In One Person

shrunken body lay still, was vigorously heaving. The Hickman catheter dangled from the right side of Tom’s chest, where it had been inserted under his clavicle; it tunneled under the skin a few inches above the nipple, and entered the subclavian vein below the collarbone.
    “These are Dad’s old friends, from school, Emily,” Peter said irritably to his little sister. “You knew they were coming.”
    The girl stalked across the room to her far-flung book; when she’d retrieved it, she turned and glared. Emily definitely glared at me; she may have been glaring at her brother and Elaine, too. When the thirteen-year-old spoke, I felt certain she was speaking only to me, though Elaine would try in vain to assure me later, on the train, that Tom’s daughter had been addressing both of us. (I don’t think so.)
    “Are you sick, too?” Emily asked.
    “No, I’m not—I’m sorry,” I answered her. The girl then marched out of the room.
    “Tell Mom they’re here, Emily. Tell Mom!” Peter called after his angry sister.
    “I
will
!” we heard the girl shout.
    “Is that you, Bill?” Tom Atkins asked; I saw him try to move his head, and I stepped closer to the bed. “Bill Abbott—are you here?” Atkins asked; his voice was weak and terribly labored. His lungs made a thick gurgling. The oxygen tank must have been for only occasional (and superficial) relief; there probably was a mask, but I didn’t see it—the oxygen was in lieu of a ventilator. Morphine would come next, at the end stage.
    “Yes, it’s me—Bill—and Elaine is with me, Tom,” I told Atkins. I touched his hand. It was ice-cold and clammy. I could see poor Tom’s face now. That greasy-looking seborrheic dermatitis was in his scalp, on his eyebrows, and flaking off the sides of his nose.
    “Elaine, too!” Atkins gasped. “Elaine and Bill! Are you all right, Bill?” he asked me.
    “Yes, I’m all right,” I told him; I’d never felt so ashamed to be “all right.”
    There was a tray of medications, and other intimidating-looking stuff, on the bedside table. (I would remember the heparin solution, for some reason—it was for flushing out the Hickman catheter.) I saw the white , cheesy curds of the
Candida
crusting the corners of poor Tom’s mouth.
    “I did not recognize him, Billy,” Elaine would say later, when we were returning to New York. Yet how do you recognize a grown man who weighs only ninety-something pounds?
    Tom Atkins and I were thirty-nine, but he resembled a man in his sixties; his hair was not only translucent and thin—what there was of it was completely gray. His eyes were sunken in their sockets, his temples deeply dented, his cheeks caved in; poor Tom’s nostrils were pinched tightly together, as if he could already detect the stench of his own cadaver, and his taut skin, which had once been so ruddy, was an ashen color.
    Hippocratic facies
was the term for that near-death face—that tightly fitted mask of death, which so many of my friends and lovers who died of AIDS would one day wear. It was skin stretched over a skull; the skin was so improbably hard and tense, you were sure it was going to split.
    I was holding one of Tom’s cold hands, and Elaine was holding the other one—I could see Elaine trying not to stare at the Hickman catheter in Atkins’s bare chest—when we heard the dry cough. For a moment, I imagined that poor Tom had died and his cough had somehow escaped his body. But I saw the son’s eyes; Peter knew that cough, and where it came from. The boy turned to the open doorway of the room—where his mother now stood, coughing. It didn’t sound like all that serious a cough, but Sue Atkins was having trouble stopping it. Elaine and I had heard that cough before; the earliest stages of
Pneumocystis
pneumonia don’t sound too bad. The shortness of breath and the fever were often worse than the cough.
    “Yes, I have it,” Sue Atkins said; she was controlling the cough, but she couldn’t stop it. “In my case, it’s just starting,” Mrs. Atkins said; she was definitely short of breath.
    “I infected her, Bill—that’s the story,” Tom Atkins said.
    Peter, who’d been so poised, was trying to slip sideways past his mother into the hall.
    “No—you stay here, Peter. You need to hear what your father has to say to Bill,” Sue Atkins told her son; the boy was crying now, but he backed into the room, still looking at the doorway, which his mom was blocking.
    “I don’t want to