Borrowed Time

by Paul Monette

  Roger decided himself that we ought to get rid of the Datsun, since we didn’t need two cars anymore and insurance in Hollywood was hopeless. I didn’t really care, though I felt a certain sentiment for the gray 280Z, which we’d bought the month we arrived in California and which Roger had kept in mint condition. But a friend who worked at Sheldon’s bank offered to try to sell it for Roger, so one afternoon I delivered it to her. I spent twenty minutes rooting under the seats and in the glove compartment, turning up ticket stubs and Stim-u-dents and quirky notes in Roger’s hand, till I was overtaken with sobs. I had an irrational fear that if we gave up things like this, got rid of too much that bore his imprint, Roger would surely die. I was therefore limp with relief a few weeks later when Jennifer had to admit she’d had no offers, and we took the Datsun back. We stored it in the garage and cut its insurance to the bone. Six months later, when I finally got rid of the accursed Jaguar, I put the Datsun on the road with the strangest sense of joy, as if Roger were suddenly near again.

  I scored my first batch of ribavirin that week from Jim Corty, an extraordinary hulk of a man whose passion for fighting fire with fire was as obsessive as mine. Jim was a nurse who cared exclusively for people with AIDS, and he personally drove a van over the border into Mexico every couple of weeks to haul back great quantities of ribavirin, supplying dozens on both coasts. His own lover, John, had been diagnosed in the spring, and Jim was constantly monitoring Roger’s experience with AZT, eager to get it for John once the protocols were expanded. Jim always made me feel we would beat it, and never failed to rekindle my excitement about AZT. Ribavirin of course was a much less certain drug, but I went on it anyway, because there was no other game in town for me. I had been too vocal for too long that people ought to be getting tested so they could demand medication early, and it was time for me to put up or shut up.

  I know I was growing increasingly desperate about Roger’s cough, and if he suddenly had a jag I’d find myself getting irrationally angry, though I could usually swallow it. But I would have sworn there were no other ominous symptoms, no shortness of breath or overwhelming fatigue. This is not to say he didn’t sleep a good deal, but between Scott and me we were very skilled at getting him up and going so he didn’t sleep the day away. When he was up he was animated and alert, especially when anyone visited. The summer days were so lambent now, even as the summer waned—mornings in the garden while I read him the paper, evenings reading Plato, the smell of anise when we walked at night. These brief, immediate goals of the day-to-day we had come to cherish, no matter how constricted our movements.

  It was Friday of Labor Day weekend when Scott asked me as he was leaving the house, “What does the doctor say the prognosis is?” I suppose I knew he was asking about the timetable of death, but that didn’t seem to me the appropriate question at all. “The doctor says he’s doing fine on the AZT,” I replied, a bit defensively. Not that Cope had really said as much lately, but it was implicit in Roger’s survival for nearly ten months now since he started the drug. He was the miracle man, period. He had to be, because thousands of our brothers were about to follow him on AZT.

  A series had begun to run in the L.A. Times, a portrait by Marlene Cimons of an AIDS person in Boston. Jeff, his name was, and he’d been chosen to be in the AZT double-blind study being funded by NIH. It wasn’t hard to get reanimated over AZT as news of its efficacy began to break in waves at last. We were thrilled by the Times story and very moved by the passion of the man’s doctor, who reminded us in his patience and dogged persistence of Dennis Cope. So I tried not to overreact to the first bad news about AZT, which was Roy Cohn.

  The press had uncovered the fact that Cohn was being treated at NIH in Washington, and the rumor was that it was AIDS, despite Cohn’s drone of denial for the last two years. We had known through the grapevine for nearly a year that he was among the first AIDS people to go on AZT, after Nancy Reagan intervened in his behalf. The press was stumbling all over itself getting the story wrong about Cohn’s demise, but I had a nearly day-by-day update from Craig, whose friend Donald was getting AZT intravenously on the same floor in Bethesda. “He’s going to die in the next couple of days,” said Craig, and I tried to keep the thought from racing in my mind: But no one’s supposed to die on AZT.

  CBS did a big report one evening that week about crack cocaine, the report we kept feeling they ought to be doing weekly about AIDS. Don’t you understand? friends in New York would say, hoarse from screaming at the press for coverage. Cocaine wasn’t a problem till it started turning up among the children of media dons and the Washington power elite. This at a time when I would hear at least every other week about the discreet death by AIDS of one or another rich man, the cause of death fudged on the certificate or otherwise unreported. Every gay man I know has stories of married bisexual men who died in the secret enclaves of family, town, church, and local GP, all without saying the “A” word. Even certain gay doctors, we heard, would blur a death certificate if the family was mortified enough.

  Saturday before Labor Day we took the dog up to Laurel Canyon, and Rog was feeling well enough to walk all the way around the perimeter of the six acres, where it falls off steeply into bone-dry chaparral. Puck nosed among the trailside bushes, where the fleas are epidemic in the fall. Roger and I were arm in arm and slightly huddled, as we always were these days, but no one stared at us, wrapped up as they were in volleyball and holiday picnics. We’d reached the far edge of the park when a man with a pair of German shepherds came sauntering by, barking commands to his dogs. Puck preferred people to other canines and thus kept his distance, but on some mangy whim the two shepherds suddenly turned on Puck and grabbed him. I had to leave Roger to go hollering into their midst, and it almost came to a fistfight between me and the shepherds’ Prussian master. Roger stayed calm, but I saw him straining to listen and separate the snarling of dogs and owners.

  I couldn’t let it escalate any further without causing Roger problems, so we left the field. I broke down crying in the car, overwhelmed by anything harsh or disruptive. Roger was very good about me crying now, where he used to get impatient and tell me to pull it together. He would let me weep it out, soothing me but offering no contradiction of the tragic. “My poor little friend,” he’d say tenderly. “So many things to worry about. Come on, let’s go home and have a spoon.”

  Sunday the thirty-first was our twelfth anniversary, and I decided to invite a few friends for dinner to celebrate. It turned out to be a bad idea, because I was beyond manic all day long as I did my IV chores and tended to Rog and tried to cobble together a proper cold supper. I would forget about people not knowing the rhythms of dealing with Roger’s blindness, especially that it was easier for him to have one-on-one conversation. At the table the guests talked too much and didn’t address themselves to Rog, so he ended up feeling ignored and lost. Meanwhile I was angry as I dished out the dinner. I couldn’t wait for them to leave, and when they did I walked them downstairs, where they wished me a dubious happy anniversary, as if to say how could I be happy? “I’m just glad we’re still here,” I said evenly. “That’s all I care about anymore.”

  Still we were going to UCLA three and four times a week, to have blood drawn and to see Kreiger. They were fairly dispiriting visits, and sometimes Roger would be so tired or feverish that we’d use a wheelchair to go from the parking lot to the clinics. Every appointment with Kreiger was sadder now, as Roger saw less and less of the chart, especially when he had fever. Kreiger avoided sounding falsely optimistic, but he swore they could do a quick laser surgery on the cataract, once it had ripened enough. Then Roger would have back the limited vision he had achieved in the summer. At least it was something to hold on to.

  Wednesday, September 3, I had my first appointment with Dr. Wolfe, who’d left UCLA and was in private practice in Century City. I wanted his measured and cautious approach to treatment as a balance against the aggressive approach of Dr. Scolaro. Wolfe for instance didn’t think much
of ribavirin, I could tell. The visit was smooth till I was driving out of the parking lot and suddenly faced the twin office towers where Roger had had his digs, and I burst into tears at the sight of what he’d lost. I wouldn’t go to Century City for months thereafter.

  I came home to find the dog had a running open wound on his leg, and we realized he’d taken a tooth tear from one of the German shepherds. So I made an appointment with the vet for Friday morning, which is why I didn’t take Roger over to UCLA for his blood transfusion. Cope called Thursday and asked him to come in next day to receive two units. We got a driver from APLA to take Rog over in the morning, and the plan was that I would pick him up at two. Then I sat with fifteen dogs in a waiting room for an hour and a half, waiting to leave Puck off.

  Arriving at UCLA, I expected Rog to be feeling spunky, since previous transfusions had always energized him so much. I knew Cope had spoken of checking out his cough and perhaps giving him a blood-gas test, but when I’d talked to Roger on the phone at noon he said the meeting with Cope had gone fine. I walked in at one-thirty and saw Roger sitting on the edge of the bed, all fresh-blooded, and I greeted him heartily. And hearing my voice, he looked over full of pain, and said in a tragic voice, “They’re carving my tombstone.”

  One of Cope’s colleagues had just been in to tell him his blood-gas number was in the sixties, which had always indicated PCP in Roger’s case. They could only be sure with a bronchoscopy, but Roger categorically refused. He would not go through that test again, recalling the night when his throat had frozen and he begged us word by slow word, “Why is this happening to me?” If they felt so certain he’d broken through again, then they should just go ahead with treatment. I fell instantly into the support mode, promising him he wasn’t dying: We knew this infection, we’d pulled him through three other bouts of it. I truly believed it as I said it, and didn’t start obsessing about Roy Cohn and the breach of the AZT wall till later that night. They were admitting Roger right away, and I felt this helpless yearning to take him home.

  Some of the agonies that burn in the heart forever begin as brief as snapshots. A nurse came to wheel Rog through the dozen corridors and bridges that connected the Bowyer Clinic to 10 East, and at one point we were on an elevator. Roger looked over and tried to see me five feet away, straining his one eye as if he were reaching for me, as if from a train pulling out of a station. That was the first time I ever suffered dying, and I can’t even say what death it was. Roger’s and mine both, to be sure, but something more as well. I understood then that the tragedy of parting was deeper than death—which only the very wisest have anything true to say about, like Mrs. Knecht across the street. “Here I am, Rog,” I declared softly. He knew then that it couldn’t be very far off, and I must’ve known as well but couldn’t face it.

  Yet that three-week hospitalization, the final extended stay, wasn’t really so horrible. I was right when I said we knew this infection cold, and we stayed on top of it throughout, conquering four for four. In addition, we were blessed with a marvelous intern, Dr. Beal, who got who we were as soon as she met us. Her empathy and humaneness only threw into bold relief the gawky discomfort of the male interns we’d dealt with. Perhaps it was because Dr. Beal had gone to med school later than the rest and was ten years older than the kid doctors. She enjoyed us thoroughly, even after the incident. On the day following Roger’s admission she was drawing blood, properly gloved of course, and she and I were chatting as she injected the blood into various culture mediums. Suddenly I saw her drop the needle; when she reached for it, it jabbed deep into her wrist. She stayed cool and went down for a gamma globulin shot, while I tortured myself with guilt that I was responsible, talking while she was working. She dismissed these thoughts firmly and did not go off the case and utterly minimized her own fears, though I could tell Cope was worried for her.

  Gradually the hospital rhythms took the terror of death away, especially when Cope assured us Roger would beat the PCP. Except for that cry about his grave and the haunted piercing look in the elevator, Roger was fairly calm and comfortable, and for some reason didn’t develop any drug reaction to Pentamidine. By the end of the first weekend his cough was already abating. Unhappily, I wasn’t sleeping. I’d chosen this month to taper down on the drugs I took at night, and was weaning myself from the sleeping pill, figuring I needed the Xanax more, for anxiety. What I didn’t know then, but which became clearer as the days passed, was that ribavirin had the side effect of insomnia. The night dose was like a jolt of caffeine, but I couldn’t get anyone to corroborate that. Craig, who’d been on it for a year now, said he’d long ago given up sleeping deeper than an inch below the surface.

  The tiredness made me punchy and weepy, especially when I would come back to the empty house. A few days after Roger went in, I arrived home and the phone was ringing. I stupidly picked it up, though by now I never answered without monitoring every call through the machine. It was Joel from Santa Fe, whom I hadn’t spoken to since Leo died in April. The sound of his voice tied my stomach in knots, especially because the tone was so post-AIDS—by which I mean every word was full of his antibody-negative status and the putting of AIDS behind him, as he swore he would. About Leo dying he said, “Leo was ready to go. He didn’t want the rest of us suffering anymore.”

  I suppose he must have asked about Roger, but what he seemed most eager to talk about was his new boyfriend, “who’s very understanding about what I’ve been through, and helps me get on with my life.” I was gasping with rage by this point, but all I said was: “I’m not going to be around long myself, and I don’t want to talk to people without AIDS anymore.” He hastened to say some drivel about not committing suicide for the sake of one’s friends. “Have a good life,” I told him, and hung up in the middle of his saying “I love you.” In the middle of the verb, in fact.

  By now Roger was registered with the Braille Institute, which had provided him with a special tape recorder and a catalogue of books on tape. He had listened at home to a specially prepared text for the suddenly blind, but in the main the catalogue was fairly middlebrow for our tastes. Yet Robbert Flick would go back and forth to the Institute, fielding tapes that Roger might like, and I recall the day when Roger tried one of Mary Renault’s novels of the ancient world. When we were in Greece we’d both read books from her Athenian cycle and loved them. But when I came up that evening he’d abandoned it because he couldn’t figure out how to fast-forward the tape. He’d gotten mired in the prefatory tables, listening to an endless chronology of kings and dynasties. I remember him making people laugh for days afterwards, telling how he’d been trapped in the lineage of Persia.

  Yet the boredom factor was very real during that first week before his parents arrived, especially since he was feeling pretty well. He was strong enough to walk in the corridor, even to go outside in the plaza, though the latter entailed a tricky juggling of IV pole and wheelchair. But when I wasn’t there he would usually be by himself, since most of our friends couldn’t be with him on weekdays, even if the loyalists did drop by in the evening. I tended to arrive at the hospital myself midafternoon, but I can’t remember exactly, because by then I was glazed with fatigue. Why did I let him stay there alone, with nothing better to do than sleep? I suppose I tried to carry on a couple of hours of business every day. It’s a curious kind of guilt, wishing I’d known how little time was left. My seven or eight hours a day at UCLA seem so paltry to me now, and I must have wasted the rest of the day, since nothing comes back to mind. I’d gladly give a year to have any one of those days again, for I know precisely where I’d be, the whole twenty-four hours.

  We decided—everyone decided—that I was so strung out and exhausted from lack of sleep that I must get away for a few days once Al and Bernice came to town. My parents had been pleading with me to visit them in Massachusetts, since they hadn’t seen me in a year. I didn’t want to go anywhere—couldn’t leave Rog—though by now Sam was concerned enough about my hysterical fatigue to s
uggest my checking into a hotel, any hotel, just to collapse. In the happier part of the summer I’d mentioned to Rog that if things stayed stable we might get up to Big Sur for a long weekend, the way we used to. It wouldn’t matter what he could see, because I would be there to tell him. Besides, we knew every trail and overlook in our sleep. Now, with friends warning that I was on the edge of a breakdown, I wistfully brought up Big Sur again. Roger pounced on the idea: clearly that’s where I must go. I always liked it when he’d pull me off a fence and make a decision. I also suspect he colluded with Cope, who reassured me that all would be fine while I was away.

  We decided I’d leave on Tuesday night, the day the parents were arriving from Chicago. Then they would have the house to themselves and be able to take care of Puck. During the weekend before, we talked about the trip and what I would see. Roger promised—I made him promise it over and over—that I could call him several times a day, and he’d send everyone out of the room and talk to me. I started to feel excited in spite of myself.

  One afternoon, I walked in calling “Here I am,” as usual. I realize now that I would announce myself this way as a counter to his blindness, but it’s still the phrase I speak when I visit the grave, or sometimes when I walk into the empty house. As soon as he heard my greeting he smiled and declared, with a mixture of astonishment and tenderness, “But we’re the same person. When did that happen?” As if he’d been waiting all day to say it. I agreed up and down right away, yet I’ve also brooded on it longer than almost anything he ever said. I think the reason for the “But” is that this was his answer to the darkness that told him he would die. But how could he die and leave me? How was it even physically possible to separate us now, with the two of us so interchangeably one?