Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [93]
“Okay,” we both said, thinking he had something to ask us about his health, some fear, some question.
“The boxes,” he said, “do they ever hold still?”
How could we answer?
Wally couldn’t bear it, found it frightening and maddening, but I will admit there was something about his talk that fascinated me—an aesthetic interest, if you will, in perception and language, a professional interest. And cool and detached as it seems, as soon as I found that interest, I was suddenly able to care for Bobby with equanimity. Observing and thinking about how he saw the world gave me a way to be with him, and he must have sensed that he was welcome to talk about his new perceptions. He was, sometimes, heartbreaking. He’d sit on the couch and be unable to tell where his legs were, or how many of them he had. Once he looked at me quite directly and plaintively and said, “All I want is one head.” And he became weaker, more disoriented, and spent more of the day in his bed.
As soon as we could, we got Bobby an appointment with Wally’s doctor. While he was decidedly not compassionate in his demeanor—he didn’t much like the idea of Wally taking on extra stress, trying to take care of someone else—he did get Bobby started on preventative drugs for thrush and pneumonia. If we couldn’t do anything else, we could get Bobby connected to services he could use—Medicaid, food stamps, medical help.
Once when I took Bobby to Dr. Magnus’s office, in a borrowed wheelchair, the physician seemed to lash out at him with an uncalled-for anger. Bobby wasn’t easy to deal with. He was a relative stranger to this clinic, here only because we’d brought him in, and in the vicinity of a nurse or doctor he tended to become at best passive and at worst appallingly weepy, dramatic, and overblown. He was manipulative and needy, but he was a patient, a confused man who could barely stand up, and the doctor brusquely said, “What are you doing here? Why don’t you go home? Where is home?” His intention, I imagine, was to protect Wally, but there was something ugly and unnecessary about it. Why did I just swallow it at the time, and glare? I suppose my intention must have been to protect Wally, too, by not offending his doctor, even if I believed him a rude son of a bitch.
Sometimes I think I’d like to be able to maintain a judgment; sometimes empathy slides in when we don’t really quite want it to. It’d be easier for me to blame the doctor, to see only his limits and failures. But I can’t help but think of all the men he’s seen, everyone who’s come into his office bright and alive and full of charms and fears, like the rest of us, everyone who’s been reduced and diminished by the wages the virus extracts, the fevers and sweats, the losses and limitations, the new debilities wearing away at the self until people are just too tired to want to go on, though they do. How hard it must be, to watch them pour by in that slipstream, and be able to do nothing or next to nothing, to be unable to offer what medicine promises—not a word or a gesture of consolation but a cure.
I think, too, of Dr. Magnus’s own lover, a gentle and diligent young man, an artist who wants so much to do his work, who looks as if illness has subtracted from him everything that’s not of the essence. He looks burnished, burning with a flame just behind his skin, a flame that seems to be flickering at the edges, glowing steadily but not strong. How terrible, to live to cure, and not be able to offer any such herb or salve to the one you love, to live face to face with that limitation.
And yet, in the face of all we can’t do, might not we be led to make the gestures we can?
After Wally died, the young artist came to the memorial service alone, and explained that Dr. Magnus sent his regrets, but he just couldn’t bear another memorial.
I couldn’t bear it either. Nor do I imagine the artist could bear seeing in the Universalist chapel that day a version of his own future. But it’s like when young writers ask my friend Jean how she found the