As if death summoned, p.1
As If Death Summoned, page 1
Table of Contents
Titlepage
Dedication
Author’s Note
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Postscript
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
Discussion Guide
About Amble Press
To the many unknown and unsung heroes of the AIDS epidemic, the brave men and women who accompanied the unknown and unsung hundreds of thousands on their final journeys, making those journeys a little more bearable and a little less lonely.
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
—Dylan Thomas
AUTHOR’S NOTE
On writing about the AIDS epidemic in a time of Covid-19.
This is a work of fiction. Still, works of fiction carry their own truth, truth that transcends “facts” and “dates” and “names” and can speak beyond a specific time or a particular people. And in this current moment, we are in need of all the truth we can get.
I find a peculiar symmetry that, just as I am bringing one defining epidemic of my life to a close with this book, another epidemic begins. There are similarities between them beyond both being caused by viruses— a retrovirus earlier, a coronavirus now. Once again, we have a president slow on the uptake, realizing too late that he has a national health crisis on his watch and displaying an almost callous lack of concern and leadership. In both epidemics, it has been doctors and public health officials who have had to provide that missing leadership, often requiring them to delicately skirt political obstacles, egos, and ignorance— though in the earlier epidemic they were aided (some would say, terrorized) by AIDS activists fighting for their lives. And once again there is no vaccine, no cure to help stop the spread of contagion. (Contrary to some uninformed sources, the CDC has not found hydroxychloroquine to be effective against the coronavirus. They also strongly advise against ingesting bleach.) It took thirteen years before protease inhibitors transformed AIDS from being a death sentence to a manageable chronic condition, thirty years before the approval of a pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) that can help reduce the risk of becoming infected. We expect the timeline to find a vaccine for Covid-19 will be much shorter.
But there are also significant differences between the two epidemics: This time it is not happening to “Those People,” but to all of us. This time our government swung into quick(er) action, its delay measured in months, not years.
Another big difference: This time people care. Resources and funding for research were readily made available. The media provides daily updates on numbers infected and numbers of those who died. Mayors, governors, the White House itself have given daily briefings. Also a major difference, this time we know what we are dealing with and began to marshal a nationwide response, however clumsy and uncoordinated, to combat it. For much of the first two years of the AIDS epidemic, it was a mystery why gay men were getting sick and dying.
Many of the emotions amid this current epidemic are familiar: anxiety, fear, grief at the loss of loved ones, “anticipatory grief” of yet more losses to come. But there is no shame, no stigma in getting Covid-19— unless you were among those who loudly decried it as a political hoax. That could be a bit embarrassing.
Today, once again it is the poor and communities of color who are disproportionately affected by this epidemic due to limited, little or no health coverage, and an ongoing legacy of racial inequality. As in earlier epidemics, there are always “those people” who are not us. Until they are.
There were benefits and lessons learned from the AIDS epidemic, gained at a terrible cost: medical advances, advances in public health policy and strategies for tracking and combating an epidemic. Also, societal advances in the decriminalizing and de-perverting of gay people in the public’s mind. What gay activists had been asking their queer brothers and sisters to do for decades— coming out to families and friends, to coworkers and fellow church members— was finally accomplished, often by a terrible necessity. (“Mom, Dad, I’m gay . . . I’m also dying.”) The AIDS epidemic became the occasion for young gay men in San Francisco, in Los Angeles and New York City, to “come out” to their families back in Iowa, in Vermont, in Louisiana and Wyoming. As a friend once said, “It’s a helluva way to come out of the closet.” People across the country began to discover that “those people” were their own sons, and brothers, and nephews and uncles, that “They” were us. “They” always had been.
What will we gain this time? I wonder. What benefits and lessons will we learn? It’s too early to yet grasp the full impact of this epidemic on our lives, but we already suspect it will be profound, wide-reaching, deep and lasting. Many of us realize we will never be returning to “Normal.” And maybe that’s okay. We can do better.
At the very most, we can hope that our global community— humanity— will emerge from this viral crucible stronger, wiser, more compassionate, guided by the better angels of our nature. History tells us that some will; and it tells us some won’t, not until a vaccine is finally developed and deployed against our human ignorance, our bigotry and prejudices. And even then, there will always be the anti-vaxxers.
At the very least, we may come out of this current pandemic with a better understanding of who we are as a people, and as individual persons, so that when we, too, are finally “summoned,” we may depart with more wisdom, greater self-awareness, and perhaps not so much strangers to ourselves.
Alan Rose
Lewis River Valley
Washington State
June 2020
There once was a Chinese philosopher who dreamt he was a butterfly.
The dream was so real that he wondered whether it had been a dream.
Or was he a butterfly, now dreaming he was a Chinese philosopher?
Prologue
In the Victorian Alps, some 150 miles north of Melbourne, there lies a vast plateau at six thousand feet called the Bogong High Plains. Part of the Great Dividing Range of Australia, it stands isolated and austere, composed of rock and heath and grasslands. The region was once sacred to the Yiatmathong people. They would climb its higher elevations to escape the antipodean summers’ heat and there listen to their ancestors’ songs carried on the winds. The Europeans who followed were more accustomed to the sacred being enclosed within a building, and with their arrival the aboriginal people were soon decimated, their ancestors’ songs lost, and the land, once sacred, became grazing ranges for the White Fellas’ sheep and cattle.
In 1936, three men— Mick Hull, Howard Michell and Cleve Cole— attempted the first winter crossing of the high plains. Overtaken by a blizzard, they became lost and wandered for five days in sub-freezing temperatures. Hull and Michell survived the ordeal, but Cole died from exposure. Two years later, a hut was constructed in his memory as shelter for others caught in the area’s changeable weather. In the decades since, there have been reports of a lone figure seen wandering over the heathlands. When approached, he vanishes and no trace of him can be found.
I am haunted by dreams of the Bogong High Plains.
Chapter One
Déjà Vu, All Over Again
[10:00 p.m., Friday, February 24, 1995,
Providence Hospital, Portland, Oregon]
I’ve been here before: Walking down the corridor of some hospital, bracing myself for what I know is coming, pacing myself for what I know will be required. At the nurses’ station, they direct me to the second-floor waiting room where I find Sandy, arms crossed as if holding herself together. She stares out the window at the city’s night lights, sees my reflection in the glass, and turns, her face tight with anxiety.
“How is he?” I ask.
Eyes red, she shakes her head— “Not good”— then puts a hand to h er face, and her shoulders begin shaking. I reach out and we fold into an embrace. She sobs once. Be strong. Be strong, I want to tell her. I need you to be strong.
We hold each other like that until she pulls away, removing a handkerchief from her jeans. “Let’s sit down,” I say. It’s almost ten, and we’re by ourselves. I’m grateful for this at least. I don’t feel like sharing a room with other grief-shattered people this night.
“How was the conference?” she asks, wiping her eyes.
“Fine. It was fine. Thanks for getting word to me. I was able to catch an early flight out of Dulles. How long have you been here?”
She looks exhausted as she checks her watch. “Since four. I came in with him.”
“What do the doctors say?”
“Not much. They’ve managed to stabilize him . . . they think. They say now it’s wait and see. Probably won’t know until morning. And even if he does . . .” Her voice trails off.
“Right. So, what happened?”
She fills me in; talking seems to relieve her, so I listen, thinking of the one in the ICU with drips and tubes sprawling from him like some high-tech marionette. It all came as a surprise, but then, not really.
When she finishes, I say, “You look beat. Why don’t you go home. I’ll stay.”
“I don’t know. I should be here in case . . .”
“I’ll call if there’s any change. I promise. There’s nothing you can do now. And I’m sure Fernando must be worried about you. You know how caring and considerate cats are.”
She looks up and I’m grateful to see her cracked smile. “Like you care about Fernando.”
“But I do. I do.” Fernando and I had taken an immediate and mutual dislike to each other upon our first meeting, and our relationship only deteriorated from there. “Go home,” I urge. “You need to get out of here.” I’m glad she doesn’t resist.
“Call me if— ”
“I’ll call. I promise.”
And soon I have the room to myself. Just me and a few dozen ghosts. Sliding into a chair, I swear under my breath, “Damn, damn, damn . . .” I had promised myself when I returned from Australia I wouldn’t go through this ever again: Never again keep a midnight vigil in some hospital, awaiting the inevitable. There had been too many. I had promised myself. Never again.
And here I was.
By my own diagnosis, I’m borderline burnt out. And I should know. I’m a mental health professional. Fortunately, one’s own mental health is not a prerequisite for the job. It’s been a year since I returned to the States, exhausted and drained of life. Aside from brief visits, I had been away for twelve years, first living in Japan, then Australia. Mom was happy to have me home, the Prodigal Son returned. That first night back I would have preferred just going to bed and sleeping for the next month, but she had killed the fatted calf and made a huge dinner of it, invited Sis and her homophobic husband, and chattered happily, managing to forget the circumstances that had brought me back.
We sat around the dining room table, I with no appetite, force-feeding myself to be polite, catching up on all the news. Family news. News of people I went to school with. News of people at church. Mom was a fount of unwanted information. Silently I listened as she went on and on.
“Oh, and did I write that Carol’s been diagnosed with breast cancer?”
Carol was my age. We had dated during high school, back in those early, preconscious days.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.” More information I didn’t need right then.
“Yes,” she sighed, adjusting her bubbly mood to the weight of the news. “It’s serious I’m afraid. But that’s a part of life. Eventually, you reach that age where your friends start getting sick and dying.”
My sister and her husband were stunned at Mom’s comment. Even Dad caught it.
I said, “Mom, my friends have been getting sick and dying for the last ten years.”
Thirty-one by last count, as my plane lifted off from Melbourne. It was the thirty-first death that was bringing me home. She started to speak, then, realizing what she’d said, nodded and resumed eating.
And yet, in spite of my exhaustion, in spite of my burnout, in spite of my resolutions on that long flight back to the US, within a month I was sitting in a ventricle of the heart of the epidemic, volunteering for more action.
Dad expressed concern about this. We’d been outside in the yard on a late winter’s day, pruning his trees and preparing his garden for spring’s return. Some people are easy to be with when grieving, people you can be comfortably silent with. Dad is one of them. Clipping dead branches, he asked, “Are you sure about this?” He meant volunteering. Hadn’t I had enough of this AIDS? Maybe it was time for me to get on with my life. To realize there was more to life than death.
I turned the soil for his garden bed. “No. I’m not sure. But I’m not sure I have a choice.” To his bemused look, I said, “I remember you telling me how the day after Pearl Harbor, you and your brothers went down to the Army office and signed up.”
After serving his three years, he had the chance to return to being a civilian again, to marry and get on with his life. And he signed up for yet another tour of duty. Why? I once asked. He’d hated the military, hated the regimentation, the fighting, the food. But there was a war on, you see, and the war dominated those years, shaping his generation, infusing every aspect of their lives, and overriding any personal plans. He could not not be part of it.
“That’s kind of the way it is with me now,” I told him. “This epidemic is my war.” He nodded, saying nothing further, and we returned to our work.
War was the right analogy, and I knew I was suffering battle fatigue even when I showed up to volunteer at Columbia AIDS Project, or “CAP” for short. Originally, for a brief time, it had been called Columbia River AIDS Project, until someone noted the regrettable acronym. Fortunately, those were the early days, before they could afford letterhead.
There are people you instinctively know do not appreciate humor. I knew this instinctively about Charles Philpott, CAP’s volunteer coordinator. We were about serious matters here. About life and death, where there is no room for humor. Levity is to be discouraged lest people misunderstand how terribly serious we are here.
Charles was prim, proper, somewhat prissy, and very, very neat. His cubicle screamed Obsessive-Compulsive. Papers stacked neatly. Books and binders arranged neatly by size. Everything neatly in order, not one renegade paper clip out of place. I sat in his cubicle, hesitant to move for fear of disturbing the artificial order of things. He was polite, with that air of social politeness usually reserved for church, as if his tone had been selected like his tie that morning. One could almost see his mental checklist:
Establish rapport with prospective volunteer (Check).
Express appreciation for candidate’s willingness to volunteer (Check).
Evince— I’m sure the word for Charles would be “evince”— a personal interest in said candidate (Check).
That done, he opened a desk drawer labeled New Applications, removed a file, and handed me a number of forms. “You’ll need to complete and return these to me as the first step in becoming a volunteer.”
He walked me through the forms I should take away, “study,” sign and return. There was the basic four-page volunteer application, a two-page medical history, a twelve-page personality profile, confidentiality statement, list of all the volunteer positions available at the agency, release form requesting a police background check— it hadn’t been this difficult to gain Australian citizenship.
I shuffled through the papers as he kept talking.
“Then there will be several trainings our volunteers take prior to working with our clients.” Our volunteers. Our clients. It all sounded terribly possessive. There would be a three-hour orientation to the agency, its mission, its services, policies and procedures; a required two-hour diversity training workshop; and then program-specific trainings on blood-borne pathogens, HIV 101, home care, self-care, homophobia . . .
“I just hope I get to volunteer before the epidemic’s over,” I joked, forgetting my earlier judgment that levity here would not be appreciated.
He offered a polite smile. “I’m sure you will.”
