Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [68]
Wally, who’d never been to college, had rather different expectations about what higher education would provide, but he spent a year and a half at Goddard painting, writing, and studying Afro-Cuban dance anyway. He’d had fun, commingled with the frustrations, but the experience hadn’t really been compelling enough to hold his attention after the test, and he let the idea of getting a degree go.
By the fall his T-cell count, never all that high, had dropped into a range where Dr. Science felt it was time to commence the antiviral. Within three days, how good a drug AZT was or wasn’t became a moot point; entirely immobilized by a clenching, unbearable headache, Wally couldn’t get off the couch.
It was the first time he was ever unable to walk Arden, into whose new life he’d poured his attention and energy, his love of play; Arden—absorbing all this affection, and sweet by nature—was becoming the most thoughtful and sensitive of dogs. He sat in the corner of the big, battered couch, confused.
Wally stopped taking the little blue-and-white pills; Science said try it again, to see if he could go “through” the headaches, ride them out to arrive at tolerance. But there wasn’t any riding out that pain; both the second and third trials left him helpless on the couch, his gripped, pounding, and unholy head held tightly between his hands, while outside the Vermont autumn unfolded its signal fires of wild-leafed maple and birch.
DDI, the next antiviral, was in drug trials, a part of the process leading toward FDA approval; people who couldn’t tolerate AZT and who had appropriately low T-cell counts were admitted to the study. Wally qualified, and soon we were receiving cardboard boxes full of white, foil-lined envelopes about the size of grocery-store sauce mix, the sort one makes into fake hollandaise or onion dip. These came filled with a powder like blank white Kool-Aid which dissolved, eventually, to a colorless cocktail. Nothing visible. (So many of our accommodations and negotiations took place beneath the surface, impossible to see.) Wally seemed to hate everything about the drug: the ritual of opening the envelope, stirring the stuff into water, clanking at the sides of the glass with a spoon. He sat at the kitchen counter twice a day, head in his hand, looking glumly into the glass while the spoon went round and round, the cloudy liquid not becoming clear for a long time. He took it regularly—even though we were full of questions: better to take an unknown drug or allow the body to do its own work? Which was more deadly, the invisible disease, the invisible treatment? We couldn’t see anything happening, but then one isn’t supposed to see; the idea was that the antiviral held something at bay. Neither of us really believed it was doing anything, but what might happen if he stopped?
And then came a bout of neuropathy, the most common side effect; his fingers tingled and went numb. He stopped taking it for a while, the neuropathy receded,