(Originally published in the NY Times)

I used to think that the only thing worse than having insomnia is having insomnia next to someone who falls fast asleep and stays soundlessly so till morning.

That was my life for 16 years. I lived with a man who slept, yes, like a baby. There were nights, many nights, when I literally wanted to steal his sleep — slip beneath his eyelids and yank it out of him; a kind of middle-of-the-night “Chien Andalou” moment, minus the surrealism. Instead, I spent the equivalent of at least a tenth of our relationship lying awake or reading in bed. In the end, that I happened to be deep asleep when he first went into cardiac arrest next to me now seems beyond irony. If I had not taken half a sleeping pill that night four years ago, might I have been awake and saved him?

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(A piece from almost 20 years ago:  Originally published in The New York Times Magazine – July 1996)

I would steal an hour of Steve’s sleep if I could. I would slip beneath his eyelids and yank it right out of him. He would feel nothing. Nor would I — neither remorse nor shame. One hour of perfect unconsciousness: one clean, soundless dive, deeper and deeper, as far as my lungs would take me. I would come up for air before he woke. Instead, I lie motionless, sewn to the sheets by the smallest demons, watching his silhouette against the bedroom blinds. Fondness becomes hostility. How does he do this for eight hours? I listen to his tranquil breathing, furious that he sleeps while I cannot.

Finally, at 3 A.M., I snip the threads, discard my carcass at bedside and leave it behind in disgust. Time for the insomniac to make his rounds. I creep into the next room, where I feel a thrilling freedom from my own body. I am naked, but not cold; neither thirsty nor hungry; I can smell nothing. My eyesight is shot; I cannot face the TV, work or read. The plug is out of the socket, the circadian clock stopped, and I roam the apartment of my own power, on my own theory of time, occupying a fragile space between dreaming and functioning.

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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….”

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