As if death summoned, p.2
As If Death Summoned, page 2
“I did bring along my résumé,” I said, pulling it out of my daypack.
“Oh good. That will be helpful,” said Charles, receiving it from me— a slight frown at the dog-eared corner. Tsk. Tsk. “I will still need you to complete the application, even if the information is already included in your résumé.” Charles knew that little boxes on forms were not created without a purpose. Bureaucracy, taking its cue from nature, abhors a vacuum. As he said this, he skimmed the résumé, his eyes stopping on something of interest: Australia. Victorian AIDS Council. Founding member. Developed and coordinated care teams. Designed HIV prevention campaign. Master’s degree and background in mental health.
“I see you already have experience,” he said, continuing to read. “Australia. You lived there for ten years?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve always wanted to travel there. Did you like it?”
“Yes.” Was this part of the interview?
“How did you come to live in Australia?” His interest was piqued, almost in spite of himself. I wondered if he was concerned about professional boundaries.
I paused. “It’s a long story.” Translation: I don’t want to talk about it. But Charles kept looking at me, so I added, “I fell in love with an Australian.” He seemed, what, surprised? I shrugged. “It happens.”
“Ah. So, what brought you back?”
“He died.”
“Of?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, I am sorry.”
I looked away. “Me, too.”
He now studied me in a new light. I knew what he thought he saw, and he offered delicately, “Perhaps you’d like to sign up for our client services. I mean, while you’re here and all.”
I turned back to him. “Thanks, but I don’t have AIDS.” I just look like shit. It seemed I was having to explain this to everyone since I’d returned. To Mom and Dad. To Sis and homophobic hubby. To old friends. To volunteer coordinators. Not that I cared what people thought. I had gotten over that long ago with Gray. Everyone just assumed I, too, was positive. Let them think what they will. I’m not dying. I’m already dead.
“We happen to have a position open for a mental health specialist.”
“Thanks, but I’m not looking for a job here. I just came to volunteer some hours.”
“You already have a job?”
“No.”
“You’ve got the right credentials and experience. We’ve been trying to fill this position for over three months.”
“I really don’t think I’m— ”
“Let me call our client services manager.” He was so insistent I wondered if he was getting a commission. “Would you be willing at least to meet her?”
Now, sitting in this hospital waiting room a year later, I realize I should have said, No. No, thank you. Really, no. But then, I would never have met Sandy. Or Steve, or Cal, or Lukas, or . . .
I was directed to the client services manager’s office where I found a hefty woman with short hair, dressed in jeans, banded-collar shirt, and vest, holding a thick file. As a program manager, she had moved up the food chain from a cubicle. Her office was a shambles, resembling a paper-recycling center. Folders strewn about. File drawers gaping open. Stacks of papers everywhere, all suggesting creative chaos— or maybe just chaos. An autographed poster of k.d. lang was tacked on one wall, on another a poster of planet Earth (“We all live downstream”). After Charles’s cubicle, this immediately put me at ease.
As I came to her door, she shouted, “Three weeks!” I looked behind me to see who she was shouting at, and found that it was me. “Three weeks I worked to find this guy a place to stay. I pulled strings. I bribed the housing authority. I nearly prostituted myself with the HUD case manager to get this guy off the streets. And now I learn he’s taken off to LA!” She threw the file on the desk, placing her fists on her hips, shaking her head. “I just want to kill him before AIDS does.”
Then she held out her hand, smiling. “Hi. I’m Sandy. Don’t mind me. I’m just venting. It’s Monday.” She had a strong, masculine grip, making me glad I wasn’t her client, wherever he was. I introduced myself and handed her the photocopy Charles had made of my résumé so he could keep the original, which I was certain he had by now filed away. We sat down and she quickly ran through it. “Charles says you just came back from Australia. You look like shit. Rough flight?”
“I’ve been back a month now.”
“Oh.” I knew what I looked like: dark circles under my eyes, pale skin, gaunt and skinny. No wonder Charles thought I was a client.
“How come Australia?”
“My partner . . . was Australian.”
She nodded once— “Sorry”— and returned to studying my résumé. I’d found this lack of sentimentality before among those working on the front lines of the epidemic. Perhaps it was a shield, a carapace over our hearts, protecting us from feeling too much, too deeply. I suspect it’s the same during wartime: There are casualties. It’s a given. So, quickly bury the dead and move on to the next battle. Keep moving. Don’t think too much about what you’ve lost. We’ll grieve when it’s over. We promise to grieve when it’s over.
“We could really use you,” she said. “You have both the mental health background and the HIV experience we need.”
I smiled through my fatigue. “I’m not exactly a poster boy for mental health right now.”
She shrugged. “Who is? Especially in this work.”
It was then I met Steve. He poked his head in the door. Charles must have told him about me. “Hi!” He was a handsome man in his mid-thirties, about my age, with the outgoing, bright-eyed manner of an Eagle Scout. Sandy introduced him as the HIV prevention program manager. He was friendly, immediately likable, and, as I would find in months to come, habitually excited. Right now, he was excited about the mental health specialist position.
“This is the third time we’ve advertised for it. None of the people we’ve interviewed had what we’re looking for.”
“You should consider it,” said Sandy. “It’s easier to become an employee here than a volunteer. Fewer forms to fill out.”
“We’re working with Charles on that,” said Steve. “We lose people all the time.”
Then they talked about how they needed someone with my background and experience for both their programs.
“I could use your help with the care teams,” said Sandy. “Father Paul is in charge of them. A wonderful human being, a prince of a guy, our own in-house saint, but not the most organized person in the world. He needs help coordinating the program and training the volunteers.”
“And I need someone who can help my team design prevention programs,” said Steve. “Someone who understands human behavior and behavior change.”
Do I understand human behavior? I once thought I did. Now humanity seems increasingly alien, or perhaps it’s my own humanity that’s become so alien. Steve continued speaking excitedly about the position. Clean, wholesome, decent were words that came to mind as I studied him. And enthusiastic. He exuded enthusiasm. One of those guys you know was on the cheerleading team in high school. This was “a wonderful opportunity,” he said. I would be playing “a really significant role” in this epidemic. It was critical they have a mental health specialist at the agency.
“Really,” agreed Sandy. “You should see all the dysfunctional people and personality disorders we have to deal with on a day-to-day basis— and then, of course, some of the clients are pretty strange, too.” Both of them laughed, and I found myself smiling. They were easy to be around.
“I assume you’re talking about FY,” said Steve.
Sandy explained, “That’s our finance director. Franklin Young son III. He signs all his memos FY, which could be for his initials. Steve thinks it stands for Fiscal Year. I think it’s short for Fuck You, which reflects Franklin’s attitude toward the staff. The ED keeps him on because he’s good with numbers and has saved the agency several times. Still, we’re weighing the cost.”
“I don’t know.” I was wavering, feeling my resolution sinking out from under me. “I don’t think I’m in the right mental space to give you what you need.”
“Maybe this is what you need,” said Steve. “You know, something to take your mind off . . . whatever you need to take your mind off of.” I suspect Charles had also told him why I returned to the States. Then he glanced at his watch. “I’ve got to get back to my meeting.” He stood and we shook hands. “Please, think about it. We really do need you.”
Once he left, I said to Sandy, “His enthusiasm is infectious.”
She eyed me. “Yeah, well, be careful. That’s not all that’s infectious about him.”
“Oh.” I felt an immediate sinking in my stomach. Why am I still surprised?
“By the way, that’s not breaching confidentiality. Steve’s very open about his status. About half the guys who work here are positive, though only a few have symptoms yet. And then, too, Steve already has a partner.”
“Oh, I’m not interested in a relationship,” I said. “And besides, he’s really not my type— you know, good-looking, charming, intelligent.” And I realized that’s exactly how I’d describe Gray. No, I wasn’t interested in a relationship. Not then. Perhaps not ever again.
Sandy looked at her watch. “It’s almost noon. Hungry?”
“Not really.”
“Good. You’ll be a cheap lunch date. It’s my treat.”
“Thanks, but— ”
“No, really, I want to talk to you some more. I’m going to wine ’n dine you until I convince you why you need to join us.”
Out of courtesy I agreed to lunch, and in a manner befitting a nonprofit agency, Sandy wined and dined me at the nearby Subway sandwich shop.
Chapter Two
The Bogong High Plains
[Northern Victoria, Australia, March 1991]
The Bogong High Plains held some mystical affinity for Gray. They evoked in him a deep sense of the holy he found nowhere else. It was on these plains he felt his own spiritual connection to the earth. It was here he entered the Dreamtime.
The two of us sat next to the campfire, he staring into the flames as I read my book. He’d always enjoyed campfires. The flickering, dancing, waving lights beckoned him, producing mild trance states where his imagination and memories wandered hand in hand. Although he’d become a barrister like his father and grandfather, at heart, Gray was a romantic.
“To the aboriginal peoples, these plains were sacred.”
The statement came out of nowhere, apropos of nothing but his flame-lit reveries.
I looked up from my book. “To the aboriginal peoples, the entire earth was sacred,” I reminded him. “They dwelled in a sacred universe.”
“Yes, I know but . . . some places are special,” he insisted.
“What, like they’re sacred-er?”
“Some places remind us that everything is sacred.”
This affinity related to an experience he’d had as a young boy. Each summer he and his brothers accompanied their father camping on this vast plateau in northern Victoria. His father said it was how he got away, “far from the madding crowd.”
“Your mother didn’t go along?” I’d asked.
“Mother was the madding crowd. Besides, she detested camping. Considered anything beyond Melbourne’s city limits the Outback and not fit for human habitation.”
Gray and I would go up there several times a year, staying at a favorite secluded camping spot from which we hiked and backpacked in spring and early summer, and skied cross-country in winter. I didn’t share his attraction to the high plains. To me, they were bleak, barren and unwelcoming, a vast empty landscape. Fifty percent heath and scrub brush, twenty-five percent grasslands, scraggly trees here and there, the rest rocky outcroppings, I found them scruffy and desolate. I’ve always preferred mountains— admittedly, not abundant in Australia— and put our difference in landscape preferences down to my growing up in the Pacific Northwest with the Cascade peaks always in view. Gray thought it had more to do with our sun signs.
“You’re Capricorn,” he’d say. “Earth sign. The goat. So, yeah, you’re drawn to mountains. I’m Aquarius.”
“What’s Aquarius drawn to? Scrub brush?”
“Air sign”— and he’d raise his hands and eyes overhead— “Sky. Infinitude. The eternal.”
He’d been brought up in the Anglican Church, so he was not particularly religious. The high church tradition offered pomp and pageantry and exquisite liturgical music, but as to the human hunger for mystery and the mystical, Gray turned to what he called his “aboriginal roots,” the land.
He was staring again into the fire. “Maybe the indigenous people didn’t express it conceptually like we do, but they sensed it. I sense it.”
“Sense what?”
“These plains are haunted.”
By then, I’d heard the folklore that Cleve Cole’s restless spirit wandered this land. “You mean haunted as in ghosts?” I asked.
“I mean haunted as in holy.”
Every people, in every place, in every period of human history, have believed that certain locations— mountains and volcanoes, deserts, forests, springs and watering holes— were repositories of special energies, holding special powers. I remain a skeptic on the subject, intrigued, intellectually curious, but skeptical. Gray, however, was a believer. Though questioning, even cynical about so much else— politics, the law, his mother’s artificially youthful appearance— he was a believer in the sacredness of these plains.
“This is where I want my ashes spread,” he said on that occasion. “This is where I belong.”
He’d just been diagnosed that week with AIDS, and hearing his words unnerved me.
“We’ve got plenty of time to talk about that,” I said, and without commenting further, I returned to my book and he returned to his fire reveries. It turned out we had less time than we thought.
It was several weeks after arriving home that I began to have recurring dreams of the Bogong High Plains.
Friday, February 24, 1995
10:20 p.m.
Providence Hospital, Portland, Oregon
“I was hoping I might just sit with him. I realize he’s unconscious.”
The nurse is kind. “I’m afraid it’s not possible. He’s still in critical condition and being actively monitored. I’m sorry.”
She seems genuinely sorry, so I offer a smile. “Well, no harm in asking.”
She gives a warm smile in return. “No harm at all.”
I start to leave for the waiting room, then turn back. “It’s just that . . .” I’m struggling for words. “If he regains consciousness, even momentarily, it’s very important I speak with him. Very important, if only for a couple of minutes.” We have some unfinished business, I want to tell her. Business that needs to be finished before he . . .
“It’s really not my decision,” she says, “but I’ll see what I can do once he comes out of the recovery unit.”
“I would be ever so grateful.” It sounds strangely formal in a Jane Austen kind of way, but a simple Thank you doesn’t seem adequate for what I’m feeling.
I return to the empty waiting room, settling into one of the chairs, groggy and thick-headed, and glad Sandy went home to care for herself and Fernando. I would make miserable company tonight. By now, I’ve gone more than twenty hours without sleep and am badly in need of caffeine. Unfortunately, the hospital cafeteria is closed. There is vending machine coffee, but I’m not yet that desperate. My preferred sources of caffeine are Pepsi and Coke, I don’t care which— I always failed their taste tests— but the soda machine is out of order.
There was a time, back in Melbourne, when these vigils were happening with such regular frequency that I kept a daypack in my car with essential items. You never knew when you’d get the call. (“He went into the hospital, we think for the last time. Come if you can.”) By then, I had it down to a science: No-Doz tablets, thermos to fill and refill with strong black coffee, two novels (in case one was a dud), notebook and pen, change of shirt, toothbrush, toothpaste, razor (some vigils went on for days), energy bars, a couple of apples, extra tissues— not for me but for the others who would come by to sit a while and who needed to talk and maybe to cry— and finally the list of phone numbers when it came time to make “The Call,” notifying family and friends the vigil was over.
But this time I was caught unprepared. Rushing in from the airport, I don’t even have a book and am now left with nothing to read but old issues of Bon Appetit! on the waiting room table. Apparently, the selection of magazines depends on whatever the staff brings from home. So, I scrunch deeper into the chair, feeling bereft without my life support system and with only my memories to occupy myself.
I already know this vigil is going to be different. But then, they’re all different. Unlike the memorial services, which over the years begin to blend and blur together, merging into one montage of loss, the vigils remain distinct in my mind— this specific time, this specific place with its own emotional atmosphere, contoured to fit this individual now dying. Memorial services are communal events; vigils are deeply personal. Often, I’ve been left by myself, after family and friends depart, choosing to remain to keep what the writer Paul Monette called “the last watch of the night.”
No need for you to stay, a kindly nurse or hospice staff person will say. He doesn’t even know you’re here.
But I stay anyway. There’s this sense that much more than a life is ending. An entire world is coming to an end, a multitude of experiences, millions of moments and memories, hopes and goals and desires and dreams, all reduced to this: a biological organism slowly releasing its hold on life, a vast network of physiological processes gradually shutting down. Seems like someone should be here to witness it. You sense the presence that was this person has already departed, a presence no longer present, and not for the first time wonder who or what is actually dying.
With each vigil, a part of my soul died with that person. I seem to have less and less soul left. This vigil will be no different. I close my eyes and pray, Don’t let him die before we make peace, forgetting that I stopped praying years ago.
