Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [91]
In October, a mutual friend from Boston appeared at our door, and told us Bobby was in the hospital with pneumocystis, had been there for two or three weeks; Bobby’s “lover” hadn’t called us or anyone else, wanting to keep as much distance between the disease and himself as he could. We tried to reach Bobby in the hospital, but he’d checked out. No answer at home, so after a number of tries we called his parents, and there he was.
The lover had told him not to come back to the house they shared for eight years. I can’t, he said, take care of you. So Bobby packed a suitcase and went to his parents; he’d told them he had plain old pneumonia, but now he told his mother the truth. She got him to agree not to tell his father, and he’d stay there awhile, under these circumstances of deceit.
If this all seems a tangled skein of bad behavior, such circumstances weren’t exactly uncharacteristic of Bobby. Was the dishonesty he’d learned at home what he carried on through his own life? We’d known that he was HIV-positive, because of a previous bout with shingles, but there’d been no discussion of this, really, and no ongoing treatment or medical attention. He’d taken to going to Mass every day, we knew that.
And now he wanted to come for a visit, and it seemed plain that his family would very much like him to do so, too. His sister agreed to drive him halfway down to the Cape; we’d meet him at a rest stop on the highway.
I hardly recognized the man we picked up that afternoon. He’d lost twenty pounds, his hair had thinned, his face grown both craggier and less focused. He seemed confused, sitting in the passenger’s seat of his sister’s car, wearing a huge red parka to keep warm, a yellow flowered pillowcase on his lap containing his clothes. He’d brought a big brown plaid blanket, too; he was thinking mostly, it seemed, about staying warm.
The next morning, after I’d left very early for work, Wally and Bobby and Arden were walking on the shore of the bay, just half a block from the house, when Bobby suddenly said he felt strange and needed to sit down. Wally led him to an upturned dory and could tell by his eyes something was seriously wrong. He turned for help, and then looked back to see that Bobby had fallen to the ground, in a grand mal seizure, thrashing, his eyes rolling. Wally screamed for help, and indeed it was a very few minutes before the rescue squad was there.
By the time Wally reached me and I’d made it home, Bobby was in the hospital in Hyannis. It seemed impossible, in 1991, that the nurses were reluctant to enter his room; they put on their latex gloves outside the door. (Later, when Bobby began to have dementia, I took him back to the hospital for an MRI. Cold as he always was, he was wearing enough clothes for three men, and there wasn’t a body fluid in sight, but I watched the technicians arm themselves with latex charms. I don’t begrudge anyone their protection, but paranoia’s ugly, as is making your fear obvious.) Nobody in the hospital wanted to tell us anything. Perhaps because they didn’t know anything; two days later, the seizure was ascribed to “viral activity” and Bobby released.
To us. He had a prescription for something to prevent seizures. But no antivirals, no preventative medication for pneumonia. No doctor monitoring his case. No insurance. No income. No lover. No home—just his belongings, left in the house he had been booted out of, and a family that didn’t seem to know if they wanted him or not. His mother told him not to cry in the house, on her couch; she didn’t want those germs around.
Bobby had, of course, set up this situation, or at least played a role in its formation. He hadn’t made any plans for his medical needs; he’d stayed with an untrustworthy man, one he knew was untrustworthy. He hadn’t been truthful, or established a system of support. And we were assuming, in fact, that he was being truthful with us, that the lover didn’t want him, that