Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [64]
So, if it was PML that erased Wally’s ability to use his legs, there wasn’t anything to be done about it. And if it wasn’t that, what was it? “Viral activity,” that mantra of ignorance, a vain attempt to gain power through description.
Wally’s progress, on the one hand, seems simple now, a gradual decline, a weakening and fading, a body increasingly unable to cooperate with the dictates of his will: a will that softened, slowly going out of focus, quieting, easing away. But on the other hand, like Bill, he seemed to become more and more himself, or some original, underlying portion of self, as if he were scoured down to bedrock. What remained, despite the diminishment, was the pure and irreducible stuff of character.
“Who needs the full story of any life?” James Merrill wrote in his memoir, A Different Person. And who needs the full story of any death? Scenes imply the whole, delineate it. We’re raised on film, and movies leave out the continuous, getting-from-here-to-there tissue of experience that holds the heightened moments of life together. All we need, as an audience, are essential gestures.
But how to identify, looking at one’s own life, the signifying moments? Now the years of Wally’s illness seem to me an avalanche, but at the time they felt more like a descent so gradual as to often be imperceptible, especially early on, before the course of things became clear. How could we know then what was happening? How distinguish a symptom of changing brain function from depression from a reaction to a drug? Then, in the final year, suddenly there we were: in chaos, in hell, and through what passageway had we arrived? Gentle Dante, to imagine hell as terraced—so that the descending pilgrims might have time to acclimate, to walk a little at the pressure of this new depth, before the ground falls away again.
For many people, there’s a clear line of demarcation which marks the crossing from being HIV-positive to having AIDS. That’s a telling grammatical distinction, the difference between being and having, between a condition and a possession. AIDS is a possession one is possessed by. Often the signifier of change is the first KS lesion discovered on the sole of the foot, the inside of the thigh. Or the first bout with pneumocystis.
For Wally, nothing was ever so firm and clear; it seemed a kind of gliding downward, his process of change, moving forward by such subtle degrees that, when one day I’d recognize how much he’d changed, or see a new limitation made clear, I’d be shocked. When did all the tiny increments add up to this loss?
At nine o’clock on a weekday morning, late in May of 1989, the public health care worker who’d come to tell us our test results blasted the world apart. I can’t say I remember the experience all that clearly, so much did it become a kind of whirlwind. She was poised on the edge of the couch, practiced, friendly in a rather formal way. She told us our results. Me first, then Wally. I remember going and standing behind him; he was sitting in a wing chair, I don’t remember if he was crying, but I remember the stunned aura around him, the sense of an enormous rupture—not a surprise, but nonetheless a horror, an announcement fundamentally inadmissible, unacceptable. Shattering, but not a surprise, for had we been thinking of anything else? And though she must have told me my status first in order to deliver good news, before the blow, I remember thinking it didn’t matter which of us it was, that his news was mine.
At that time testing was offered by the state, and after a three-week wait one arranged to meet the caseworker someplace—often secretively, in parking lots or cafés, to protect the identities of closeted