Hector remained unfazed by each new cycle of medication. I would lie in the darkened bedroom, counting to a thousand and promising myself that when I reached that number the migraine would disappear, while through the door I heard the television set and Hector’s quiet laughter. He was unaffected by the nausea that plagued me. When I knelt before the toilet’s open mouth, the ceramic bowl splattered with orange vomit, Hector would wipe my lips with a wet towel and squeeze the back of my neck. I would spit in the bowl and look up at him, at Hector as beautiful as ever, at Hector watching himself nurse me in the bathroom mirror.
A strange thing happened. Every three months we had our viral load checked, and despite the adverse reactions I began responding to the therapy. My count shrank to five thousand and hovered in that vicinity. The virus wasn’t going anywhere for a while, but it wasn’t able to replicate either. My body and the disease were engaged in a stalemate. But Hector’s count increased, from eighteen thousand to twenty-four, twenty-four to forty, forty to fifty-two, fifty-two to fifty-four, fifty-four to ninety. He was still dancing, his body remained muscular and lithe, but the monsters were breeding.
Eighteen months after I moved in, on a bright June Sunday, he called for me. I ran into the bathroom, saw him standing before the mirror, his mouth open. His tongue was coated with a milky film. Thrush.
I called Kislyany at his home in Westchester. I could hear the screams of young children in the background, and the whine of a blender, and below everything Bach’s great fugue for organ. I told him what had happened.
“All right,” he said, and I thought, Please don’t use that phrase, Doctor. “It’s been heading this way for a while. How are you feeling?”
“Me? Listen, should I bring him into the hospital?”
“How’s his breathing?”
“His breathing’s okay. Is this—Does thrush mean for sure?”
“Put that down, Julia,” he said. “Thank you, sweetheart. Sorry, Alexander. Say again?”
“Does thrush mean for sure?”
He sighed into the telephone and I could picture him removing his wire-frame glasses, rubbing his tired eyes with the back of his hand. “I could tell you nothing’s certain until we do tests. But yes, it’s for sure. He has AIDS. Bring him into the hospital tomorrow morning, we’ll give him some antifungal for the thrush. It clears up quickly.”
“Tomorrow morning?”
“Unless you want to go to the emergency room. Come in tomorrow, we’ll X-ray his chest, see if anything’s in there.”
The next morning rubber-gloved, face-masked doctors and nurses subjected Hector to a battery of tests. A serpentine tube, a bronchoscope, was twisted down into his wind-pipe, where it scraped a small tissue sample for microscopic examination. They laid him down naked on a steel mechanized table and covered his groin with a lead pad, then X-rayed various parts of his body. Three different nurses jabbed three different needles into his arm for three different blood tests.
Afterward we sat next to each other in Kislyany’s office. I tried to hold Hector’s hand but he wouldn’t let me; he stared out the window at the buildings across the way.
“You have to stay here tonight, Hector,” Kislyany said. “You’ll have to stay for a while. You’ve got pneumonia.”
Hector slowly turned his head to look at the doctor. “Pneumonia?”
“Parasitic pneumonia. Pneumocystis carinii. We’ll get you on pentamidine for that, but I need to keep you here. It’s—It boggles the mind that you’re able to move around so well. Most cases the patient can’t walk across a room without help. That’s a good sign. Here’s a bad sign: Your T-four lymphocytes are at one-twenty. That’s low; that’s getting way too low. We’re going to switch over to a new series of meds—”
“Who’s we? You and me?”
“No—”
“Alexander and me?”
“Figure of speech,” said Kislyany. “Alexander’s pills are working; he’ll stick with those. For you it’s antibiotics for the pneumonia, antifungals for the thrush, whole new regimen. I’ve got a room reserved for you on the eighth floor, nice room, sunlight.”
Hector fought off the pneumonia in three days, to Kislyany’s astonishment. The hospital released him and Hector returned to his rehearsals, weakened but eager to dance. He slowly gained his strength back. In August he was reinstated as danseur, a noble but doomed gesture on the company’s part. A few weeks after that, limbering up at the studio, Hector’s heel slipped off the barre and he crashed to his back. Three ballerinas came to our apartment that night; they teased Hector for his clumsiness and we all laughed, but I saw that the ballerinas were frightened. Hector never fell.
The following Monday I came home with a bag of groceries and found Hector sitting at the kitchen table, staring at his hands.
“Rehearsal canceled?” I asked him, putting the milk in the refrigerator.
“I’m taking a leave,” he said, his eyes dry and dark and unknowable.
It made no sense to me that Hector’s body was quitting, that my own kept battling and holding its own. It seemed stupid to me. It seemed criminal.
Things got worse. I would find him standing in the living room and ask him what he was looking for. He would stare at me blankly and then blink, half-smile, and shrug. Once, while I was painting in the guest bedroom, I heard a thud from the bathroom. I ran in there and found him kneeling naked in the shower, the water beating down on him, a red bruise already darkening his forehead.
“What happened? Are you okay?”
He picked a tangle of my hair out of the drain and held it up to me. “You’re going bald, Alexander,” he told me sadly.
When he watched the television sitcoms he no longer laughed; he stared at the TV as if he were waiting for someone to step through the glass. When I turned the power off he did not seem to notice; he’d continue to gaze at the empty screen for minutes.
I woke up on a rainy October morning to a strange moaning; turning over in bed I saw Hector lying facedown, his right arm twitching. I thought he was having a nightmare and poked him in the side. He did not wake up. I rolled him onto his back and saw that his eyes were open, twin trails of drool leaked from the corners of his mouth.
I called for an ambulance and the paramedics came, lifted him off the bed, strapped him into a stretcher, and drove us to the hospital. Dr. Kislyany met me in the waiting room, a manila folder in his hand, a pencil behind his ear. He led me to his office and closed the door.
“It’s bad, Alexander.” He pulled a sheaf of transparencies from the folder. “He has lymphoma of the brain. We ran a few CAT scans.”
I looked down at the black-and-white images of Hector’s brain. Kislyany indicated a white blur with the eraser of his pencil. “See that mass?” He indicated another one. “That one? They’re all over. Lesions.” He exhaled loudly and tapped his desktop with the pencil.
“What do we do?” I asked. The pencil-taps sounded loud as bombs.
“We’ll start radiation treatment tomorrow. I’ve reserved the same room for him, the one on the eighth floor. Listen, Alexander, how are you feeling?”
I did not understand what he wanted.
“Your viral count was very low last time,” he said, nodding approvingly. “Under four thousand. We’re headed in the right direction.”
The next day hospital technicians began blasting Hector’s head with X-rays. As the weeks went by his body started to wither, the muscle melting from his bones, the bones surging against his skin, the skin sagging and fading until it seemed no more than cheap paper hastily wrapped around last-minute gifts.
For two weeks in November he seemed to improve. He would lie awake for a few hours at a time, and nod at me as I spoon-fed him custard and applesauce, and half-smile as I wiped his lips clean.
On one of those occasions he asked me to bring his portrait into the hospital.
“I never finished it,” I told him. “It never looked as good as you.”
“Bring it,” he said. “
I want to see it.”
The next day I brought him the painting, the frame sandwiched between two sheets of corrugated cardboard. I had painted Hector nude and didn’t want people on the street, in the subway, to stare at his unclothed image. Hector nodded when I showed him the painting, and directed me to rest it on the windowsill.
“You want everyone to see it?” I asked, looking at the painting. The muscular, healthy Hector stared back at me. But that was a stupid question. I placed the painting on the windowsill and stepped back.
“No,” he said, closing his eyes. “I don’t like the frame. Not black. Get something in wood, a pale wood.”
Later in the week, when the painting was newly framed, he nodded. “That’s nice. I look good.”
“You do,” I told him. “You look good.”
“What’s not finished?”
“Your feet,” I said. I pointed at his painted legs that ended at the ankles. In the painting Hector floated, nothing but space between the butcher shop’s concrete floor and where he began.
Hector smiled and closed his eyes. “Feet are hard.”
On New Year’s Eve I smuggled a bottle of champagne into Hector’s eighth-floor room. He had lost consciousness a week before. I filled plastic cups for both of us, sat beside him and watched the television, watched the ball drop, watched thousands of small bulbs light the giant number 1994, watched fireworks explode on the small screen. A nurse came into the room to check his breathing and pulse; she wagged her finger at me but then accepted a drink. She stayed with us for ten minutes and joined me in a chorus of “Auld Lang Syne.”
“Happy New Year,” she said as she was leaving the room. “I’ll be back in two hours.”
When she left I pulled my chair close to Hector’s bed and leaned forward to kiss his forehead. His skin was hot and damp. I was used to that; the fever had come and gone for months. His body was collapsing upon itself. If I placed my palm against his chest-bone and pushed, he would crumble like ash. His yellow face rested on a white pillowcase, his lips dry and blue, partly open. A patchy stretch of beard grew along his jaw. His lower lip bulged like a ballplayer’s with a wad of chewing tobacco; I pulled the lip from his teeth and saw the wine-grapes of Kaposi’s sarcoma jutting from his gums.
I stood wearily from the bed and walked into the bathroom, turned on the hot water, and waited until it steamed from the faucet. I wet a hand towel, lathered it with liquid soap, returned to Hector, and daubed his face gently with the cotton cloth. I drew the tortoiseshell handle from my pocket and opened the blade. While fireworks continued to flare on the television, I shaved the coarse whiskers from Hector’s face. After I was done, after I had sponged off the soapy residue and patted his face dry with a clean towel, I stood above him with the razor open in my hand. I thought how easy it would be to cut his throat, how good it would be for him, something in the way of mercy. But I could never do it; I could never raise my hand against Hector, not even for mercy.
That night I understood the old story for the first time, that the wooden horse is Love, allowed through the gates against all warnings, bearing its cargo of killers, men with long knives who crawl from the dark belly and burn the city down.
One week later he was dead and buried with the winter dead.
The new antiviral therapy, of course, was hailed as a great success. Beaming doctors graced the covers of magazines, test tubes in hand, beneath jubilant banners: Hope for the Hopeless, The Virus Hunters, Man of the Year, A Cure at Last? I read story after story lauding the scientists’ ingenuity, their exhaustive research and testing, how they sprang back from each defeat to renew the attack.
I looked at diagrams of the drugs’ molecular composition; I read the dates of FDA approval. I scanned charts that listed percentile scores for the drugs: their efficacy in lowering the viral count or raising the T4 count, their rates of specific toxicities. The numbers were ordered in two parallel columns, statistics for people given the drugs lined up against statistics for people given placebos. I read that nevirapine caused nausea in forty-seven percent of the patients, against three percent for the placebo group. Breathing hard, I read two years of drug-induced symptoms in a single row of italics, side-effects I had suffered and many more I had escaped: kidney stones, bilirubin, abdominal pain, fatigue, flank pain, diarrhea, vomiting, acid regurgitation, loss of appetite, dry mouth, back pain, headache, insomnia, dizziness, taste changes, rash, respiratory infection, anemia, peripheral neuropathy, hepatoxicity, pancreatitis, ulcers, dry skin, sore throat, fever, indigestion, muscle pain, anxiety, depression, itching, painful irritation, gallbladder inflammation, cirrhosis of the liver. I believed I could hear a rhyme-scheme in the procession of words, a rhythm, and I thought: These words mean nothing to whoever typed them, they are mere collections of letters, unburdened of pain. I thought: These are the miseries of the lucky, of the survivors. I read the percentiles for the placebo-users: two percent, two percent, zero percent, one percent—and something made sense. I dropped the journal to the floor and shut my eyes.
The next morning I banged on Kislyany’s office door. A nurse, carrying a clipboard in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, walked by and smiled.
“How you feeling, Alexander?”
I banged on the door again and Kislyany opened it. Two young men sat by his desk, one black, one white, their heads bowed together, speaking in low, urgent tones. They held contracts in their hands.
“Alexander,” said Kislyany. “What’s the matter? Are you feeling all right?”
He was one of the heroes of the great medical victory, and success had treated him well. He leaned against the door frame, handsome and urbane, one hand in the pocket of his gray wool cardigan. His initial expression was of warmth and concern. The look on my face changed his mind; he raised his palms to me before I said a word.
“You let him die,” I said. “You knew what was happening and you let him die.”
I didn’t think I was speaking loudly, but the two young men turned to stare at me. Kislyany stepped out of his office and nodded to them.
“Give me a minute, gentlemen.” He closed the door behind him.
“He never got real pills, did he?”
“Why don’t we take a walk, Alexander.” Kislyany tried to rest his hand on my elbow but I pushed it off. “Alexander—”
“Did he?”
“No. He was part of the control group.” Kislyany saw the way my face twisted and he quickly added, “This is the way medical research works. It has to be this way.”
“You let him die. You were his doctor for his two years and you gave him nothing but sugar pills. You let him die.”
He grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me close, his eyes narrow and angry. “You think I work this hard because I want people to die? Listen to me. We didn’t know if the pills would work when we started. Nobody knew. This is brand-new research; for all we knew the pills would kill more people than the virus. Okay? It has to be done this way. The drugs have to be tested. There always has to be a control group.”
The phrase control group hung there in the fluorescent light, cold, precise, and merciless.
“But why did he have to be in it? He would still be here, Doctor. Why did you pick me? Who told you to pick me?”
He released my collar and shook his head. “I didn’t pick you. It’s all random. A computer selects the names randomly. It was just luck, Alexander.”
My legs felt boneless below me; I feared I would collapse onto the linoleum floor. I didn’t want to be weak now; I prayed for strength.
“He would’ve beaten it,” I said quietly. “If you gave him the drugs, he would’ve beaten it.”
“It was double-blind. He didn’t know, I didn’t know. That’s the way all tests are conducted. It’s the way it has to work. I’m not the bad guy, Alexander. I know you want a bad guy, but there is none. Not me, not the FDA, nobody. This is my life, this is it, trying to find a cure for this goddamn disease. Two years ago we didn’t know if the pill
s worked. Now we know. Those men in there,” he said, nodding toward the closed door, “they have a chance to live long lives.”
I rested my face against the beige wall, my cheek flush with the cold paint. I could hear the gurgle of water running through pipes, and hammering from somewhere below us; I imagined I could feel the flow of electricity running through copper wires.
“I don’t want a bad guy, Doctor. I want Hector.”
He nodded. “I’m sorry, Alexander. I saw him dance once. Sleeping Beauty. I know nothing about ballet but—” He shrugged and smiled. “He had the whole audience in the palm of his hand. Listen, we’ve probably got these two guys in here panicked. Let me finish up with them and we’ll go get something to eat.” He gripped my arm for a moment and then reached for the doorknob.
“Doctor,” I said, and he paused there, waiting. “You knew. You knew my pills were working, you knew for a long time. Don’t say anything for a second, okay? Please, don’t say anything. When you saw what was happening, you could have given him the real drugs. Maybe it would have been too late, I don’t know. But you could have tried. Hector could have—”
Kislyany’s face closed down on me. He entered his office and shut the door behind him. In that moment, while the door was still partway open, I saw the two young lovers sitting a few feet apart, holding hands across the gap. One of them looked right at me, his eyes fearful and curious. The other stared out the window.
5
The stewardess returns with the co-pilot, a broad-jawed man, his sleeves rolled to the elbows. He scowls as he comes close and waves at the air with his hand.
“How long has he been sitting like this?” he asks the stewardess, his voice low but angry.
“Maybe fifteen minutes. I think he’s sick, Jimmy.”
“You think he’s sick? No kidding he’s sick.” The co-pilot bends toward me, until his face is inches from mine. “Look at me, buddy,” he whispers. He wrinkles his nose. “Look at me.”