Heaven's Coast

by Mark Doty

  June 13, 1992. It’s very hot outside. I worked a little with clay and felt nervous. Nervous that I might do the wrong thing. I know there is no right or wrong. Just do what you feel. There is a part of me that just wants to break free and work. Let it out and not be afraid. I feel safe—but I’m still a little shakey. I’m always thinking, what if? I could turn this around to what if I’m always thinking. It’s not so bad to think. Think about what I’m doing here. How I feel about my surroundings. I would love to just go and lie in the grass. Feel it against my body. Chew some grass. I just had a thought of painting myself black and white like a cow. Peaceful, content. No one pushing me. No one telling me to get in the barn. If they did I would run very fast through the fields. Laughing all the while. I would like to do that for a couple of days. Then maybe I would come home. My dog would come and find me. Lying in the grass afraid to go home. He would lick off my cow disguise. Looking down at myself I see me. The peaceful cow. The peaceful man.

  I’d thought I wanted some time to myself, but by the end of the first day I don’t know what to do with it; I’m out of focus, tense, unable to relax and enter into anything. I ride my bike, work in the garden, try to read, and give it up, ride my bike around the trails again. I feel restless and pointless the whole five days.

  On the way home from the workshop, the cardboard box full of things Wally’s made rides in the AIDS Support Group’s van, down on the step just behind the sliding door, and when the door’s opened the box tumbles out and most of his work is smashed. He says he doesn’t mind, really, that what’s mattered has been the process of entering into the work, into himself. But there’s something sad about it still, as he explains to me each broken piece of clay, showing me the way the fragments fit together.

  August. I have this feeling that there’s a word behind my life I can’t quite say, a word that’s pulling at everything, a word that’s keeping me from writing because it’s just too hard to say it. What word?

  My friend Jerry walks by and says, How are you? and I say I’m tired and he says yes, he’s tired too, because Henry’s sick. Not that Jerry’s working so hard taking care of him, but just that the knowledge makes him tired. That’s what it’s like, the knowledge underneath everything, the rock-ledge of the knowledge, the soil on top of it so thin nothing grows, or almost nothing—a few green words, lanky stems, not quite connecting, not finding strong nourishment or sun.

  We take a little trip to Vermont together. A college for which I work sometimes has loaned us an empty house on the edge of a beautiful meadow, a place in which one can walk and walk and never come to the end. It’s decked, August, in Queen Anne’s lace and cow vetch, daisies and turk’s-cap lilies. Wally hasn’t been back since we left, and he’s excited to see the old territory again, the world we left, and we’re planning to take Arden back to the old railroad tracks, in search of Shadow, the pit bull he used to wrestle with when he was a puppy.

  We talk on the way about how it’ll be to look at a familiar place from a new, more distant vantage point. But we don’t calculate just how hard on Wally the drive will be. Once we arrive, the most time he’s spent in a car in months, he’s entirely exhausted; we fix a bed for him on the couch, in front of the TV, and I walk Arden in the endless meadow—brilliant jewelweed, butter-and-eggs, drunken humming in the clover—and bring us sandwiches from the Grand Union, take-out pizza, pastries and coffee from the new French bakery that opened after we left town.

  August. Grim day in support group. Martin on the way out, with hospice care; Alan blind in one eye, Henry not recognizing people, also very much on the way out. It’s so painful to hear; and makes home feel more grim—and I’m having a hard time not letting W’s recent sickness sink my spirits. I want to be able to be with him well, but I’m restless and uncomfortable, I guess just because it’s hard for me to face it. Easier to keep moving, doing things—that way I can stay up, cheerful, not look at the sadness so much. I want to be cheerful for him, but I also don’t want to deny things or act like my father here—so the best thing I can do is try to be present, be right there when I’m there.

  On the couch: low-grade fevers, headaches, fatigue. And then there are times when he feels better, wants to go on a walk with me and Arden, or on a shopping trip to Hyannis, or out to lunch. What I can hardly remember now, what I can’t call back up from the strongbox of memory in which I’ve locked it, is the gradual process through which such days or hours or moments of feeling good came to be a surprise.

  Of course they were the norm, at first. There’d be a bad spell of a few days, and then it would clear, and we’d have a good week, maybe weeks. I have hidden in my heart the recognitions, the knowledge that he was surely failing, each month a little worse.

  I knew it, one brilliant day, when I’d ridden my bicycle out to Herring Cove, and gone for a walk by myself along the curve of beach, the barrier arc of dunes that keeps the salt marsh from being swept away. After a long walk, I turned back toward home. Halfway across the marsh, I saw a man and a black dog coming over a cleft in the dunes up ahead, and I was suddenly flooded with delight, thinking Wally had brought Arden and come to meet me. But I knew, as soon as I thought it, that Wally couldn’t manage it anymore, that he couldn’t have driven himself here, and walked across the sand. And my heart sank in me, I think I let out a cry, out loud, knowing I’d never again see the two of them coming down some bright slope together, running toward me.

  How did I know? People with AIDS got sick all the time, sick unto death, and then before you knew it there they were pushing a cart around the A&P or exhibiting their paintings or singing at a benefit. The familiar opportunistic infections killed, but there were treatments for them, too. Whatever was happening to Wally didn’t follow any pattern anyone seemed to know, yet it was clear that it was progressive, deepening, that he was steeping in his illness, taking on its color, the way fabric steeps in dye.

  At the end of August, Hurricane Bob swept through Provincetown. We had a few days warning; the tourists cleared out, the hardware and drugstores sold out of flashlights and batteries and radios. We battened every hatch we could find.

  The morning of the storm was hushed, expectant. When the wind began to blow, it was as if not only the town but the world had exhaled, all at once. A grand horizontal stream of watery air—airy water?—came tearing down our street, rocking but fortunately not tipping over our big box alder tree. Every leaf in town was shredded, windblown, and mixed with saltwater to form a sticky pesto which would, hours later, cover any exposed surface, turning the white New England clapboards a mossy basil green.

  About five in the afternoon the wind simply stopped, and the citizens of Provincetown crept out to survey the damage, a tentative examination, at first, which swiftly became a sort of festive promenade. Everybody was out, walking the length of our arterial Commercial Street, exchanging stories, pleased to see one another, responding with wonder to the few real disasters: great trees thrown down, some of them onto the roofs of houses, and the lid of the Surfside Motel (frankly, an eyesore) blown clean away and dumped into Bradford Street. It was the strangest sort of party, and there was something extraordinarily communal about it, and tender; how glad we all were to have survived together, how happy it wasn’t worse.

  There’s a photograph a friend took of Wally and me together that late afternoon, a photograph I never saw until after he died (evidence of the past keeps floating up, new ways to see, new prompts and reminders). We’re standing side by side, his left arm linked in my right. I am clean-shaven, and wearing a cotton khaki beret from the army surplus store, a favorite hat; Wally has a little shadow of a beard, and an oversized cotton sweater, one that makes him look boyish, lost in the big warm knit, whose sleeves hang down over his hands. I am smiling; it’s a real smile, and yet it also betrays strain, how much I am trying, how hard I am working to see that things move on. On Wally’s lips a little faint smile floats, too, but that is not what dominates his face, which looks somewhere away from the
camera as if in a kind of reverie. This walk must have been hard for him, much as he wanted to go. But what plays across his face isn’t just this moment but all these months. He looks hollowed out, his cheekbones high, as if he is being consumed. It’s the face of someone who has known a good deal of pain, yet there is some unmistakable tenderness in it, too, some sort of gentle bemusement that seems, impossibly, to coexist with suffering.

  I try to imagine what I’d think if I didn’t know these people. How would I read this picture? I’d know they’re lovers, from the fit of their bodies but more from a kind of resemblance in these faces, which is not just of the flesh but of the way shared experience, the psychic stuff held in common, shapes and illuminates the face. I’d know they’ve been down close to the bone in something that taxes all their strength, requires every resource they have. I’d know that, whatever it is, they’re in it together. I’d know they aren’t done yet.

  School starts again at the beginning of September. Nervous about leaving Wally those two days a week, I’ve been busy making arrangements—our friend Paul to check in on him every day, the freezer full of quick frozen meals he can just thaw out, pans of lasagna in the fridge.

  The caseworker from the Family Care Program insists we install a “Lifeline,” a machine which serves as a kind of instantaneous way of calling for help. It consists of a red button Wally’s supposed to wear around his neck, on a chain.

  Pushed, the button sends a signal to a big, ominous-looking box beside the phone, which automatically calls the first on a list of friends and neighbors. If no one answers it phones the second, and so on, and eventually calls an ambulance.

  The idea is that Wally might have some sudden crisis, might fall and not be able to reach the phone, though right now that seems to us perfectly remote. His fevers or headaches make him feel listless, washed out, but he’s always been capable of making a phone call, or fixing himself a sandwich. He takes Arden down to the bay in the morning, though slowly; he walks the few blocks downtown, some days, to rent a movie. The caseworker’s alarm feels excessive; perhaps she’s right to be cautious, but we can’t help but feel we’re being pushed. We make a point of saying that we want to emphasize how well Wally is, that we want to behave in accordance with his capacities, as long we’re able. She’s not about to budge, and so we reluctantly accept the thing, and learn to joke about it, even though it’s a symbol of the loss of autonomy. There’s an ad in the newspaper practically every day for a similar product, and it pictures an elderly woman with black lips lying stricken on the rug a few feet from her fancy French phone; the image and its accompanying quote—I’ve fallen and I can’t get up—becomes a kind of silly joke for us. Wally threatens that one day I’ll come home and find him on the floor in a tweedy suit, and stockings with seams, his lips painted black, his nails clawing after that big red button.

  I’m holding myself with increasing tension, steeling, bracing. I’m never alone, at home, so my solitude is in the car, and I find myself weeping there, listening to stupid songs on the radio. I fall apart in between places, and then pull myself together to work, pull myself together at home to run the household, take care of the exhausted, fading man on the couch. What can I do but watch? What can I do but sit next to him, and rub his head when he has a headache, and bring him sweet things to eat?

  September. I man I knew—a little—is dead. [Reading this journal now, I realize so many people I’ve known have died that I don’t know who this entry refers to.] All our understandings, all our consolations and considerations feel so flimsy. Faced with real loss, they’re paper, flimsy little cut-paper flowers. Name them: A Better Place, Universal Mind, Being—worst, Heaven!

  Wally begins to complain about stairways, high places, not the work of climbing them but a feeling of uncertainty about his footing. Especially the stairs at the video store, this one particular flight that’s giving him trouble, because they’re open between each tread, so that you can see between them to the ground below, and it disorients him so that he fears he’s going to fall.

  October. This whole landscape’s varnished with death.

  He starts a new drug, D4T, another in the same family of antivirals, the same damnable class of drugs that have done nothing at all for him so far (unless, of course, what’s happening now would have happened sooner without them, but why believe that?). Dr. Magnus says there’s a good buzz about this one; people report having lots more energy, a new wave of vital force. And after a week or two there’s a flicker of new strength in Wally, too, and we wonder if he might in some way be mending? If what’s weakening him is just “viral activity,” then an antiviral ought to help. But soon he’s tingling in his fingers and toes, his hand going numb; this drug’s dangerous side effect is also permanent neuropathy, painful nerve damage to the extremities. He seems to feel as tired as ever, and his head hurts even more.

  Dream: Wally and I are rehabbing a huge brick factory we’ve bought, gutting lots of it. We climb around on a large, dangerous stairway which is hard to get down, dangerous for Arden, who keeps getting his leash caught. We break for lunch (suddenly with a bunch of people) explaining how we’ll only heat one room, which will have a ceiling, even though the rest of the vast space will be open. It is beautiful—like a nineteenth century brick facade turned inside out, and extremely daunting. But I feel certain that together we can make one warm, enclosed space inside the great ruined structure.

  In January, we go to Florida together. I’m teaching, in a two-week program for writers held at a resort on the Panhandle, in the area known as the “Redneck Riviera,” a brilliant strip of astonishingly white sand and water of a mild Caribbean blue, and hotels and golf courses chewing up what must have been a startling, pristine landscape once. In the decorative pool by the resort office, a stunned-looking great blue heron resides; he must be wondering what’s happened to the world he knew.

  It’s been touch and go whether Wally will be able to come along; I’m not sure I’ve ever really believed it would happen. But he’s feeling mildly perky, as the date arrives, and eager for a change of scene. The setup is perfect: we have a condo with a kitchen, a bath on the first floor, and the requisite couch, so if he has to spend the whole time lying down, at least it will be on a different couch, watching a different TV.

  I teach workshops in the morning, and then come back and pick up Wally in our rented turquoise Mazda, a few shades darker than the sea. We eat lunch—sandwiches I pick up at the Winn Dixie—sitting in the car, watching the pelicans on the beach. Wally never feels well enough to walk out onto that white sand, but he likes going for little drives, finding a place to park and watch a shore so different from our own.

  One night I’m to give a poetry reading, and Wally decides to come, his first social outing during our stay. I drive him to the building where the reading will be held, and our friends Roger and Ellen meet him at the door. They haven’t seen him for over a year now, and it’s a shock to me to read in their faces their shock at seeing him. Is it that clear, how changed he is? Later, Roger will tell me, he had to excuse himself from the conversation so that he could go into the bathroom and cry.

  I have an awful feeling, on the way home, about the toll it takes on Wally to walk through the airport in Atlanta, to make it to the plane to Boston, as if that walk’s drawing upon reserves of energy he doesn’t have any more—and since there is no reserve, it’s him that’s being drawn upon, disappearing.

  My journals repeat, painfully, obsessively; they have one note to strike, helplessness.

  January. What can I do but stand with my mouth open, no sound emerging? My lips move and I wave my arms making gestures from the other side of the glass, which I cannot penetrate. No articulation possible.

  No, that isn’t true, people can speak out of anything, though the struggle takes years. The problem is, whatever I say about the present feels false—nothing contains it all, or catches the depth of things, or their terrible one-dimensionality.

  What am I living on? S
omeone said the other day, “that old irrepressible—impossible—hope.” And I thought no, this doesn’t feel like hope. But maybe that’s what hope is, no shining thing but a kind of sustenance, plain as bread, the ordinary thing that feeds us. How could we confuse this with optimism, when it has nothing to do with expecting things to be better?

  Hope has to do with continuing, that’s all: thin stuff, unprepossessing food which—looked at in this light—seems really neither thin nor plain, but miraculous. What keeps us going? Some native will to live, as much the stuff out of which we’re made as blood or bone?

  But many refuse to live, or continue on but refuse to feel, or try to. How do they lose their will? I can imagine, now, where I couldn’t before, this long erosion of faith, this steady drawing from one’s strength, until what’s left is tenuous, transparent. I used to think depression wrong—a failure to see, a rejection of the gifts of one’s life, an injustice to the world’s bright possibilities. But I understand better than I did before.

  W’s leaving me—already—though who knows how long, to what degree, when—and nothing I can do can even begin to touch that fact. Already he’s starting to make his peace: the dreams, the things he says (“this will be my last trip,” on the way home from Florida) seem to say he’s preparing himself. I’m terrified of being alone—sometimes I think I won’t be anyone without him—and terrified of his suffering, of being unable to be there with what he needs. The whole thing scares me shitless, plain and ugly fact—ugly? Human. Who could be looking at this without fear?