I shook my head in sympathy and as I glanced around I noticed that the people at the table next to ours were watching us with disgusted expressions on their faces. I caught the eyes of one of the men—he was well into his fifties, bald and obese with an enormous steak bleeding onto the plate before him—and he simply stared back at me with utter loathing before turning back to his friends.
“Despite all this,” continued Bastiaan, “Patient 741 was still not willing to accept the truth. He wanted to know who the best doctor in the field was, where was the best hospital; he insisted that someone must be able to help him. That someone would be able to prove me wrong. But Doctor, he said leaning forward and taking me by the shoulders as if he wanted to shake some sense into me, I can’t possibly have that disease. Do I look like a queer? I’m normal, for Christ’s sake!”
“You see?” said Courteney, sitting back and throwing her hands in the air. “No education. No understanding at all.”
“And did he come to terms with it in time?” I asked.
“Well, he had to,” said Bastiaan, reaching across and taking my hand for a moment and squeezing it. Despite how close we were with Alex and Courteney, there was still a moment where I noticed how their eyes glanced toward our hands and they seemed a little embarrassed by our physical affection. “He had no choice. When I told him that he would have to contact all the women he’d been intimate with and tell them that they needed to get tested too, he said that he didn’t even know the names of half the women he’d slept with in the last year, let alone their phone numbers. Then he said he wanted a blood transfusion. Take all my blood out and replace it with good blood, he said, but I told him that was ridiculous, that it didn’t work like that. But I’m not fucking gay! he kept insisting.”
“And where is he now?” I asked.
“At Mount Sinai,” said Bastiaan. “He doesn’t have long left. He was admitted a few weeks ago and it’s only a matter of time at this point. In the end I had to call security. He started to lose his mind. Came around to my side of the desk, pinned me up against the wall—”
“He did what?” I asked.
“He pinned me up against the wall. He said he knew that I was a dirty faggot too and that I shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near patients, that I was probably infecting them one by one.”
“Oh for God’s sake,” said Courteney.
“Did he hurt you?” I asked.
“No. Look, this was a year ago anyway. And I was bigger than him. And stronger. I could have taken him down if I’d needed to, but I was able to control the situation, to calm him down, to make him realize that his anger would not help. Finally, he backed off and that’s when he just crumbled and started to cry. Jesus Christ, he said. What will they say at home? What will they think of me?”
“Where was home?” asked Courteney.
Bastiaan hesitated for a moment and turned to me. “Well, that’s the thing,” he said. “He was Irish.”
“You’re kidding me,” I said. “I haven’t even kept up with what’s going on over there. Do people have AIDS in Ireland too?”
“People have it everywhere, Cyril,” said Alex. “Probably on a much smaller scale, but there’s bound to be a few cases.”
“So why didn’t he go home to die?” I asked. “Why stay in America?”
“He said he didn’t want his family to know. That he’d rather die alone here than tell them the truth.”
“You see?” I said. “That country never fucking changes. Better to cover it all up than to face up to the realities of life.”
I looked up as the waiter came over to the table and stood before us, smiling nervously. He had enormous bouffant hair and was wearing a leather waistcoat with no shirt underneath, revealing a hirsute chest, and looked as if he belonged on stage with the rest of Bon Jovi.
“How was your dinner?” he asked, and before we could reply his expression grew noticeably anxious. “I’ll just leave this here for you for whenever you’re ready,” he said, laying a small silver tray on the table and turning around to walk away.
“What’s that for?” asked Alex, summoning him back. “No one asked for the check.”
“I’m afraid we need this table,” said the waiter, glancing toward our neighbors for a moment. “We didn’t expect you to stay this long.”
“We haven’t even been here an hour,” I said.
“And we haven’t had dessert or coffee yet,” said Courteney.
“I can give you some coffee to go if you like?”
“We don’t want coffee to go!” she snapped. “Jesus Christ!”
“Just take the check back and we’ll order something else when we’re ready,” said Bastiaan.
“I can’t do that, sir,” said the waiter, looking around for reinforcements, and I noticed a couple of his colleagues gathered near the bar area watching what was going on. “This table is reserved for another party.”
“Well, where are they?” I asked, looking around.
“They’re not here yet. But they’re on their way.”
“I can count at least four empty tables,” said Courteney. “Seat them at one of those.”
“They specifically requested this table,” said the waiter.
“Then it’s hard luck,” said Alex. “Because we were here first.”
“Please,” said the waiter, looking at our neighbors again, who were watching with smiles on their faces. “Don’t make a scene. We have the other diners to think about.”
“What’s going on here exactly?” said Bastiaan, throwing his napkin down on the table and growing angry now. “Are you throwing us out, is that what’s going on here? Why? What have we done?”
“We’ve had some complaints,” said the waiter.
“About what?” I asked, completely baffled.
“Why don’t you just do what the man says and get the hell out of here,” came a voice from the next table, and we looked over at the man with the steak who was staring at us in disgust. “We’re trying to have a nice dinner and all we can hear from you people is a lot of talk about that queer disease. If one of you has it, then you shouldn’t be in a restaurant anyway.”
“None of us has it, you moron,” said Courteney, turning on him. “These two are doctors. They treat victims of AIDS.”
“I think you misunderstand the meaning of the word victim,” said one of the women. “You’re not a victim if you’re asking for it in the first place.”
“What the fuck?” I said, looking around, half-amused and half-shocked by what I was hearing.
“Waiter, you need to throw away all their plates and cutlery,” said the man. “No one else should have to eat off them after these people. And wear gloves, I advise you.”
It took just a moment for Bastiaan to be on his feet and marching over to their table. The waiter stepped back in fright and Alex jumped up, as did I, uncertain what to do at a moment like this.
“Let’s just leave,” said Courteney, grabbing Bastiaan by the arm as he passed her. “But don’t think we’ll be paying the bill,” she added to the waiter. “You can stick that where the sun don’t shine.”
“What’s the matter with you?” asked Bastiaan of the fat man, pushing him with both hands against the chest as he stood too, and his Dutch accent became more pronounced the more furious he got. This was something that happened whenever he grew really angry; I called it “the tone” and dreaded its rare appearance. “You think you know what you’re talking about? You don’t understand anything of what you’re saying. Develop a little humanity, why don’t you?”
“Get the fuck out of here before I call the police,” said the man, not even slightly intimidated despite the fact that Bastiaan was younger, fitter and taller than him. “Why don’t you and your friends go down to the West Village. They’ll be happy to serve all you perverts whatever you want down there.”
I could see Bastiaan trembling as he summoned all his self-control to stop himself from picking the man up and throwing him through the windows,
but finally, controlling his temper, he turned around and walked away. We made our way to the doors and left, the eyes of everyone in the restaurant on us as we marched back out on to 23rd Street, where the lights from the corner offices of the Flatiron shone down on us.
“Fuckers,” said Bastiaan, leading us down the street toward a bar where we had every intention of getting riotously drunk. “Bunch of fucking fuckers. They’d have a bit more decency if one of them came down with it. I wish they would. I wish they all would.”
“You don’t mean that,” I said, wrapping my arms around him and pulling him close to me.
“No,” he whispered with a sigh as his head rested on my shoulder. “No, I suppose I don’t.”
Patient 563
The curtains were drawn in Room 711 and in a husky voice that sounded as if it had not been used in sometime, the young man asked me not to open them. Enough light was seeping through, however, to allow me to make out the figure in the bed. He was around twenty years old but probably weighed no more than a hundred pounds. His arms, which were lying on top of the sheets, were stick-thin, his long fingers skeletal, the elbow joints inflamed beneath the hospital gown. His face was gaunt, the skin stretched taut against the skull beneath in an anatomical miscreation that summoned images of Mary Shelley’s monster to my mind. Lesions on his neck and above his right eye—dark black bruises that melted into the skin—appeared to pulsate as if they had a life of their own.
Shaniqua had told me that if I ever felt uncomfortable then I should leave, that it wasn’t fair for a patient to witness my discomfort, but I had never done such a thing yet. Today she had insisted that I wear a gown and mask, and I had followed her instructions even though the boy’s bed was covered in a white plastic tarpaulin that reminded me of the scene at the end of E.T. when Elliott’s house is quarantined by the government and the alien appears close to death. I told him my name and explained why I was there and he nodded, his eyes opening a little wider as if he was trying to physically draw some more life into his body, and when he tried to speak again the words came out as a sequel to a prolonged bout of coughing.
“It’s good of you to come,” he said. “I don’t get many visitors. I haven’t had one in weeks, other than the chaplain. He comes every day. I’ve told him I’m not religious, but he comes anyway.”
“Do you want him to stop?” I asked. “Because if you do—”
“No,” he said quickly. “No, I don’t want him to stop.”
“All right then,” I said. “How are you feeling today?”
“Like the end is nigh,” he said, laughing a little, which turned into another series of coughs that lasted for more than a minute and brought me out in a cold sweat. Relax, you can’t catch it, I told myself. You can’t catch it just by standing here.
“Do you want to tell me your name?” I asked. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to. They just identified you as Patient 563 to me.”
“It’s Philip,” he said. “Philip Danley.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Philip,” I said. “Are they making you comfortable at least? I’m so sorry that this has happened to you.”
He closed his eyes and I thought for a moment that he was falling asleep but then he opened them again and turned to look at me, breathing in so deeply that I could see his chest rise and fall beneath the blanket. I imagined how pronounced his ribcage would look beneath his skin.
“Are you from New York?” I asked.
“Baltimore. Have you ever been there?”
“I haven’t been anywhere in the States outside of Manhattan,” I said.
“I used to think there was no point in going anywhere else. I only ever wanted to come here. From the time I was a kid.”
“And when did you first arrive?”
“Two years ago. I came to study Literature at CCNY.”
“Oh,” I said, surprised. “I know someone who’s studying Literature there.”
“Who?” he asked.
“His name’s Ignac Križ. He’s probably a couple of years older than you, though, so you may not—”
“I know Ignac,” he said, smiling at me. “Czech guy, right?”
“Slovene.”
“Oh yeah. So how do you know him?”
“I’m one of his guardians,” I said. “Not in a strictly legal sense, but it’s how things have been for seven years. Not that he needs a guardian now, of course. He’s twenty-two years old. Anyway, he lives with my boyfriend and me.”
“I think he’s going to be a famous writer someday,” he said.
“Perhaps,” I said. “I’m not sure fame is what he’s after, though.”
“No, I didn’t mean that. Only that I think he’s going to be very successful. He’s a lovely guy. And I’ve read a few of his stories. Everyone thinks he’s very talented.”
“Did you enjoy studying there?” I asked, biting my lip when I realized that I’d used the past tense, as if that part of his life was entirely over. Which, of course, it was.
“I loved it,” he said. “It was my first time outside Maryland. I’m still enrolled there, I guess. Or maybe they struck me off their books, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter anymore, I suppose. My parents didn’t want me to come here at all. They said I’d get mugged my first time out in the city.”
“And were they right?”
“In a manner of speaking. What do you do anyway?” he asked. “Do you work at the hospital?”
“No,” I told him. “I just volunteer.”
“And what do you do when you’re not volunteering?”
“Not much. I think I’m turning into a 1950s housewife. I don’t have an employment visa, so I can’t legally do anything, although I work a few nights a week at a bar near where we live. My boyfriend earns enough to keep us both, so I guess I’m scrounging off him. Anyway, that’s why I volunteer. I wanted to do something positive with my days.”
“You’re gay then?” he asked me.
“Yes. And you?”
“Yes,” he said. “How do you think I got in this spot?”
“Well, not because you’re gay,” I said. “You can’t think that’s the reason.”
“But it is the reason,” he said.
“No, it isn’t. There are plenty of straight patients on this floor.”
“It’s the reason,” he insisted.
I came closer to him now and sat down on a chair. Despite the trauma that the disease had done to his face and body, I could tell that, when he had been healthy, he would have been a good-looking boy. His dark hair, which was cropped close to his skull now, complemented his eyes, which were bright blue and could not be dulled by the worst efforts of the disease.
“Do you remember when we were kids,” he said eventually, turning to me again, “the time we took the sleigh up to Ratchet Hill on Christmas morning? You said that if we held on to the sides as tightly as we could, then we’d be OK? But you fell off and sprained your ankle and Mom blamed me for it and I was grounded for a week?”
“I don’t think that was me,” I said gently. “Was that your brother, Philip? Are you thinking about your brother?”
He turned his head and stared at me for a moment and frowned. “Oh yes,” he said, turning away again. “I thought you were James. You’re not James, are you?”
“No, I’m Cyril,” I said.
“Does your ankle still get sore in cold weather?”
“No,” I told him. “No, it healed. It’s fine now.”
“Good.”
A nurse came in and ignored us both as she took a reading from one of the monitors, then changed his IV bag before leaving again. As she did so, I glanced toward the bedside table where copies of The Sound and the Fury and Catch-22 were piled one on top of the other.
“You’re a reader,” I said.
“Of course,” he replied. “I told you, I study Literature.”
“Did you want to write? Like Ignac?”
“No, I wanted to teach. I still do.”
“
Anne Tyler’s from Baltimore, isn’t she?” I asked, and he nodded. “I’ve read a few of her books. I liked them very much.”
“I met her once,” he said. “I worked part-time in a bookshop when I was in high school. She came in to buy some Christmas presents and I went bright red I was so in awe of her.”
I smiled and then, to my horror, I saw tears beginning to stream down his face.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You should go. You don’t want to see me making a fool of myself.”
“It’s fine,” I told him. “And you’re not making a fool of yourself. I can’t begin to imagine what you’re going through. Can you…” I hesitated, uncertain whether I should even ask. “Do you want to tell me what brought you here?”
“It’s ironic really,” he said. “They say that you’re most at risk of catching AIDS if you’re promiscuous. Guess how many people I’ve had sex with?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
“One.”
“Christ,” I said.
“One, and even then it was only once. I’ve had sex one single time in my entire life and that’s what brought me here.”
I said nothing. What was there to say?
“I was still a virgin when I came to New York,” he continued. “I was such a shy kid. Back in high school I had crushes on practically every guy I knew, but I never acted on any of them and never told anyone that I was gay. They would have beaten me up if they’d known. They would have killed me. That’s why I wanted to study here. I thought that maybe I could find a new life for myself. But it wasn’t easy. For the first six months, I stayed in my dorm room, jerking off, frightened to go to any clubs or bars. And then one night I did. I just decided, Fuck it. And it felt so good once I was inside. I felt like I belonged somewhere for the first time in my life. I’ll never forget that sensation. How difficult it was to walk through the doors and how easy it felt once I was inside. Like I was where I was supposed to be. And then some guy took me home, the first guy who talked to me. He wasn’t even hot. Jesus, he was old. Old enough to be my father. I wasn’t even attracted to him. But I was so desperate to get laid, to lose it, you know? And frightened of staying in a club where I didn’t even understand the rules. So I went home with him and we had sex. It lasted about twenty minutes. And then I threw my clothes back on and ran back home. I didn’t even know his name. And that was it. That’s how I got it.” He took a long breath and shook his head. “Isn’t that just the worst thing you ever heard?”