“A few more hours,” Dev said. “Get some rest.”
Ted was ready, to some extent, to deal with traveler’s diarrhea. He’d brought salt tablets and Cipro, though Ann had depleted the latter. He had planned against what he could expect. One or two days of loose bowels was a small price to pay for traveling abroad. But now, he felt cheated. He’d skipped so much: the Red Fort, Humayun’s Tomb, the bazaars and spice markets, crowds so vast that Ann could only describe them by holding her arms out, as if embracing the world. He hadn’t seen the Taj Mahal. People would be horrified to learn that he’d been to India and not gone to the Taj Mahal.
“Do you think it may be motion sickness?”
“I don’t know,” Ted said. The cramp throbbed, radiated. “I just wish it weren’t so far.”
“Less far now.”
“Why Varanasi?” Ted asked. “Why so far from Delhi?”
“Everyone should see Varanasi,” Dev said. “It is one of India’s holiest cities.”
“I didn’t know you were devout.”
“Me? No, not me. It’s just superstition.” Dev crossed his arms. “My wife, she likes to have a bottle of Ganga water on hand when she cooks.” He removed an empty plastic bottle from his bag. “I take it back to the lab, centrifuge it to remove sediment, and irradiate it. Perfectly safe.”
“Your wife?”
“Yes,” Dev said.
“I didn’t know you were married.”
“I told you.” Hesitation crept into Dev’s voice, a birdlike quiver.
“I’d remember something like that,” Ted said. He felt like throwing up, the acid gurgling in his throat, sourness in his mouth. “Does she know about you?”
Outside, the darkness gave no indication of movement: no blurred lights, no stationary objects rushing by. Travel was a suspension, a held breath, the transition between one state of being and another. The centrifugal force pulled at his bones, but the distance between him and his destination only seemed to increase, as if this trip wasn’t a movement toward but a movement away. Dev’s voice, when it came, came from this ever-further place.
“She entered the marriage with her eyes open,” Dev said — a radio transmission plucked from the ether.
When the feeling overcame him, Ted tore back the curtain, bolted out of the cabin, and ran the length of the car. The restroom was at the far end. His body clenched: it was a race. Could he find the lock on the door? Could he undo his belt buckle and pants? The split second before his haunches landed on the toilet seat, he felt — not relief, really, because pain followed the length of all thirty-feet worth of intestines — but release. Explosive release, the type that made Ted feel ashamed that he could not control his own body, that his own body could rebel.
There were things that, later, he was thankful for: that the bathroom was unoccupied, that its stainless steel walls gave the appearance of being sanitary, that it had a Western-style toilet instead of a squat one. Squat toilets unbalanced him, and the guidebook said that oftentimes, squat toilets were nothing more than a hole in the floor. Indeed, as Ted sat, warm puffs of air greeted him, the rhythm of train ties. He felt wheels beneath him, their terrible friction against the rails.
And after this first wave passed — his bowels once again clenched, agitated — he realized that in his rush, he had forgotten tissues. There were no towels, no toilet paper, nothing for him to banish the filth between his legs, clinging to his skin. Stickiness. All the things you feel when you think you’re dying.
Pants around ankles, he waddled to the sink, cupped a handful of water, and waddled back. He rinsed himself as best he could, forcing himself to look away from his hand, as if seeing uncleanliness was admitting to its existence. He brushed droplets of water off his buttocks, down his thighs. He didn’t want it to soak through his boxers and spot his trousers.
There was a time, when he was still with John, that he both anticipated and feared John’s decline. He, one day, would have to bathe John. He could do it, he knew, but he also knew that he could not not do it. These were the lies of love: that it was not disgusting, that it could transcend illness, that it could be more than an unending series of obligations.
When did he and John have “The Conversation”? It must have been when they moved in together. The Conversation was the formalization of his commitment, both verbal and mental. If Ted had to divide his life into a series of befores and afters, this would have been the first schism. The news. Ted still didn’t know what to call it. The information. The more he stuck a name to it, the more it peeled away. What do you call something that changes your life? Maybe it was ridiculous to even try to name it. By naming it, maybe he could put limits on it. Give it boundaries. A specific meaning. But — The Conversation would do.
He frequently wondered how often John had had The Conversation with others. If it was John’s method of scaring people off, of testing them. Because that’s what it felt like: a test. One of many for Ted to take.
Ted even remembered his first actual test, taken in February, after he and John had been together for five months. They’d always been scrupulously careful. Well, maybe not scrupulous—but cautious. The clinic had the whiteness of a blizzard, and the nurses shuffled papers like they were made of snow. Everyone sat in a hush. They were assigned numbers — blood drawn today, and in a week or so, the results. Ted said he could have gotten the test at the NYU health center, but John insisted no. “There’s a difference,” he said, “between confidential and anonymous testing.”
“I don’t see the difference.”
“It’s not a difference you see,” John said. “It’s one you live.”
When it was Ted’s turn, a middle-aged woman with sandy-blond curls pulled on latex gloves with a single snap. “I need to ask you a few questions for research,” she said. “Your responses will be completely anonymous, so I’d like you to be honest.” She ran through the battery of questions with a strict efficiency, but Ted couldn’t answer without tittering like a schoolgirl. Never had he had to think so much about sex before: what, with whom, how many times.
Ted rolled up his sleeve. The nurse tied a strip of rubber tubing above his elbow. “First time?” she asked.
“How can you tell?”
“You’re shaking so much I can barely get this knotted. If you don’t hold still, your arm is going to look like a sheet of stamps.” She held his arm, gentle, firm. The latex pulled his hairs. “Easy, easy.”
“You’ve done this a lot?”
“Oh, honey,” she said, “you have no idea.” The needle entered his skin. The slow trickle of blood in the vial looked so dark, so thick, he didn’t think it was blood at all. More like the sludge that came out of the faucet first thing in the morning. “It’s better if you don’t look,” she said.
A week later, Ted told himself that he wasn’t worried, that he knew everything would be fine — but he couldn’t be sure. Back in the clinic, he saw a Hispanic couple, the girl with one hand in her boyfriend’s, the other on her belly, her face awash with worry. A sullen young man in an army jacket stitched together with safety pins refused to pull in his legs as Ted walked by. They prayed for the same diagnosis in silence, in unison.
But Ted was alone for his moment of panic. The nurse, the same one who had drawn his blood two weeks ago, came in and sat across from him, her face set and serious, her eyes betraying no sign of good news. “Let me tell you a few things about HIV,” she said, and Ted thought, Oh, God, no. But then he realized: this was an informational spiel. There was genius to the timing: if the talk had come after a yes, he would have been too devastated to listen; if it had come after a no, he wouldn’t have cared. This was the secret of communication: give the information you want the person to hear before telling them the information they want to hear.