Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [40]
My friend Bill has been here for twenty-three weeks, not because of his lesions, but because of devastating and continuous diarrhea caused by cryptosporidium, an intractable intestinal parasite. Wally had it too, though never to this extent. Nothing cures it, but Wally’s infection was controlled by an antibiotic. For Bill, drug after drug has done nothing, so he’s dehydrated, malnourished, and requires intravenous feeding, though the plastic tube inserted into his chest as a porthole for nourishment and drugs keeps getting infected and causing more problems. His insurance can’t pay for this kind of stay in a regular hospital, where in fact they really don’t want him anyway. This is a kind of maintenance care; this place, the less expensive alternative, seems some precinct of hell. Though the faces of the people behind the nursing station are kind and tired; it’s almost time for the shift change and they look as if they’ve fought a long day’s battle without much success or help. It’s not their fault the place is desolate; they can’t remake the inferno. In some of their faces you can see that they would like to.
I’ve come with Phil, Bill’s lover. We’ve been to a reading in Cambridge together, and we’ve stopped by to deliver some yogurt and a good night kiss from Phil. I haven’t seen either of them for months, though we’ve talked on the phone, and Phil and I have decided to take some time tonight and tomorrow to catch up face-to-face. We’re going to lunch at a museum, letting him relax into a different role for a few hours. I’m bracing myself for I don’t know what as we move down the corridor. This was, in a way, what I dreaded for Wally—his life wrenched out of our hands, into this institutional world where he’d be at their mercy, subject to invasion, unprotectable. My chest tightens as we come toward the end of the hall.
I wait at Bill’s door while Phil goes in first; it’s nearly ten-thirty and he expects Bill to be sound asleep. But in a moment he’s back, brightened. Bill is up and wants to see me, and Phil takes me by the hand and draws me in behind him.
The room’s a revelation. In memory it seems to me that Bill has draped a scarf across the shade of a bedside lamp, as Blanche DuBois would have, to warm the light to something rosy and flattering. Perhaps I’m inventing that; it feels like a room whose glow is filtered through figured silk, anyway. The walls are covered with paintings from Bill’s house, the windowsill thick with flowers and leafy plants, the whole room redolent of warmth and human habitation, an aura—in opposition to the severity of every floodlit room we passed to arrive here—of civility. This might be Bill’s little studio apartment, in the intimate upper floor of some city brownstone; room just for bed, tiny refrigerator, and the non-negotiable requirements of the civil life: flowers, paintings, music.
And here, in splendor, lies Bill. I realize, seeing him, the apprehension I’ve been carrying about not knowing how he’ll look; he’s the first really sick person I’ve seen since Wally died. But seeing his face I’m flooded, suddenly, with relief, with appreciation. Not because he looks well—always a boyish man, he’s become a large child, extremely thin, his head shaved, his lesions darkened against his pale skin, his eyes enormous—but because he is what people are, sometimes, very late in their