Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [94]
For Bobby, Dr. Magnus at least provided a prescription for AZT, and for once that drug truly did hold out more than a distant promise, since it had been known to produce dramatic results in patients with dementia.
The first few days, nothing changed. Bobby would report to me his operatic dreams, his hallucinations, which would be narrated, disarmingly, with absolute faith: crystal bottles in his chest, lawn furniture in his brain, distortions of pattern, his obsessions with geometric figures. I’d note down what he said—feeling almost opportunistic myself, but also as if this focus sustained me, occupied my nervous energies, since any poet’s a student of perception, of the ways in which individual sensibilities filter and arrange the world. I dreamed one night that I was wondering how I would survive this, how I’d come through these days, and I saw in front of me a stack of books and papers and pens. The message: You have everything you need.
Then, one evening, Bobby came into the living room, wanting to watch TV. He still had that kind of swimming vagueness in his face, a lost look, but when a Supremes song began to play he suddenly grabbed the nearest piece of cloth and wrapped it around his head, stood up and began to lip-synch. He could only stand like that, arms out in the air in imitation of Diana Ross, for a few seconds, but he did stand, and he did move his lips to the words, and he was, for that moment, the man we knew.
And the next morning when I woke up he was in the kitchen, banging pots while he made his own goddamned oatmeal.
And not a moment too soon. Dr. Magnus, seeing the tension in Wally’s face, thought the stress of the past month unhealthy. A blood count confirmed it. Wally’s T-cells had fallen violently, by over two hundred. Dr. Magnus said, He’s got to go, now.
And go he did; though I hated the doctor’s blunt demeanor, I knew he was right. We encouraged him to stay in Provincetown, to find his own place, but it wasn’t his familiar arena. His mind cleared, his energy level rose; he could travel again, and went on to stay with other friends in Boston, the ones who’d first told us Bobby was sick. And when they couldn’t deal with him anymore, he went back to his parents for a while, and then to the YMCA in Cambridge, in Central Square. We thought—most of us would think—this a bleak prospect, but there seemed something familiar about the atmosphere for him, a sense of freedom and autonomy, a world in which he knew how to operate.
The fact of Bobby’s living in the Y was hard for Wally to accept; he’d have liked to intervene, but there was nothing to do but let go. He’d encourage Bobby to check into housing programs for PWA’s. Bobby went to visit one, he said, and reported that it was “depressing”—a term hard to countenance when the user lives in the YMCA! I don’t think Bobby wanted to identify himself as a person with AIDS. He stayed away from the support services Boston offered, out of a sense of shame. Or pride? Or the independence that had, in fact, made it possible for a difficult and marginalized man to build a life for himself in the city, over the years? The world he occupied in the few blocks around the Y was a small one—coffee shop, barber’s, corner store—but one he could negotiate, for a time. One where Wally would visit him. But not yet, not today.
The house was quiet again, but it had not regained the sense of peace, its atmosphere of safety. Wally looked strained and weary, a little—transparent, somehow? I’ve seen that look in other men, that weightlessness, that quality of being stretched thin, but not in my lover’s face. He’s been pushed to some edge. We’ve entered a new world, in which illness is no distant thing. AIDS, he said, was somewhere out there, present but not close. “I wasn’t ready,” he said, “for AIDS to come into my house.”
Suspense
Illness is anticipation; illness surrounds us with the vertiginous, the branching paths of what could happen. Our year of spiraling