the intern and the pulmonary man—they stayed as close to each other as they could, like puppies. They stood at his bedside, for the new enlightenment demands that a doctor not deliver doom from the foot of the bed, looming like God. The intern spoke: “Mr. Horwitz, we have the results of the bronchoscopy. It does show evidence of pneumocystis in the lungs.”

  Was there a pause for the world to stop? There must have been, because I remember the crack of silence, Roger staring at the two men. Then he simply shut his eyes, and only I, who was the rest of him, could see how stricken was the stillness in his face.

  “We’ll begin treatment immediately with Bactrim. You’ll need to be here in the hospital for fourteen to twenty-one days. Do you have any questions?”

  Roger shook his head on the pillow. I wanted to kill these two ridiculous young men with the nerdy plastic pen shields in their whitecoat pockets. “Could you please leave us alone,” I said.