“Being here feels a little strange,” Ted said.
“The culture shock can be quite extreme.”
“No, not that,” Ted said. “I actually haven’t been outside the hotel yet.”
“You haven’t? Poor thing.” He patted Ted’s head and kept his hand there. Ted felt his scalp prickle beneath Dev’s touch.
“I don’t mind,” Ted said, leaning back. Dev’s hand was a cradle. “I like being here.” The sentence hung on his tongue; it was a sentiment he hadn’t thought through. What did it mean to be here? Not just in Dev’s room, not just in India, but present in his own body? His body responded to Dev’s advances, but Ted could not locate himself in it. He felt like a machine. A machine hidden among other machines.
Dev extended a hand, and Ted took it. Years of syringe pressing and prescription writing had left calluses on Dev’s thumb and index fingers. Dev caressed his face. I’m calling to you, the flesh said. Here you are.
Dev unbuckled his belt and let his trousers drop. His belly puckered over the elastic of his briefs, and the cotton ribbing was stretched so that it looked striped. Thick ringlets of hair covered his upper thighs. Ted pressed his face against Dev’s right thigh, buried his nose in the intersection of cloth and skin. He wrapped his arms around Dev’s legs, and Dev fell backward onto the bed.
“My shoes.” Dev laughed. “I’ve still got my shoes on.”
Ted helped him out of his shoes, which Dev took to the closet. Ted undressed, and Dev lay back in bed, watching. “I like your body,” Dev said. “I like your skin.” Ted joined Dev in bed, and Dev clutched him, and Ted knew that he was here, if for no other reason than Dev was holding him down.
Coconut. Dev smelled of coconut. Ted wondered if he had a distinct smell, and if he did, if it was external or intrinsic, an inescapable aspect of himself. John always smelled voltaic, the static of his Lycra bike shorts. Ted sniffed his wrist. Soap, laundry detergent — but nothing that he could identify as uniquely Ted. Maybe his mistake was assuming that there was a unique Ted to begin with.
Six days ago, Ted had arrived to a blank hall with tables skirted in white. Then, one by one, flags unfurled, claiming terra incognita in the name of Merck, SmithKline Beecham, Glaxo Wellcome. Now those banners were rolled up, the land returned to its native state, no worse for the wear. A few conversations lingered, but these dwindled, as if the exhibition hall had run out of breath.
Ted collapsed the Crixevir booth into two knee-high cardboard boxes and a duffel bag. Not much, but still burdensome. Maybe Ann and Dev were right. Maybe he was inextricable from Crixevir. Once, at the manufacturing plant in North Carolina, he stood in sterile blue bootees and watched the purple-and-white pills spill from the mouth of a machine. They clattered onto the conveyor belt, rat-a-tat, a barrage of BB pellets. He smelled their sweetness. He thought at first that it was the sucrose coating — sugar to mask the medicine — but it wasn’t that. It took a while for him to identify the smell. Benzene. Maybe that’s what he smelled like.
And then, John simply said, “Ted.”
Jesus. John.
Ted’s instinct was to shake hands, a neutral gesture, friendly and meaningless, but his hand stopped mid-dart, as if it were an animal realizing it was trapped. John leaned forward for a hug. For six years, they’d assiduously avoided each other, and for six years, Ted had imagined the course of John’s illness. Sometimes his own cruelty frightened him. He imagined John a corpse, cheeks sunken in to reveal the skull underneath, arms dry and brittle. John’s cycling-hardened legs desiccated and withered. Ted told himself that he would not recognize John when he saw him, and that that would make it easy not to remember how much he had once loved him.
Ted broke away from the hug. “How are you?” he asked.
“Do you really have time for the answer?” John replied. He was taking a triple cocktail therapy of protease inhibitors, including Crixevir. His viral load was near undetectable, and his T-cell counts had never been better. But the benefits package he got from working for the International Alliance against AIDS still left him with a crushing pharmaceutical co-pay.
“You want to know what’s ironic?” John asked. “After bitching you out for working for a reactionary, profiteering conglomerate — which it still is, don’t get me wrong — I shack up with someone who works for a Catholic organization. Mark Rifkin. Maybe you’ve heard of him.”
John. So coy. Of course Ted had heard of Mark Rifkin. Rifkin had put St. Anthony’s Medical Center on the map. What was once a small Catholic clinic had, in ten years’ time, become a full-fledged research facility. Avartis had paid well for the privilege of doing clinical trials for Crixevir at St. Anthony’s. Rifkin spoke across the country — across the world — for different companies, and Ann had tentatively recruited him to speak for Avartis too. The other reps swarmed Rifkin. He handed out business cards like papal blessings. He was preternaturally handsome, the type of handsomeness that didn’t trigger desire as much as shame: shame at one’s own mediocrity, at one’s own shortcomings. John hadn’t come to gloat — that was an incidental benefit.
“I’m happy for you,” Ted said.
“Thanks.”
“You look good.”
“What you’re actually saying,” John said, “is that I look fat. Otherwise you would have said that I look great.”
“You look great.”
“Much better,” John said. “Where’s your partner?”
“Oh, my work keeps me too busy,” Ted said, and it took him a moment to realize that John had meant “partner” in a different sense. “Oh, Ann. She caught a stomach bug. She’s laid up in her room.”
“That’s unfortunate,” John said. “About Ann.” His tone shifted. “Didn’t I tell you this job would eat you alive?”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Sounds like something I would have said. And it’s true, isn’t it?”
“It’s not bad. I make a good living. I travel.”
“I used to think that Avartis was killing me for a few bucks,” John said. “I know better now. I know Avartis is trying to save my life. Still for a few bucks, though.” He put his hands on his hips. His biceps bulged beneath his T-shirt. It was a folly to have a ridiculously good-looking boyfriend. Unless you were obscenely rich. Or ridiculously good-looking yourself.
“But you know what sucks?” John continued. “I have to rely on Mark for my meds. I can’t afford them on my salary. He pays for them out of pocket.”
“There’s a gay guy on Avartis’s board of directors,” Ted said. “We have a pretty good partner benefit package.”
“If I were still with you,” John said, “you’d probably be dead by now.”
Ted couldn’t respond.
“We would have strangled each other. Besides,” John said, “if Mark knew that you were hitting on me, he’d strangle you himself.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Ted said. “I’ve met someone. A doctor. Here at the conference.”
“Do you mean that he’s here at the conference or that you met him at the conference?”
“Kind of both?”
“That’s pretty shameless, don’t you think? Hitting on someone at an AIDS conference?” John threw his hands back. “Not that I’m judging. What’s his name?”
“Dev.”
“And he’s based in?”
“Delhi General.”
“I see.” John folded his hands, his preparation for lecture mode. “Don’t take this the wrong way. It’s been six years, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still care. I do care. But in a different way now. You understand?”