Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [70]
Robert had passed his fatalistic attitude about AIDS along to his mother. One evening Peg said to me, “How do you feel, knowing Wally is going to die of AIDS?”
I told her I didn’t know that he was going to die of AIDS; for all I knew I might go first, or he might live a long life with the virus, or there might be a cure or at least a life-prolonging treatment tomorrow. It seemed important to me to maintain that kind of openness, to resist fatalism. In my heart I thought there was a slow erasure of Wally taking place, tremendously slow; the metaphor that came to me was of the outline of his body gradually being filled in with a kind of dark transparency, like ink, slowly spreading to fulfill the outline of him. A darkly spreading, bruise-colored tattoo. He looked like himself, still, but I began to imagine his body filling with an absence. I imagined that when we received his diagnosis we entered into the gates of the underworld, beginning a fatal descent, one very small step at a time. I imagine that the god of hell doesn’t come out to meet us in chariots and fire, infernal stallions stomping and champing and foaming; it’s that the dark god slowly turns the body of the descendant into himself, making it of a piece with his darkness. In my heart I felt this process as inexorable. We were moving downward, on the charred slopes, and nothing I could do would stop it.
But we were also living in the outer world, as well as in the inner, metaphoric one, and in the outer world, the day-to-day, Wally was not sick. Perhaps a bit less energetic, but was that just depression, worry? There was time in front of us, time to be used well, time to live. And I needed to turn away from that internal sense of descent, to live as if that wasn’t what I felt. I was, in my spirit, as much a fatalist as Robert, but I railed against his fatalism and talked about positive expectations, uncertainty, living as if we will live. After all, any of us can die, any time; we know we will, we just don’t know when. And if the diagnosis made it likely that Wally would die first, and sooner, then didn’t we have to live as fully as we could now, not in some death-haunted stasis?
Robert and I belonged to the same gym. He led bicycle tours for a living, and ran and biked indoors all winter to stay in shape for his demanding summer schedule. He painted rather conventional landscapes in oil, made stained-glass objects to sell at a craft store, and pursued a complex arcana of sexual practices involving leather and bondage. He had multiple body piercings before they become the fashion. He was a brave soul, I think, to use the sauna and shower in a mostly straight central Vermont health club in 1989 with his nipple pierced. One day when I arrived he was already running on the treadmill. He nodded hello and kept running while I climbed on the machine beside him, and while I did my idle warm-up and then gained what little speed I do, I noticed that he kept pushing up the lever to increase the speed of the conveyor belt, so that he was going faster and faster, on and on, pushing the machine to the limit, staring straight ahead, the sweat pouring off him. I didn’t think he was ever going to stop. But when he did, eventually, as I was winding down, he told me that morning he found, on his right calf, his first KS lesion. He wore sweatpants, and that day he showered at home.
Researching, he learned that the average person with Kaposi’s sarcoma survives eighteen months after diagnosis. He circled on his calendar the approximate date he expected to die. He informed his mother, took care of everything, and started thinking seriously about the traveling he wanted to do while he still could.
Wally was horrified by this almost casual fatalism (which disguised, of course, pain that was anything but casual; it was easier for Bob to present this sort of cool surface, a that’s-the-way-the-world-is attitude). This was so much the opposite of Wally’s spirit, and seeing someone so plainly, baldly