Over the next two hours, Ted went to the bathroom four more times, each an episode of abject shame. He had evacuated his bowels but continued to feel more coming out of him. His internal organs had liquefied. He contended with the metal toilet seat, with the bathroom that shook like the inside of a throat, with a packet of tissue clutched in his hand as he braced himself between the sink and the wall.
But the fourth time, something within him let loose, like air rushing out of a balloon, and he pressed his hand to his stomach to make sure he was intact. What came out of him no longer had the consistency of diarrhea or water, but of something in between. Against his better judgment — against his will — he looked into the toilet. There, among the specks and chunks of shit, were tarry streaks that he knew were blood. And even worse, a viscous liquid, discolored, foamy, a substance he didn’t know that his body could produce.
He had hoped that whatever it was within him was being flushed out, that each evacuation cleansed him. But this wasn’t in fact true. He was getting worse. Here was the proof.
“Dev,” he said, “something’s wrong.” Dev had turned to the wall, a huddled mass, the shape of him familiar, the bulk of him not. Ted felt dizzy, and he reached out to shake that mass, afraid to arouse Dev’s ire, but more afraid of not knowing what was happening inside him at that very moment.
Ted could pinpoint the moment things changed between John and him. It was shortly before they broke up, though to say they “broke up” suggested that they had spoken face-to-face about their relationship, its direction, its downward spiral. That some mutual decision had been come to, agreed upon. No. John had cleared out all his belongings one day while Ted was at work, and Ted came home to find a John-shaped vacancy in his life.
But the shift happened before then, when John decided to shave his head. To make himself more aerodynamic, he said. It was August. He’d keep cool that way, he said. Afterward, his head reminded Ted of an orange, the skin pitted with tiny pockmarks from the razor. Ted ran his hands over John’s scalp, mapping out the nicks, the dry spots, the small patches of fuzz. They went to the makeup counter at Macy’s, and Ted filled his palms with lotion from the testers and, once out of the store, poured the lotion in an empty shampoo bottle. He scraped his hand against the mouth of the bottle, and whatever was left between his fingers, he rubbed into John’s scalp. The scents mixed together — ylang-ylang, lemon verbena, orchid.
John said, “I smell like a tampon.”
“With your bald head,” Ted said, “you look like one too.”
He replied, “I guess that’d make you the string.”
After he’d showered off the scent, he yelled for Ted to come into the bathroom. There, nude, the steam enrobing him, John pointed at his back.
“What is this?” he said.
It could have been a hickey. A rash scratched raw. A bruise from a punch. But Ted knew what it was and what it wasn’t. It was the first dark spot, an unmistakable sign that John’s luck had collapsed.
“This is a fucking genocide,” John said, the ire reddening his face. “We’re dying here.” He brought home information from the ACT UP treatment committee, and Ted spent hours reading Lancet and JAMA articles until he believed that he could understand the arcane language of illness. John said as long as he stayed asymptomatic, he could take interferon for his Kaposi’s sarcoma. The single splotch on his back. The black hole. But the interferon treatments left him lethargic and sluggish.
Ted kept this deep within him — but he wondered if it would have been easier if he were HIV positive too. Maybe then he could feel what John felt. Their combined fury would leave scorch marks on the street. People would have to shade their eyes when they passed. But the truth was, if Ted became positive, John would have never forgiven himself. I didn’t go through shit, he would say, so that you could go through the exact same shit.
For the weeks immediately following John’s departure, Ted thought, If I forgive him, he’ll come back. I just have to forgive him, and it’ll work. And Ted forgave and forgave and forgave. And it didn’t work. John didn’t return. And every day, Ted discovered a new disappearance: a shirt here, a tchotchke there. Imperceptible bits. Ted would look at the nightstand and notice a circle outlined in the dust, and he’d have to think about what had been there and what was now missing.
After the pity came the anger. Ted couldn’t wait to call John a coward, a fraud, a bastard, right to his face. He hated feeling like he’d never love someone so intensely, so urgently again. It was easy to remember love. To memorialize it. He slipped into it like an old T-shirt and thought, This had been new once. This had been beautiful. It wasn’t the memory that hurt; it was the distance between the present and that memory. Once, he dreamed that he and John were sleeping in bunk beds, and in the dark, John had climbed down to join him. Their skin was bathed in shadow, and they tumbled to the floor. Ted saw them clearly, as if he were a third person in the room, and he couldn’t tell which one was him and which was John. They were rolled together, whole. When he woke, he felt warm and content, luxuriating in that feeling. And then he realized that it was the worst dream he’d ever had.
But their paths never crossed, and after a while, Ted had made the distinction in his life: before John/after John. Ted ran into mutual friends, mostly those who fell more on the John spectrum than on the Ted, and one told him, “You know the real reason, don’t you? He left you because he thought it’d be easier.” Easier for John? Sure. He could once again engage in intimacy without fear, cross infection aside.
“No,” the friend said. “Easier for you. In case, you know…”
It wasn’t easier. Ted hired on at Avartis and moved to Chelsea, overlooking the piers. He went on failed dates. He wondered, sometimes, if John had started taking AZT or the regimen of newer ddI drugs. When he was offered the lead on Crixevir, he wondered if John had taken part in the clinical trials, one of the corpses — cheeks sunken in to reveal the bone underneath, arms dry and brittle — who made a Lazarus-like recovery. Every so often, he glanced through the obituaries in LGNY, looking for John’s name. He was out there, somewhere. Or if he had died, he was one of the thousands of anonymous ones.
When the weather turned warm, Ted went onto his balcony. The sound of the river was like pleasant company. He watched the people below him, hoping to catch a glimpse, maybe, of John’s bike racing down the street. He often saw couples walking hand in hand. Occasionally, they saw him too, and he imagined one telling the other, Look. I wonder if that man is happy up there. And after a pause, the other would answer, He looks miserable.
Dev asked Ted to lie as still as he could. Ted’s instinct was to coil up, but he did as Dev asked. Dev checked the curtain twice.
“See if you can identify exactly where the pain is coming from,” Dev said. He pressed his fingertips against Ted’s abdomen, a pressure so faint that it could have been rain.
“There,” said Ted when Dev had reached his upper left abdomen. “Right there.” Dev pushed a little harder. Ted gasped, but Dev continued his inch-by-inch inventory of Ted’s stomach.
Sunrise bled into the sky. Shapes moved against the horizon. Dev left to wash his hands, and Ted put his own hands on his stomach. What did Dev discover that he could not? Could Dev read skin the way the blind read braille? Ted looked at the sunlight without sun. What did Dev keep saying? That’s right: We will be there before you know it.