Borrowed Time

by Paul Monette

  And Roger perked up beside me in bed and shook his head: “No, of course it isn’t.” So it wasn’t—not yet. However horrible what would come in the next two days would be, he was feeling peaceful enough just then, taken care of and going along, no pain or fear. That turned out to be all we could give him, but we brought him that far. I gave him the night IV and stayed up again until four, watching him sleep peacefully, waking him every hour or so to give him water and change his sweat-soaked shirt. Perhaps because I have always worked by midnight oil, I never believe that anything truly bad can happen on the night watch.

  Scott strode into my room at nine and woke me. “You have to get Roger to the hospital,” he said. I was blurred with sleep and tried to explain we had an appointment at noon. “He’s rigid,” Scott said. “His temp’s 103, and he can’t talk to me.” So I ran in, pounding with adrenaline now, and talked softly to Rog, coaxing him to respond. He seemed to relax and murmured “All right” when I said we were off to the hospital. Scott was furious because the morning nurse had obviously ignored the problem, leaving Roger to lie in fouled pajamas. I remember that as Scott brought him downstairs to the car, Roger was walking on his own but seemed wooden and stiff.

  Then as we drove over to UCLA, me patting and reassuring him, the fever began to break, and he started to sweat. At a light in Beverly Hills I took his temp with a throwaway thermometer. It was down to 100. He seemed more focused, and we began to talk. As we arrived in the emergency room parking lot I told him I’d go get a wheelchair, and he said, “That’s not necessary.” But I got one anyway, put a mask on him, and wheeled him in to the registration desk. The nurse droned through a list of questions, asking what was wrong, and I said, “He’s had a high fever, and he’s a little incoherent.”

  “I am not,” piped up Rog with a certain stubborn pride. I smiled at his tenacity. It was the last full sentence I ever heard him speak.

  We waited in an examining room for Cope. Roger’s temp continued to hover toward normal, and I gave him an Ensure to sip through a straw, certain that whatever crisis had erupted this morning had passed. But then, when Cope came in, in a wheelchair of his own, Roger couldn’t answer most of his questions. When’s your birthday, Roger? “November twenty-second,” he replied, and my heart leaped with triumph. But then he was silent when Cope asked, “Who am I, Roger?” I could see Rog straining to answer, trying to focus, and when the next question came, the intercom in the hall announced some neutral business, paging a doctor, perhaps. Roger, struggling to speak, began to parrot what the intercom said.

  Out in the hall, Cope told me they would run the usual battery of tests—bone marrow, spinal tap, x-ray. He suspected it was either cryptococcal meningitis or the AIDS virus in the brain, and the one was treatable and the other not. I said I would stay with Roger till the tests began, then I would go back to the house and pack him a bag and meet him on the tenth floor when they admitted him in the late afternoon. I stayed by him through the x-ray procedure, talking and holding his hand in the glaring hallways. When they brought him back to the ER for the spinal tap, I told him I’d be back in a few hours. He said “Okay,” or perhaps just murmured yes; I don’t think he could talk whole words by then. But I didn’t realize, and I still don’t know why I left.

  I went home and stared at his bed, where the sheets still swirled with the shape of his sleep. Then I stripped and jumped in the pool, though it was freezing cold in late October. I made calls to various sources in the underground to check out the central nervous system, pulling together anecdotes about meningitis. I took a nightmare nap, packed an automatic bag and got up there about five, when they were just putting him to bed in room 1010.

  He was clearly miserably sick when I walked in, but I’m sure he could still answer me yes and no, because I had no sense of his speech center having been affected. I got him to drink another Ensure and ordered him dinner. Then two interns came in and stood by the side of the bed and announced he had cryptococcal meningitis. They would begin treatment right away with amphotericin B. Rog didn’t answer them—didn’t move—and I dismissed them and told him how lucky we were it was treatable. As if I had no other choice but driving forward into the teeth of the gale. I remember feeding him soup, and him looking up at my face with a kind of stillness in his own, yet full of an indescribable yearning. I don’t know how dim his sight was then, or how locked the muscles of his face, but I felt him looking at me with a heartbreaking immediacy. He dutifully ate all the soup, then quietly vomited it up.

  Cope came in in his wheelchair and went over the diagnosis again. Now Roger’s eyes were wide with terror, and he could barely respond with a murmur. Cope promised him we’d bring him through it and was at once forceful and infinitely kind, after his fashion. Then he spoke to me quietly at the foot of the bed, saying, “Paul, I think this is worth fighting because the quality of life he has at home is worth it. But it wouldn’t be the worst thing if this were the one that took him.”

  I stared at him, unable to hear it, and made him declare again that the medication would restore him. Then, as we waited for the pharmacy to send it up, I made phone calls to the families, especially to Al and Bernice, informing them that Dr. Cope thought they should fly out. I didn’t know they’d asked him to alert them months before if the end was near. Though Sheldon tried to put them off till later in the week, they called me back to say they’d be on a plane in the morning.

  Amphotericin B is administered with Benadryl in order to avoid convulsions, the most serious possible side effect. It was about nine or ten when they started the drug in his veins, and I sat by the bed as nurses streamed in and out. A half hour into the slow drip, the nurse monitoring the IV walked out, saying she’d be right back, and a couple of minutes later Roger began to shake. I gripped him by the shoulders as he was jolted by what felt like waves of electric shock, staring at me horror-struck. Though Cope would tell me later, trying to ease the torture of my memory, that “mentation” is all blurred during convulsions, I saw that Roger knew the horror.

  I kept waiting for the nurse to come back. Why didn’t I press the call button? Did I think the horror was supposed to happen, another thing to endure? We had stood in the fire so long that burning was second nature now. I sat there frozen, holding him for endless minutes, trying not to cry as I told him I was with him. Here I am, Rog—but with all the cheer and exultation drained away. When the nurse returned she looked at him in dismay: “How long has this been going on?” Then she ordered an emergency shot of morphine to counteract the horror. When at last he fell into a deep sleep they all told me to go home, saying they would try another dose of the ampho in a few hours. I was so ragged I could barely walk. So I left him there with no way of knowing how near it was, or maybe not brave enough to know.

  I went home and called Jim Corty, Sam and Craig, who all reassured me the ampho would kick in. They were full of cases that had shaken the stranglehold on the nervous system, and the convulsions were to be expected. He’d come back; they swore it. I sat at the desk unable to sleep, working numbly on Predator for an hour or so. I called UCLA at two and again at three. They said they were having trouble keeping his fever under control, but otherwise he was stable. You force yourself not to think about the pain, where it hurt this time and how bad. I cursed myself for not having a private nurse with him and ordered one for the morning. But that was all: I went to bed certain he’d be responding to the drug within a few hours. I would not see the dying.

  I started calling at seven-thirty, as I always did when he was in the hospital, checking in every half hour till I got up. The private duty nurse said he was resting comfortably, and I understood he’d had the first full dose of the ampho early in the morning. It turned out she was merely stonewalling me—didn’t know who I was, certainly didn’t understand that I was the one who had hired her. In fact they’d tried the drug at five, and he’d had another convulsion, so they stopped it. Nobody ordered it started again. It waited for someone to make a stink, and
I wasn’t there to make it. The unraveling was on every side.

  I got up and was getting ready to head over, but taking my time, in no rush at all, when a call came in from Michael, Roger’s brother-in-law in Chicago. He’d just talked with a neurologist, who told him that if they administered the ampho even a few hours too late the brain might have swollen so much as to cause permanent damage. I didn’t really hear the awful details, all I heard was the primal urgency in Michael’s voice. Within two minutes I was in the car, roaring up Sunset Boulevard.

  There’s a sucker speed trap just before the Beverly Hills Hotel, and I was going fifty in a thirty-five zone, but the problem was the Datsun. They don’t stop Jaguars in B.H., not wanting to ruffle the core constituency. The cop had me cold with his radar gun and pulled me over. I erupted out of the car, screaming that my friend was in a coma—only time I ever used the word—pleading to be taken to the hospital. He said nothing, ignored me completely, and methodically, very very slowly, wrote out the ticket. I went bullshit, shrieking at him at the top of my lungs. Did he enjoy making people suffer? I’m certain he would’ve been within his rights to arrest me on the spot, but he didn’t even tell me to shut up. Coldly he handed over the ticket. I got in the car and shrieked away from the curb, gunning to sixty in five, but presumably he’d had enough of me.

  When I ran into the hospital, there was a crowd waiting for the elevator. On a weekday morning it can take ten minutes to get to the tenth floor, and after thirty seconds’ wait I couldn’t take it and ran up the ten flights. I arrived panting and dizzy on 10, immediately bumping into the Howdy Doody doctor from Infectious Diseases, a man Roger and I used to mimic cruelly. He shook his head and said Roger didn’t seem able to handle the medication, and I said they had to try it again. I spilled out all the cases the underground had armed me with. An intern heard this whole exchange, watching it like a tennis match. Howdy shrugged and appeared to wash his hands of the matter, but the intern decided to be on my side as I stormed away to Roger’s room.

  The first thing that unnerved me when I got inside was seeing his penis hooked up to a catheter, always a wincing business for a man to witness. The nurse said Rog was comfortable and that he’d been communicative, but for the present he appeared too sick to notice I was there. In any case, I was madly scrambling around making calls to Cope and ordering the intern to speed up the drug from the pharmacy. Finally the nurse realized who I was, and she was my right hand from then on. I’d been there a few minutes, setting up command, when Roger began to moan. It was the saddest, hollowest sound I’ve ever heard, and loud, like the trumpet note of a wounded animal. It had no shape to it, nothing like a word, and he repeated it over and over, every few seconds. “Why is he doing that?” I asked the nurse, but she didn’t know. I assumed he must be roaring with misery and anxiety, and he hadn’t had any Xanax since the previous day. I ordered a tranquilizer and told him everything I was doing. It wasn’t till ten weeks later, on New Year’s Day, that I understood the trumpet sound. I was crying up at the grave, and started to mimic his moaning, and suddenly understood that what he was doing was calling my name. Nothing in my life or the death to come hurts as much as that, him calling me without a voice through a wall he could not pierce.

  Within fifteen minutes the intern came in with a shot to relax him, and right after that they began the ampho drip. I was on the phone to Jaimee constantly, the two of us gnawing our hearts as we waited to see if he’d have convulsions. Meanwhile the nurse taught me to communicate with Rog by telling him to blink when I asked him a question. Can you hear me, Rog? And his eyelids fluttered. It was such a stunning gift to have him back, tapping through the wall like that. Thirty or forty times in the next hour I made him do it again, lobbing him yes questions and cheering at the reassuring flutter of his eyelids. I kept telling him how much of the drug still had to go in. I talked and talked, excitedly declaring that we were home free. It was working. We were going to bring him back. I held the phone so Jaimee could talk in his ear, and he blinked to say he heard her.

  I don’t regret a syllable of our manic cheer. I wouldn’t have wanted the last he heard from me to be moaning and grief. We were pulling through, as we always did. I asked a friend with a thousand nights’ experience of young men dying, How much pain was Roger in that last twenty-four hours? I’ve heard all the tales of the tribe now about the pounding headaches of crypto. He said the harder thing for Roger than the pain would surely have been the consciousness of his final imprisonment and exile from me. I know he’s right because it comes to me in nightmares over and over, the last claustrophobia, no way to touch your friend again or say good-bye as you spiral down. At least we had that queer and eloquent hour of the eyelids, and then he fell asleep.

  He took the whole dose of the ampho without a convulsion. After an hour and a half of ceaseless monitoring, the nurse and I actually began to relax, proud of ourselves and how we had shown Dr. Howdy what for. She told me her son was gay, in his mid-twenties, and she considered it her duty to work lovingly with AIDS patients, “so maybe if someone ever has to take care of him, they’ll treat him like a son.” I was telling her about Roger, what a wise and giving man he was, about our life together—when suddenly out of nowhere he began to breathe strangely. Deep heaving breaths, expelled with explosive release. I could see the nurse’s face go pale. “What is it?” I asked.

  “Not good,” she replied fearfully, running out of the room. The curious helpless breathing continued, like a storm inside him, while I sat there utterly still. Then six or eight different people rushed in, all the interns and the nurses off the floor. They stared at him and jabbered at each other in their own terrible shorthand. Finally one of them turned to me. “Is there a living will? What do you want us to do?”

  Nothing. Because that is the point of the living will he’d signed, that we couldn’t take him to intensive care and put a tube down his throat. The breathing had leveled out, but his temp was shooting up, and they expected heart failure at any moment. What had happened was that the meningitis had crept to a certain watermark in his brain, and the terrible breathing—Cheyne-Stoking, it’s called—was the start of the final drowning. They paged Cope, and he ordered something to reduce the swelling in the brain. Gradually the temp came down to normal, and within the hour he was sleeping deep and easy. He looked most vividly well, in fact, his weight normal and his color good. They gave him oxygen and shouted his name and lifted the side of his head from the pillow, but it slumped back without any muscular life. The battle was over.

  I walked through the rest of it numb and lost, borne along by the new and ghastly rituals of separation. Yet I was curiously abstracted too, and unable to cry. The fight had gone out of me, there being no point anymore. Alfred came over and stood outside the room for eight hours, making whatever calls needed to be made. A half-dozen friends came streaming in, and I talked to them all from inside a bell jar. I didn’t want to talk to anyone long, because I had to keep going over to Rog to kiss him and tell him I loved him. Everyone always said hearing was the last to go, and I didn’t want him to miss a syllable of me before he left, even if he only heard it in a deep and thoughtless dream.

  His mother called from Denver to say their flight had been delayed and they were running to catch another. “He’s not going to make it this time,” I told her. None of us thought he could possibly last till they arrived. Joe Perloff came and sat with me for a while, propping me up with talk of Roger’s courage. Dennis Cope, who had fought with us in the trenches for nineteen months, came in and stayed the longest. “What am I going to do without him?” I asked in a hollow voice, and Cope replied immediately, with great force and conviction. “Write about him, Paul,” he said. “That’s what you have to do.”

  Sheldon came by but couldn’t bring himself to step into room 1010. I had to go to him in the lounge, where he said he didn’t know what to say. Cope returned at ten and waited till Al and Bernice arrived. When they walked in they greeted him warmly, not look
ing toward Rog right away, thanking the doctor for all the long fight. Al gripped my shoulder and declared, his voice breaking, “This boy took care of him like a mother.” Then Bernice went to the side of the bed, touched Roger’s hand and said, “Good night, sweet prince.” But they held their tears, those two, because they had sworn since the very beginning of the end to be strong for me.

  After an hour or so they left, and then I dispatched each of the friends. Though Rog had been expected to die by seven or eight, Cope told me at eleven that if he was still alive in the morning they would give him another dose of the ampho. It was all unpredictable now, and Roger might even resurface again, one way or another. Or maybe he would go on like this for hours or even days.

  Finally it was Rog and me alone, late at night in the quiet, the way it had been all summer. Still I would not cry, because I wouldn’t let him hear sorrow. I spent all my own endearments—my little friend—and sat till four o’clock. When I’d kiss his forehead I could still smell the freshness of the shampoo. I called Sam at four and said I was ready to leave, and we talked awhile about whether I needed to be there for the actual moment. I didn’t, I don’t know why. I clipped a lock of his hair, which got lost in the chaos of the following day. I slipped off his father’s sapphire ring, which the nurse had taped to his finger. I said what half good-bye I could. You’re the best, I whispered as I walked out the door, what I always said when I left his room at night.

  I drove home trying to beat the dawn and knew it would not even start until morning. Waking teaches you pain. The parents were in the front bedroom, so I took a Dalmane and curled up in Roger’s bed, where I still sleep every night because he is nearer there than anywhere else in the house. When the phone rang at six I drifted out of bed and went into the darkened study. Bernice was standing in the hallway door, and we held each other as the machine answered the phone. After the beep, a voice said: “This is UCLA Medical Center calling. Mr. Roger Horwitz died at 5:42 A.M. this morning, October twenty-second.” Bernice and I hugged each other briefly, without a word, and I swam back to bed for the end of the night, trying to stay under the Dalmane. Putting off as long as I could the desolate waking to life alone—this calamity that is all mine, that will not end till I do.