Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [63]
Losing one’s self: is that it? Is the descent of the surviving into grief and incomprehension a death, too? I awoke in a dark wood…A descent above all into the unfamiliar, the known world made strange, all signposts gone, one’s sense of the predictable future shattered. Everything utterly different, though it looks the same.
In the months after Wally died I felt a kind of spirit with me that sustained me, even though I was miserable; it was strange how I could be in so much pain and feel, at once, somehow close to the heart of life, in a place of no little radiance. And then, the descent, the dying back into the world—a dark wood—where we are unguided. Lynda died and whatever shine seemed to leak out of the other world as Wally entered it left me. What my soul requires is this going down into darkness, into the bitterness of salt and chewing at old roots. In my heart I make myself ugly and bitter, I say cruel and harsh things, I spit on hope, I mock the bit of life which is tender beginnings, which is promise, which is hope. I will let myself be ugly, I will have a mouth full of darkness, a heart full of bile, I will be sour and hateful and old. I see the future burning, the oily rags of love going up in the black smoke of the torched body. In another time I would have wandered in the desert, I would have torn my clothing and walked in rags, I’d have smeared my face with dust and clay and refused speech, I would have hurled my body down into the dust and my soul into darkness, into nothing, utter free fall in the world of senselessness. Much as I want to hold on, want to cling to any perception which might be redemptive, any solid point, what is required of me is what I fear the most: relinquishment, free fall, the fluid pour into absolute emptiness. There is no way around the emptiness, the bitter fact, no way to go but through.
Part Two
THROUGH
Descent
Wally died of a viral brain infection, PML, which stands for progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, a condition in which an ordinarily harmless virus that most of us carry around in our livers is able to migrate, due to the suppression of the immune system, into the brain. There it multiplies unchecked, causing certain areas to become inflamed, unable to function. Typically—to the extent that anything is typical, since this is a rare opportunistic infection which affects perhaps two percent of people with AIDS—PML leads to a gradual paralysis, symptoms rather resembling those of someone who’s had a stroke. One side of the body is usually affected more than the other. Difficulties with speech and comprehension develop gradually, along with loss of movement and feeling. Leading, at worst, to complete paralysis, which was my deepest nightmare for Wally, the scenario I tried not to let myself imagine, that he might be awake and aware but unable to move or to react.
PML: hard, unyielding acronym. Another constellation of letters, in themselves meaningless, full of negative capability. We could imagine into them further because they were so empty, so devoid, in themselves, of content or suggestion. Like “AIDS” itself; if the disease had a name, a real word, would we be able to attach so many cultural meanings to it, freight it so heavily with values and associations?. AZT, DDI, DDC, PML: troubling recombinations of letters. A bad hand drawn at Scrabble, letters which we can figure and refigure and still make nothing. PML literally makes nothing; where someone was, where clarity and spirit and intelligence and movement were, erasure. As if the self were written in chalk, then powdered away.
If, in fact, PML was what we had. (I write that “we” unconsciously at first, automatically, as though it were my illness too, I lived with it that closely, it consumed my life that completely. I know I can’t know what it’s like even to be HIV-positive, but there is a way in which people have illnesses—especially terminal ones—together.) The only way to make a positive diagnosis of PML is a brain