Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [65]
We drove to Burlington. It was glorious dense green spring in Vermont but it could have been anywhere; there wasn’t anything outside our numbed sphere. Inside the car we held hands as I drove, talking or not talking, I can’t recall. A blur of green outside, shreds of fog, I think, on the mountains and the almost impossibly green valleys between them. The palpable wounded shock inside. We went to the support group office that day, signed up, took home brochures; I remember crying in a Szechuan restaurant, Wally’s hand shaking as he lifted his water glass. We were inside a zone of silence; we could talk and still not violate it, even in a crowded room full of carved dragons and people chattering over business lunches. Perhaps we looked as if nothing had changed, so that no one would know we had entered, that morning, into the rest of our lives, into the harrowing, forward-pouring next.
Though nothing had changed but knowledge; our understanding had shifted so radically that the world seemed wildly unfamiliar. If my life were the tree I studied through the windows of my childhood museum, then I’d suddenly been slammed to the floor, my face thrust to a glass I’d never looked through before. We stumbled through the days, raw with the new fact. How long was it before any sense of consoling ordinariness—those brief intervals when things seem normal again—would return? Could this knowing become part of the landscape in which we lived, an aspect of the daily?
We began to seek out medical alternatives. Our decision to test had been influenced by a trip to San Francisco, where the word was that the HIV-positive would live longer if identified, since more and more preventative measures were being discovered. AIDS, the buzz had it, was on the way to becoming a chronic, manageable disease, like diabetes. It seemed perfectly plausible, in 1989, to believe that; my faith in medical technology, in science without limit, wasn’t the weak and compromised—vanished?—thing it is today. And then there were all the questions which floated around HIV status: would everyone who had been exposed to the virus eventually get sick? Why, presuming that many men of my generation or older had been exposed around the same time, in the late seventies and early eighties, were some people already dead, while others appeared completely healthy? Did that mean that some people were more naturally resistant than others? What about co-factors? How, when Wally and I had unsafe sex countless times, could I be negative? Did that mean that my blood held in escrow some soon-to-be-tapped promise? Somebody had to be working on this, with the same intensity that was, presumably, being brought to bear on the search for treatments of opportunistic infections. AIDS activism would make sure this was so.
(Today, knowing what I do, would I still want to take that test? I don’t know if the preventative treatments actually spared Wally anything; he never had pneumocystis, thank heaven, and perhaps that was because of the invisible clouds of aerosol pentamidine he’d breathe through a clear plastic tube, and, later, the big yellow Bactrim tablets which would make nearly everyone who took them ill. Who knows? In response to what he did have, the medical profession offered us nothing but a CAT scan and a shrug. However, I know that testing allowed us to make good decisions. No one can really be ready for AIDS, but we were able to have our house in order, able to get ourselves to a place of relative safety and support. So I’d do it again, I guess, though I admit there’s also a strong part of me that wouldn’t want to know.)
We’d been inspired by San Francisco’s cutting-edge