In One Person

withdrawing, just as I was aware of people shrinking away from me—not only my fellow wrestlers.
    Rachel had retreated immediately. “She may think she can catch the disease from your
writing
, Billy,” Elaine told me.
    Elaine and I had talked about getting out of New York, but the problem with living in New York for any length of time is that many New Yorkers can’t imagine that there’s anywhere else they could live.
    As more of our friends contracted the virus, Elaine and I would imagine ourselves with one or another of the AIDS-associated, opportunistic illnesses. Elaine developed night sweats. I woke up imagining I could feel the white plaques of
Candida
encroaching on my teeth. (I admitted to Elaine that I often woke up at night and peered into my mouth in a mirror—with a flashlight!) And there was that seborrheic dermatitis; it was flaky and greasy-looking—it cropped up mostly on your eyebrows and scalp, and on the sides of your nose. Herpes could run wild on your lips; the ulcers simply wouldn’t heal. There were also those clusters of molluscum; they looked like smallpox—they could completely cover your face.
    And there’s a certain smell your hair has when it is matted by your sweat and flattened by your pillow. It’s not just how translucent-looking and funny-smelling your hair is. It’s the salt that dries and hardens on your forehead, from the unremitting fever and the incessant sweating; it’s your mucous membranes, too—they get chock-full of yeast. It’s a yeasty but, at the same time, fruity smell—the way curd smells, or mildew, or a dog’s ears when they’re wet.
    I wasn’t afraid of dying; I was afraid of feeling guilty, forever, because I
wasn’t
dying. I couldn’t accept that I would or might escape the AIDS virus for as accidental a reason as being told to wear a condom by a doctor who disliked me, or that the random luck of my being a top would or might save me. I was
not
ashamed of my sex life; I was ashamed of myself for not wanting to
be there
for the people who were dying.
    “I’m not good at this. You are,” I told Larry; I meant more than the hand-holding and the pep talks.
    Cryptococcal meningitis was caused by a fungus; it affected your brain, and was diagnosed by a lumbar puncture—it presented with fever and headache and confusion. There was a separate spinal-cord disease, a myelopathy that caused progressive weakness—loss of function in your legs, incontinence. There was little one could do about it—vacuolar myelopathy, it was called.
    I was watching Larry empty the bedpan of our friend who had this awful myelopathy; I was truly marveling at Larry—he’d become a saint—when I suddenly realized that I had no difficulty pronouncing the
myelopathy
word, or any of the other AIDS-associated words. (That
Pneumocystis
pneumonia, for example—I could actually say it. Kaposi’s sarcoma, those terrible lesions, gave me no pronunciation problem; I could say “cryptococcal meningitis” as if it meant no more to me than the common cold. I didn’t even hesitate to pronounce “cytomegalovirus”—a major cause of blindness in AIDS.)
    “I should call your mother,” I told Elaine. “I seem to be having a pronunciation breakthrough.”
    “It’s just because you’re distancing yourself from this disease, Billy,” Elaine said. “You’re like me—you’re imagining yourself as standing on the outside, looking in.”
    “I should call your mother,” I repeated, but I knew Elaine was right.
    “Let’s hear you say ‘penis,’ Billy.”
    “That’s not fair, Elaine—that’s different.”
    “Say it,” Elaine said.
    But I knew how it would sound. It was, is, and will always be
penith
to me; some things never change. I didn’t try to say the
penis
word for Elaine. “Cock,” I said to her.
    I didn’t call Mrs. Hadley about my pronunciation breakthrough, either. I
was
trying to distance myself from the disease—even as the epidemic was only beginning. I was already feeling guilty that I didn’t have it.
    T HE 1981 ATKINS CHRISTMAS card came on time that year. No generic “Season’s Greetings,” more than a month late, but an unapologetic “Merry Christmas” in December.
    “Uh-oh,” Elaine said, when I showed her the Atkins family photo. “Where’s Tom?”
    Atkins wasn’t in the picture. The names of the family were printed on the Christmas card in small capitals: TOM, SUE, PETER, EMILY & JACQUES ATKINS . (Jacques was the Labrador;