Flying Finish
Originally published in The New York Times Magazine, July 1995
Here we are, in this car, at this moment, at this place we hoped never to be. I don’t know which of us seems more lost and defeated. His seat belt buckled, Steve stares out the window. I think to myself wearily, we haven’t even gotten home yet and we’ve already moved to a new place. We are itinerants, our old lives wiped out, the future stretching no more than a few miles. We have new identities, new language, new names. He is planning for the next stop. I am in charge of driving.
I cannot help retracing our steps, frantically searching for something of intense personal value, lost within a space of a few minutes, a few city blocks. We walked from the parking garage, through the heavy office doors and into the waiting room, where we stopped for a moment. A nurse brought us into a tiny, overheated room, and we waited anxiously, as if stuck in a broken-down elevator, for the door to open.
We had led our lives this way for four years: on a grim treasure hunt across his body, following the natural history of HIV disease, with one clue leading to another. From AZT to ddC to 3TC. T-cell count to T-cell count. From the symptom-free period to early signs of immune-system breakdown. All the while, treading in the safety zone of the not-yet-sick and dodging an actual AIDS diagnosis. Now, the hunt was over. We knew time was probably up.
The doctor appeared and began leafing through Steve’s file nonchalantly, as if she were looking for a telephone number. He peeked over her shoulder. “So, am I in the land of AIDS?” He said it playfully, covering for fear, as if he were guessing at a riddle.
With a childlike sense of denial that seemed rational at the time, I furiously prayed to my dead friend Carol to stop time and magically raise the T-cell numbers. My daydream was interrupted by the doctor. She was speaking very, very slowly. “You…are…in the land…of AIDS….”
