Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [66]
But we were in central Vermont, a state with—at that time—twenty reported cases of AIDS. There was no activist pressure for advanced health care, drug trials, or services to the sick and their families, and none of the community of concern and support offered on either coast. So our central truth, the fact that dominated our days and nights, felt like ours alone; the world around us ignored it and disconfirmed it at every step. Sometimes I used to look at the clapboard houses rowed along our street, the blue and yellow porches, the russet Victorian bricks of the law office down the block, and be overwhelmed by the sensation that no one there knew what I knew, no one lived as we did. Wally and I were sealed together in some kind of bubble, a private sphere. The impact of the news was underscored by the way in which it isolated us, by the strange way in which our reality, more than ever, didn’t match the life around us.
Long phone calls to Project Inform, asking about drugs, T-cell counts, what’s new. I wanted to hear anything; I remember once the weary man on the other end of the hot line saying to me, “What is it you want to know?” I couldn’t answer; I wanted everything from knowledge to comfort, names of drugs to gestures of consolation. The world had split apart, and I wanted anything that could pour into that newly opened gap.
Wally made another hasty, not-well-planned trip to San Francisco. We’d seen, for the first time, ads for clinics there specifically for the HIV-positive, with upbeat names like Positive Action or Positive Choices, tags that suggested empowerment, no passive relinquishment but a firm grasp on possibility. A year before there’d been nothing like these ads, which now loomed large in the gay press, the bold type full of promise. We’d thought of AIDS as a catastrophe that left the sufferer no room for any sort of action, but this new attitude promised at least living longer than we’d come to expect, and weren’t there after all so many unknowns? Here, at least, the absence of knowledge might lead to hope.
But Wally’s experience at the Whatever Clinic wasn’t empowering. The staff felt cold to him, the project mercenary; the expensive consultation led to an unexceptional round of advice: AZT, when his T-cell count warranted it, and vitamins. The doctor didn’t demonstrate the sort of optimism the ads connoted. Wally’s visit there was really like my calls to Project Inform: what did he want? We each brought to our reaching out a wildly unsorted mixture of needs: for knowledge, for emotional support, for medical and psychological and spiritual help. What we wanted was what no one could offer: clarity, understanding, deliverance.
We tried to tell ourselves that nothing had changed, really. Wally’s health was, of course, exactly what it was the day before we gained this new knowledge. He didn’t have AIDS, or even what was called, then, ARC. He had, we had, instead, knowledge, a new awareness of potentiality—maybe of certainty? Who knew? He had been given a word, POSITIVE, and, as would be the case later, too, when he was given the “word” AIDS, that act of naming stunned us and sent us reeling. It felt, then, like knowledge we couldn’t actually use, though we tried to find ways to act upon it.
We got a dog. We’d been thinking about this for a while, before the test, and somehow it seemed, now, essential. I’d had one dog in my entire life, a collie puppy who’d died in infancy; I’d been so upset my parents