‘What is this?’ Zorn asked, and Nora replied: ‘End of the world, gateway to hell.’ And as she pulled up to a curb she offered a solemn confession: ‘This is where I’ve been spending my nights.’ Knocking on a half-broken door, she said: ‘The other side of medical practice.’
The door opened and a surly woman dressed in a heavy man’s sweater led them up rickety stairs with frayed carpeting. She took them to a tiny room on the third floor, and from the moment she kicked open the door without knocking, Zorn saw all he needed to know about that room: from the facing wall two large areas of plaster had worked loose from the laths and fallen to the floor, making the wretched room look even more desolate and forbidding.
On a cheap metal bed in the far corner of the room, jammed in beside the lone window, lay a very tall, emaciated young black man who once must have been handsome, for he had a face with strong chiseled features and deep-set glowing dark eyes. Even in his present condition he looked as if he could have been an athlete.
Against his better judgment, Andy Zorn again became a doctor, for automatically he leaned down to take the stricken man’s pulse: ‘Is it what I think it is?’
‘Yes, AIDS,’ the young man whispered. At this terrible word Zorn drew back because, coming from those withered lips, it sounded doubly horrible. Nora explained: ‘Jaqmeel is my nephew, my brother’s boy. Basketball scholarship to the university at Gainesville. And this happens.’ She elbowed Zorn aside and took the young man’s hand.
Zorn asked: ‘Are you pretty good at the game? I should think you might be, with your height and all.’ He used the present tense purposely, as if there were a chance that Jaqmeel might one day miraculously recover and play again.
‘Fair.’
His aunt could not accept this depreciation of his ability. Taking from her purse a carefully folded clipping from a sports page, she showed Zorn a full-length photograph of a six-foot-four university basketball player in a uniform that displayed his two hundred and twenty pounds of aggressive muscle: ‘He was the star. What they call the point guard, rather big for that job, but very quick in his movements.’
Zorn had the grace not to gasp at the horrendous difference between the photo and the figure huddled on the bed. The first was a giant oak tree, the second a shriveled reed. Nora, eager to have Dr. Zorn understand how extraordinary her nephew was, used basketball jargon she had picked up from him: ‘With him so tall and strong in those days, he made himself a master of the in-your-face slam dunk,’ and this made Jaqmeel smile wanly. Then he said: ‘I’m nothing now,’ with such grim finality that the doctor shivered. In an awkward effort to maintain a conversational tone Zorn asked: ‘How far did you get toward your degree?’
‘It was mostly basketball.’
Again his aunt would not allow such an evaluation to stand: ‘Two years of excellent work, mostly A’s and B’s. His professor told me Jaqmeel could go on for a master’s.’
‘In what?’
The emaciated young man, not eager to relive his days of glory, mumbled: ‘He thought I could go into college teaching. Black history.’
Admiringly his aunt said: ‘Jaqmeel could do it. He speaks well, none of that “all peoples gots” that you teased me for,’ and Zorn could see from the way she looked at the young man that she loved him and had marked him as the member of the family who would really make it in the white man’s world. To her, his loss would be tragic.
Dismissing somber thoughts, he again became a doctor, ‘First thing we must do,’ he said brightly, ‘is get you out of this dump.’ Turning to Nora, he asked: ‘Where can we take him? Don’t worry about the money. Something can be arranged.’
‘No one will take him,’ Nora said. ‘Even if you have the money.’
Zorn could not accept this: ‘There must be something available. This is the United States. We don’t throw people into the streets—or into places like this.’ He took it upon himself to call downstairs: ‘Ma’am, can you give me some help?’ and when the frowsy woman climbed protestingly to the third floor, he asked: ‘Could you tell me if there’s a place with medical care that we can take this young man?’
‘There ain’t any.’
‘There must be, in a civilized place like Tampa.’
The woman looked at Nora, then shrugged her shoulders: ‘There is one place, but it costs money.’
‘Money we have,’ Zorn snapped, and the women started whispering.
‘Why the whispering?’ the body on the bed cried weakly. ‘Whatever it is, I can take it.’
‘It’s a hospice,’ the woman said harshly. ‘Where they take people to die.’
‘I’m ready to go,’ the wasted young man said with no touch of bravado. He was nearing the end and knew it. ‘Let’s get on with it.’
When Nora nodded, Zorn lifted the man in his arms, and the woman running the place grabbed the bedsheets, which she was obviously afraid Nora might steal. Zorn’s labor down the stairs was too easy: This man weighs practically nothing! How could he have been a rough-house basketball player of well over two hundred pounds? Studying the young athlete’s face he clearly saw a look of unimpaired exceptional intelligence, and from that moment he accepted responsibility for Jaqmeel’s existence as long as the frail body could stay alive.
As they loaded him into Nora’s car, Zorn noticed that a curious-looking couple—a dumpy woman about five feet tall, and a scarecrow of a man a foot taller—stood across the dirt-filled road photographing everything happening at the hovel. Returning to the landlady, he asked: ‘Who are they?’ and she said with obvious bitterness: ‘The morals police. They photograph everyone who enters or leaves my house.’
‘Why?’
‘They want to be sure that anyone inside dies in the proper way. None of that Kevorkian stuff like out in Michigan. Helping deadenders to commit suicide.’ Placing her right thumb to her nose, she threw them an indecent gesture before slamming the door.
The hospice to which they drove, Angel of Mercy, occupied a respectable three-story house in a reasonably decent part of Tampa, and its manager was no frowsy beldame in a man’s sweater. Mrs. Angelotti was a middle-aged Italian woman who with her husband, Tommaso, operated one of the few havens for people with AIDS in this city, where the disease was not yet rampant. They all stood on the porch while Nora explained that they were rescuing her nephew from a situation so abominable that no stricken man should end his days there, and they were sympathetic when Nora said: ‘I didn’t want him to come to you, where he’s supposed to die. It doesn’t seem right.’
‘It isn’t right!’ Mrs. Angelotti said. ‘But this is how it is.’
‘Can you direct us to any other place where he’d have a chance of getting round-the-clock care?’ Dr. Zorn asked.
‘We have no such places. Be glad you found us. I give these men loving care. In their dying breath they thank us, all of them, rich or poor, because we seem to be the only ones who give a damn.’
‘Can he get a doctor’s care with you?’
‘Most doctors don’t like to come here. What’s the profit to them? And I don’t mean money. Some of them are generous about that. But if they come here they run the risk of contracting AIDS, and besides, they have no real chance of curing the young men anyway. So it’s a no-win proposition. It’s the goodness of my husband that makes this place possible. One day a couple of years ago, he got real mad and said: “We can’t let them die like dogs.” You should see some of the places these men have to go for their last days.’
‘We saw one of them.’ Zorn said. ‘That’s why we’re here.’ He had not yet entered the hospice, but now, forced to accept the fact that there was no alternative, he wanted to satisfy himself that the Angel of Mercy was a proper refuge: ‘Could we please see your place? Then we can decide.’ Mrs. Angelotti looked at him and shook her head as if she could not believe his innocence: ‘Doctor, not many couples are brave enough to run a hospice, so it’s leave him here or lug him back to some foul hole in the wall. You haven’t a lot of opt
ions, you know.’
Acknowledging his naïveté, Andy smiled: ‘OK. But please let us look around anyway.’ They entered one of the institutions that had grown up in response to the AIDS crisis. It was clean. It had a communal dining room with flowers. It had a reading area, with a corner for card games, and other indications of responsible management, but the young men they saw there were so cadaverous that any visitor did not have to be told that the place was a refuge for those who had been rejected by society, their friends and their families and were waiting to die.
While still on the ground floor, they met Mr. Angelotti in the kitchen preparing lunch, and as they approached he explained: ‘I was a cook in the navy. It comes natural; my father was a top-flight short-order cook at an all-night restaurant on the bay.’ He told them that he conceived the idea of turning his house into a hospice when he read that young men with AIDS were being turned away from hospitals and rooming houses, so, after consulting with a Dr. Leitonen, for whom he seemed to have great regard—‘a doctor with a heart’—he and his wife satisfied themselves that they would not contract the dread disease solely by touch, and he quietly let it be known through Dr. Leitonen that he and his wife would accept AIDS patients in their final stages of decline.
‘We’ve cared for more than forty,’ he said, ‘and only one has gone away alive. When his parents wouldn’t have nothing to do with him he came here to die, but an uncle heard about it and came here to take him into his home—the uncle’s, I mean. He died there.’
‘All your patients died?’ Zorn asked, and Mr. Angelotti said: ‘That’s what it is. The disease where you always die. Everyone you’ll see here is on his way to death, fast express. Sometimes Rosa cries all night, when two or three she’s come to love die all at once.’
‘Who pays for this?’ Zorn asked.
‘What they call a consortium of churches, Catholic, Jewish, Baptist, you name it, they give us funds for food, water and electricity.’ So the old woman at the hellhole had misinformed Zorn. But he could understand why she had assumed that a place like this would be expensive.
Mr. Angelotti continued: ‘The house we give. But they also pay for two part-time nurses who help us.’
‘You get no salary?’
‘No. We have savings. Rosa never wasted money.’
‘If we decide to leave our young man with you, we’d pay.’
‘Some relatives do, when they find out where their boy is. And we’re grateful.’
When they went upstairs they forgot the almost cheerful atmosphere of the reception area below, for now they saw how once-big rooms had been partitioned to make two or even three very small cubicles, each with its metal cot with wire springs, a thin mattress, one wafer-thin blanket and a beat-up pillow that invariably looked as if the occupant of the cot had wrestled with it in his sleeplessness. And on the cots in some of these cubicles, in various stages of exhaustion, men so withered and enfeebled that they seemed already dead. Certainly they did not react to Zorn’s presence, for they knew that death was near and that conversation or other participation in social intercourse was meaningless.
In two of the cubicles the dying men were attended by professional nurses; they were massaging atrophied muscles or bathing hideous bedsores. But even those men who received what little assistance was available in their final days seemed not to be aware that they were being helped. This was a place where death waited outside every door, and little that was done on the frail cots delayed his entrance.
The sight of the cramped cubicles with their doomed occupants affected Zorn so profoundly that he cried: ‘Is this the best you can do for men who are dying?’ Mrs. Angelotti said quietly: ‘It’s so much better than what we found when we started,’ and Zorn apologized: ‘I’m sorry I said that. Mrs. Angelotti, you really are an angel of mercy. But if we bring Jaqmeel here, could he have a bigger room? We’d pay double.’
‘It could probably be arranged. But you understand, while he’s still able to move about he’d spend most of his time with the others downstairs. And when that is no longer possible, one of the cubicles would be big enough.’ She touched his arm: ‘You see, Doctor, men like this never have visitors. No need for extra chairs.’
‘We’ll go down and fetch him,’ Zorn said, and with the help of Mr. Angelotti they carried Jaqmeel up to the second floor, where the two nurses took over. After examining him they assured Zorn and Nora quietly: ‘He’s not in his last stages. Some good food, exercise, meeting with the others will help. And when it’s time he can die with dignity.’ As Nora and Zorn departed, Jaqmeel said in a very weak voice: ‘I know where I am, and I’m glad to be here. It doesn’t smell.’
In the room downstairs that served as a kind of office, Zorn gave the Angelottis a hundred and fifty dollars for Jaqmeel’s first week and embraced each of them in turn: ‘You are truly Good Samaritans,’ then he cleared his throat and said: ‘Now, where can I find a doctor who will care for him?’
‘Most doctors won’t come near this place,’ Mrs. Angelotti said, ‘but there is the one we mentioned to you, a living saint, who does come here and performs wonders for our men.’
‘Where can I find this doctor you mentioned?’ Zorn asked, and she wrote out an address: ‘Not far from here.’ When Zorn telephoned the doctor’s office, he found he was not in, but would be later that afternoon. He asked for an appointment, and in this roundabout way Andy Zorn was projected into the heart of the AIDS crisis.
The euphoria that had marked the tertulia’s aviation project vanished when a truck delivered a large package to the Palms addressed to Raúl Jiménez, who had assumed responsibility for ordering the engine for their airplane. It had been sent down from the Lycoming people in Pennsylvania and was professionally packed with sachets of a silica gel to absorb moisture that would rust the delicate parts of the engine. When the package was solemnly opened in the presence of the five who were building the plane and the engine reflected sunlight from its polished surfaces, the men did not, as one might have expected, react joyfully and revel in their new acquisition.
Instead they looked at it soberly, for they realized that its arrival had altered everything. They were no longer playing at little boys’ games. Now, in the real world and within a measurable time, they would be forced to bolt that engine into their homemade contraption, rev it over, apply the gas and fly the bundle into the air, with the channel to the west and the Gulf of Mexico beyond.
‘Ideal engine for a small plane like ours,’ President Armitage said professionally. ‘Amazing how light they can make it and still turn out the power.’
Lewandowski was satisfied with the specifications provided in the handbook: ‘It can produce twice the power we’ll ever need,’ and he visually checked the various components, giving it as his practiced opinion that it was a superior engine.
Senator Raborn said it was durable: ‘That little monster can take a lot of punishment. Gives you a feeling of confidence. Worth the money, too.’
That night, when the tertulia assembled in their corner, the conversation did not focus on some arcane topic. Ambassador St. Près cut right to the subject that was on all their minds, approaching it in his customary urbane way: ‘I’ve been wondering if any of us have been having second thoughts about our grand adventure.’
‘Heavens, no!’ Armitage said quickly, but the more cautious Jiménez asked: ‘What did you mean, Richard—lack of nerve?’
‘No, no! Just that we represent, whether we like it or not, the entire establishment of the Palms, and a failure on our part, a disaster if you will, might have regrettable consequences. I was simply wondering if we were prepared to take that risk, not to ourselves but to our larger community.’
Raborn said bluntly: ‘Richard, if you’re hesitant about taking the first flight, you should know that I had my license reactivated two weeks ago. Just in case something like this came up. The doctor said I had the heart functions of a man of fifty and the reaction times of a thirty-year-old—and that was without weari
ng my glasses. So I’m the backup pilot and I say we go.’
So did the others, but without the bravado they had shown at the beginning when actual flight was still far in the future. When Lewandowski came over to join the table he brought with him a touch of even more reality. As a cautious scientist he said: ‘We should test-run the engine right away. Bolt it down to heavy boards, pile it up, fill her partway with gas, and check how she performs.’
‘We won’t be fitting it in the plane for weeks,’ Armitage pointed out, but the old research expert said: ‘More’s the reason to check it now. We can send back for another if things should go wrong.’ He made plans with Raborn to run the tests in the morning. The others agreed that it was a prudent move.
As they were finishing the meal the ambassador said, slowly and gravely: ‘Gentlemen …’ He had never used that opening before with his tertulia. ‘On the eve of any major battle action—and our airplane project is just such a major undertaking—sensible soldiers and sailors have somber thoughts. I remember in World War Two on the eve of one of the great naval battles in Leyte Gulf, I was serving as junior officer of the bridge with Admiral Olendorf and he had cleverly deduced where a major part of the Japanese fleet was at midnight and where they would be at dawn, and he believed he had a chance to execute one of the supreme maneuvers of naval strategy, to Cross the Enemy’s T.’
‘What does that mean?’ Jiménez asked.
‘The American warships calculate when the Japanese ships will be coming out of the strait. The enemy is the long downward leg of the T, we’re the crossbar at the top. Do you see what happens? As each enemy ship comes out of the leg, he faces our entire line of heavy warships cutting across his path. He can fire his big guns at one of our ships, whichever he elects, but we have nine massive ships that can bring their fire on him. And when he sinks, as he must under that bombardment, the next Japanese ship staggers forward, fires its guns at one of our ships, and again, nine of ours blow him out of the water.