Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [113]
One night when I’m sound asleep there’s an enormous crash. I sit straight up in bed and look around and see that Wally’s gone. In my groggy, startled confusion I can’t think what’s happened, but when I jump up there he is, on the floor beside his bed. His legs have drifted, as they do, off to the left, and he’s been unable to stop himself from simply sliding onto the floor. He’s not, thank God, hurt—is, of course, laughing, but this time I can’t laugh with him. I can’t lift him. Darren’s out for the night, and here I am with this helpless, inert man on the floor, and I can’t do a thing but get a pillow under his head. I think what to do, and come up with nothing. We talk about it. Wally, bless his heart, says it’s not so bad, being on the floor till morning.
In a while, slowly, we get him more-or-less sitting up, then rest like that for a while, me propping his back so he’ll stay upright. Then, his arms around my neck, my legs bent, I try to lift, but his weight nearly strangles me. We try again in a minute, his arms locked around my shoulders. And while he says Oh, oh and I see blinding white light that seems to begin at the base of my spine I haul him straight up off the floor and onto the edge of the bed, and he falls back into it, and I fall next to him.
W’s voice smaller on the other end of the phone—this connection, tender—his narration recognizing just one room and the slice of neighborhood held in his view.
I am so grateful he’s not in the hospital. I’m so angry there’s nothing for his doctors to do, and yet I’m glad too that they can’t hurt him, that he’s here, at home, in a room that feels like us, full of animals and his own food and his own music and his own TV.
November. You’ve seen waves breaking, at the end of their long travelling—it’s as if he were breaking inward, foaming into himself, a tide turning back toward its origin.
I look at him sometimes, just taking in his face, the way he smiles back at me, the way he takes in my attention, unquestioning, loving. The way he says, as he always has, Now what…a sign that means, What are we doing next? Where do we go from here?
Wally’s primary nurse, Paolo, means well, but he’s not a subtle man. There are things about him I don’t like: he wants to be very important to his patients, but he doesn’t really know them, though he thinks he does. He isn’t really paying attention. But Wally adores him, and flirts with him outrageously, admiring the tuft of hair that pokes up at his collar, his thick mustache. All fall, when he’s felt well enough (and, in fact, he always seems to summon some energy from somewhere when he knows that Paolo’s coming), Wally has subtly teased him, turning his serious remarks to jokes, subverting the conversation by turning it to sex in a way that I find hilarious and charming. Paolo only gets the grossest of the innuendo; I love to watch Wally lead him, play with him, and occasionally come forward with startlingly direct questions. Wally is particularly enamored with Paolo’s tattoo, an image of Pegasus, the horse’s wings just unfolding across Paolo’s biceps, his hooves visible, warm days, beneath his T-shirt sleeve. Wally likes to find ways to get Paolo to bend over him, so that the patient can look closely at the nurse’s tattoo.
It makes me think, now, of a man I’d meet six months after Wally’s death, when I visited a writing workshop in New York for men with AIDS. He had watched his own lover die, had come close to death himself, and in the space of a year had endured the deaths