After the meetings, Asher would tell Yale he ought to get together with someone in the group. After a brief fling with Ross, the redhead from Marina Towers—they’d mostly had dinners together because Ross, who got tested the first weekday of every third month, was terrified of anything more than kissing—Yale had been completely celibate. “That Jeremy, with the chin,” Asher said once, when they went for coffee after. “He’s got no baggage, he’s your age, he has amazing arms. I’m judging from the forearms, but I’m extrapolating. You’re both positive, he lives a block from you, and he’s financially independent. I’m not saying you move in together, I’m saying you exchange some bodily fluids and feel good about it.”
Bodily fluids were the last things Yale wanted to think about. He said, “What if there are different strains? Some people think you could get—”
“That’s the biggest bullshit. They want to police your sexuality, and then even once it’s too late, they want to police it some more. There’s no reason to stop getting laid. It’s just that your dating pool’s changed.”
Now, in the car, Yale wondered if Asher was inviting him to the DAGMAR meeting just to fix him up with someone there. He wanted to ask, and he wanted to ask if he should be offended or flattered that Asher was always so interested in his sex life, yet had never volunteered to participate in it. Not that Yale had ever propositioned him. Not that he could.
Asher said, “You owe me one favor in exchange for this ride. Either you come to the meeting or you visit Charlie.”
He took his eyes off of traffic long enough to look at Yale, and Yale’s face did involuntary things. He tried his best to smile casually. “Maybe I’ll get in touch with his mom.”
Asher said, “Does it really ever go anywhere?”
“Does what?”
“Love. Does it vanish?”
Yale looked at his own hand, resting on the dashboard to keep himself steady whenever Asher braked suddenly. “I mean, we never want it to. But it does, doesn’t it?”
Asher said, “I think that’s the saddest thing in the world, the failure of love. Not hatred, but the failure of love.”
* * *
—
He didn’t go see Charlie that night, although maybe that was the day he knew he would eventually. He didn’t see him for a year and a half, not until October of 1989, when Charlie, although it had nothing to do with that infected eyelid a year and a half earlier, had gone blind.
Teresa met him at the elevator. She’d aged a million years.
Yale had been to Masonic for a few tests, but he hadn’t been up to unit 371 since he’d visited Terrence that once, years ago. The acquaintances who’d landed here, like Charlie’s copy editor Dwight, hadn’t been close enough friends to visit.
The place looked worn in now, in a good way. Broadway posters hung on the walls, and the place was done up for Halloween. A man in a gown leaned on the nurses’ station chatting, his feet in fuzzy yellow slippers, his arms covered with lesions. There was a board with Polaroids of all the staff and volunteers, their names markered on the white strips. The biggest difference this time was that Yale knew that unless his insurance fell through and he ended up at County, he was looking at the unit where he himself would die. This would be his final home, and the faces of those two passing nurses would, in time, be the ones he was most familiar with in the world. He would know every detail of this linoleum, every light fixture.
He hugged Teresa and asked how things were. “They’ve moved him to a single,” she said, “and I don’t think it’s a good sign, do you? I just want to sleep. He’s—listen, he’s been under a lot of sedation lately, and they had to sedate him again this morning for his bronchoscopy, and he’s still quite out of it. I don’t know that he’ll know you’re here, necessarily. I should have called you back and said, but I was hoping he’d be recovered by now. The thing is, he’s not—even when he’s not sedated, he’s not fully here. I should have said.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”
Yale followed her, and as he first entered the room he squinched his eyes shut. He opened them, slowly, to a man who wasn’t Charlie. He wanted to tell Teresa she’d taken him to the wrong place, that this withered fetus on the bed was no one he knew. But Teresa was stroking this man’s scalp, and when the man’s mouth hung open, Yale saw Charlie’s teeth. He was an alien, an Auschwitz skeleton, a baby bird fallen from its nest. Yale’s mind kept reaching for metaphors, because the simple fact of it—that this was Charlie—was too much.
There wasn’t much room between the door and the bed, but Yale covered it as slowly as he could. He grasped the bedrail, looked at the cards taped to the walls.
Teresa was tired, and Yale told her he could stay, told her to go home and rest. She hugged him and left.
He didn’t know if he should talk. He could explain that he was here, check Charlie’s face for a reaction. But with the sedative still in effect, and with Charlie blind, Yale had a cushion of anonymity right now—one it would feel safe to stay in, at least for today.
Later, if Charlie was ever lucid, he could tell him everything he’d been wanting to. The good parts, at least. He could say, at least once, that he forgave him. And even if Charlie never fully woke up—well, he’d still say it. Maybe it would still count.
He sat on the chair by the bed.
The nurse came in, and she showed Yale a small pink sponge on the end of a stick, showed him how he could hold it to Charlie’s lips to give him water.
He did it for a while, and he ran his thumb over Charlie’s wrist, listening to the thrumming of the walls.
He fed him water, drop by drop.
He could feel it, all around him: how down the corridor, and down other hallways of other hospitals around Chicago and the other godforsaken cities of the globe, a thousand other men did the same.
2015
It made no sense. Or maybe it did. It had to. She was awake, and it was 2015, and here was a man, very much alive, whose eyes and gestures and voice were Julian’s.
Fiona sat on the studio’s cement floor, the back of her head against a cupboard. Julian was explaining to the rest of them what Fiona had stammered in the hallway. “What’s the line about rumors of my death? Richard, should I be insulted that you never talk about me?”
Serge found the whole thing hilarious, called Julian a zombie, laughed at the look on Fiona’s face. Cecily didn’t know Julian; she got Fiona a damp paper towel for her forehead.
Richard said, “Fiona, I only found him myself two years ago. We knew you didn’t know where he was. That was the surprise. But if I’d thought for an instant that you’d believed he was—listen, I’d never have sprung that on you.”