Читать книгу This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death - Harold Brodkey - Страница 6

I have AIDS. I am surprised that I do. I have not been exposed since 1977, which is to say that my experiences, my adventures in homosexuality took place largely in the 1960s and ’70s, and back then I relied on time and abstinence to indicate my degree of freedom from infection and to protect others and myself.

At first, shadows and doubts of various kinds disturbed my sleep, but later I felt more certainty of safety. Before AIDS was identified, I thought five years without noticeable infection would indicate that one was without disease. When AIDS was first identified, five years was held to indicate safety. That changed. Twenty years now is considered a distance in time that might indicate safety, but a slight number of AIDS cases are anomalous; that is, the delay in illness is not explicable within the assumed rules, even under the most careful, cynical investigation. It doesn’t matter much. I have AIDS. I have had Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, which almost killed me. Unlikely or not, blood test, T-cell count, the fact that it was Pneumocystis means I have AIDS and must die.

There it is. At the time I was told, I didn’t even believe I had pneumonia. I thought it was literary exhaustion, and age, and bad flu-bronchitis—the death-urgency brought on by finishing a book, what I called the Venice book, Profane Friendship. When the piece of journalism I was working on, a piece about the Academy Awards for The New Yorker, was done and scheduled to go to press, I went to see my doctor, Barry Hartman. I wasn’t that familiar with him yet that I easily called him Barry. He was my new internist, a specialist in infectious diseases. He had taken over the practice of the doctor I’d had before. He looked at the X rays and at how thin I was and said it might be AIDS and Pneumocystis, and I pooh-poohed him. Because of my wife, Ellen Schwamm, I agreed to the HIV test, but I refused to go to the hospital. And Barry said he might be wrong.

He said he would telephone with the test results. I said he shouldn’t worry about it. I wasn’t tense.

I went home, went to bed, took the general-spectrum antibiotic Barry had prescribed, and in bed went through the Academy Awards piece with the fact-checker on the phone. And I suffered with flu-bronchitis and fever but not with foreboding. I had some nervousness about the test, since you never know what surprises God has up His sleeve, destiny’s sleeve. But not much. It had been a very long time. I didn’t even have that lapsed awareness one can get when sick, You goddamned fool, why did you stay up so late? I didn’t have that kind of contrition.

But by the next evening I was so much worse that I could not find a balance point in the gusts of unpleasant sensation. I don’t remember feeling panicky, but I felt so sick I was uneasy about death (from illness, at least) for the first time in my life. Ellen was treating me with an unyielding attention and a kind of sweetness, without any noticeable flicker of independence or irony. She had never once been like that with me, even sexually. You’d have to know her to know how rare any state other than autonomy is for her. It was strange how the illness kept getting heavier and more settled by the hour, with a kind of muffled rapidity. Again and again, it thudded to a level of horrendousness, consolidated that, and then thuddingly sank to a worse level still. Nothing was stopping the process of strangulation. I kept putting on a front for Ellen, or trying to, until, in a kind of extreme inward silence, nothing was working. The weird, choked dizziness didn’t moderate or waver; I found I could not breathe at all, even sitting up.

I gave in. I said we’d better get to the hospital. The ambulance people came, and I whispered to them that I could not walk or sit up. Or breathe. They went down for a gurney and oxygen. Breathing through a tube in my nose and motionless and sheeted on a gurney, I was wheeled through our apartment and into the elevator and across the lobby, past the doorman, onto the sidewalk, into the air briefly, and then into the ambulance. This is how my life ended. And my dying began.

When Barry said I had AIDS, I said I didn’t believe him. He said, “Believe me.” At that instant, I was having such difficulty breathing that I hardly cared. I was embarrassed and shamed that the people who cared for me in the hospital would have to take special precautions to protect themselves. Then, as the fever went down, I suppose my pride and sense of competition took over. When someone from Social Services showed up to offer counsel, I found that bothersome, although the counselor was a very fine person, warm and intelligent. I suppose I was competitive with or antagonistic toward the assumption that now my death would be harder than other deaths, harder to bear, and that the sentence to such death and suffering was unbearable. I didn’t find it so. I didn’t want to find it so.

Ellen says that when we were first told, on a Monday, she sat in the one chair in the hospital room. To prove that she is actually remembering in the Brodkey mode, according to Brodkey theories and method, she says that Barry leaned against the windowsill with his arms folded while he told us. And that the weather was warm. And that I was strangely jovial and reasonable. She says I was heroic and completely in charge, and that I surprised her by agreeing agreeably to being treated for Pneumocystis rather than asking for sedation and being allowed to die. I remember Barry propping himself with one arm on the sill and then refolding his arms and saying, “You have AIDS,” and holding his pose and staring at me.

Yet these first moments in which I consciously felt the reality of having AIDS are hazy, slippery, and return to me in different coverings. I was in New York Hospital, and in a private room—itself a sign of possibly having AIDS-related tuberculosis, to go from the emergency room to a private room—and still hardly able to breathe even with oxygen, and I had a high fever, and I was drugged, though not as heavily as later. I was breathing oxygen through a tube from a tank and I was attached to an IV. I wasn’t in a condition of vanity and yet I was—I was worried about Ellen’s opinion of me. I suppose this is a male way of worrying about her feelings, her reactions, without quite worrying about her.

The fever moved in acid waves. Some sort of final castration, real helplessness, felt very close. I could see nothing to do about it. A display of manner, a touch of William Powell, of Huckleberry Finn with the bed as the raft, was like a broken piece of salvage to me.

I heard Ellen say something to Barry, ask him something about what was going to happen, and he said that after the Pneumocystis cleared up I had the possibility of a few years of life.

And I said, “But it will be embarrassing.” The stigma. Incontinence. (Would I have to wear a diaper?) Blindness. He said the good years were quite good, were livable.

In the confused, muddled velocities of my mind was an editorial sense that this was wrong, that this was an ill-judged element in the story of my life. I felt too conceited to have this death. I was illogical, fevered, but my mind still moved as if it were a rational mind—the mind, everyone’s mind, is forever unstill, is a continuous restlessness like light, even in sleep, when the light is inside and not outside the skull. I took inside me the first stirrings of acknowledgment of AIDS, not with the arching consciousness with which I try to write fiction—I didn’t feel that isolation—but with a different sense of aloneness. And maybe I felt the wretchedness in Ellen. Maybe I was sensitive to what I had, so to speak, done to her now.

Part of what is basic in my life is how I show off for her. Somehow, sadly, that evening I was getting it wrong. I was wheezing too much, and Ellen kept indicating that I shouldn’t try to talk unnecessarily. She was scared shitless. She was deep into her bravery tactic—almost trembling with it. Only in a memory which resurrects the fever, in that full memory, do I see her, strong-eyed, polite-voiced, and feel her leaning over me as if to protect me with her small frame. She said to me later that she had had the conviction that it was over for us, both of us—that she, too, must be infected, all things considered. Nothing for us, of us, would survive this devastation. But she said nothing of it then. She is often indirect; she frequently lies to me because I bully her in a lot of ways; she is quick, tactically quick.

She says she thought then that we would die together, both of us—commit suicide simultaneously—in a few months, when everything was in order. But she didn’t want me to leave her now, not this abruptly. Most of us who know Ellen know her as a fine-boned tyrant who looks a bit like a small Garbo. Her hair is gray, and she has never had a face-lift. She is of interest physically still—neatly formed and stylized, like the stopper of an expensive perfume bottle. She is incredibly willful, and she is my human credential. People think she is good-looking and trustworthy and sensible, whatever they think of me. It seemed clear from how Barry and the harried nurses acted that they saw her in that way. They all trusted her judgment and her will, not mine.

I remember not wanting to be an exploitative fool in her eyes by asking her to nurse me through a terminal disease, and one with a sexual stigma. I wondered if she would despise me. I knew a woman once who’d had a good marriage, unmistakably so, within limits, and whose husband, a clever banker, fell ill and impressed everyone with how hard he fought to be himself again, to get well again. That woman once said in my hearing, “I wish he would give up.” His struggle went on for so long, and so dominated everything, that it was killing her. And he was hardly alive except as a will to struggle.

And then, lying in that room, I saw it differently: after all, death—and AIDS—are a commonplace. “Big deal,” I said. That didn’t lighten anyone’s face. “Jesus Christ,” I said. “What a mess.” Barry said something about tranquilizers and counseling to help with the shock and despair, and natural grief. “I’m OK,” I said, and went on grandly, “Look, it’s only death. It’s not like losing your hair or all your money. I don’t have to live with this.”

I wanted to make them laugh. I wanted them to admire me, it’s true, but I also wanted Ellen to stop that inward shaking, and I was afraid to say, “Christ, what have I done?” or “Look what’s happened to me” or “It’s all my fault.” I have an odd cowardice toward grief. I would just as soon suffer without it. The two of them were watching me, ready to sympathize and comfort. Ellen turned to Barry, who was disapproving. Or worried. “We can help when the despair hits; we have drugs,” he told her.

I was only thinly and artificially conscious anyway. I suppose I had made up my mind to try not to be humiliated, and that involved my not being pitiable to these two people, the only two people I would see with any regularity for the next eight weeks. And, you see, a traumatized child, as I was once, long ago, and one who recovers, as I did, has a wall between him and pain and despair, between him and grief, between himself and beshitting himself. That’s the measure for me—handling the whole weight of my life in relation to polite bowels. The rest is madness, rage, humiliation.

Again, the fevered cresting memory pulls me back in, to that moment when I think it was that the future had suddenly vanished for me, had become a soft, deadened wall. Back there at the beginning, the end, when Barry told me flat-out that I had AIDS, I didn’t feel it, although I also saw that denial was futile. Barry was not even remotely real to me at that point. He was merely a conductor, a lightning rod of medical error. I still didn’t believe he was a good doctor; that would come later. The framework of the self wasn’t changed by the words, the general feeling of its being my body and its having been my body all my life didn’t dissolve, as it would in a few days. I had no sense of gestating my death.

Ellen says that she hung back and expected me to be violent psychically, and to want death immediately once I had accepted the diagnosis. Well, that was true. But I was also afraid of death, of my own final silence.

And I was ashamed toward her, and angry at her. She does not steadily believe that I love her—it is one of her least endearing traits to expect proof at unreasonable intervals. And what is love? My measure of it is that I should have died to spare her. Her measure is for us to be together longer.

I thought I could feel myself being suffocated second by second. What was strange was that all sense of presence, all sense of poetry and style, all sense of idea left me. It was gone, with not one trace, one flicker remaining. I had a pale sense of the lost strength it would take to think or feel a metaphor, and of how distant it was from me. Everything was suffocation and the sentence of death, the termite-like democracy and chemical gusts of malaise and heat, of twisting fever, and the lazy but busy simmering of the disease in me. Everything outside me was Ellen’s breath and the color of the walls in the dim light and was the hospital noises and the television set on its wall mount and a ticking slide of the moments.

And nothing was a phrase or seed of speech, nothing carried illumination in it, nothing spoke of meaning, of anything beyond breath. Attentive to nothing but breath, perhaps in my dying I was alive in a real and complete way, a human way, for the first time after ten or fifteen years of hard work. I lay awake in an almost bright amusement. Did you ever, as a child, play alone in a large cardboard box that a refrigerator came in? Or work alone in a large room? Or at night, when everyone else was asleep? Whatever I say now applies to feelings inside such a box, the box I’m in. No one can possibly know the power of feeling I project inside my carton.

For the next two weeks, the world and all other issues would be omitted. We were two people alone in a hospital room. We allowed no visitors. We had two weeks of near-silence with each other and my increasing helplessness. I tended to tangle the IV and misplace the oxygen tube. As I started to say earlier, I could feel no sensible interest in the future. The moments became extraordinarily dimensionless—not without value but flat and a great deal emptier. When you learn you’re fatally ill, time becomes very confusing, perhaps uninteresting, pedestrian. But my not caring if I lived or died hurt Ellen. And I was grateful that I could indulge my cowardice toward death in terms of living for her.

I remember her arriving back at the hospital that first night after four horrible hours at home, in our apartment alone, racked by waking nightmare. She arrived soon after it got light and had a bed for herself moved into my hospital room.

She said, in an averted way, “I want more time with you.”

And I said, from within my flattened world, “You’re nuts. It isn’t that much fun to live. Now. And you know it.” I sighed. “But if that’s what you want …”

“I do,” she said.

I don’t want to be defensively middle class about this, but it was a middle-class decision I made, nothing glorious, to try to go ahead and have AIDS, live with it, for a while. I felt the doom was bearable. Also I was not, am not, young. I am not being cut down before I have had a chance to live. Most important, I was not and am not alone. I am embarrassed to be ill and to be ill in this way, but no one yet has shown disgust or revulsion. I expected it. To the interns AIDS is medically boring now (and I did not have a recondite opportunistic infection, but the most common one), and outside the hospital it arouses, at least in New York, sympathy and curiosity. I do get the feeling I am a bit on show, or rather my death and moods are. But so what?

Barry, who is very able and very experienced, is surprised that I am not more depressed. He says cheerfully that I am much more upset than I realize. He credits some of the medicines with shielding me, my mood, and warns me that severe unhappiness is coming, but so far it hasn’t come. I have resisted it, I suppose. And my wife is with me every moment. I feel cut off from old age, it’s true, but that’s not like someone young feeling cut off from most of his or her possible life.

To be honest, the effort of writing, and then my age, and the oppressive suffocation of the illness itself, and my sad conviction of the important validity of my ideas (of what my work presents), and my hapless defense of that work had so tired me that I was relieved by the thought of death. But I also wanted to make a defiant gesture at AIDS. So it became a matter of contrary style. The disease and its coercions (like all coercions) were contemptible. I figured that later on I would make meek friends with it while it killed me, but not just yet. This performance startled Ellen, who assumed for a while that I would break down all at once. (I am not sure what I myself expected, but it happened quietly and almost secretly. Ellen would describe her own reaction differently.)

She left her husband for me. She walked out on everything. No one backed her but her children. We have had fifteen years together so far. Some of those years were quite tense, with public attacks that were a bit on the vicious side. Things hadn’t been all that smooth between me and her children or me and my daughter. Some of those years had been unbelievably hard. One of her sons had been very ill, and the public attacks hadn’t let up even while the boy was sick. That first night in the hospital she tried to make up her mind that it was all worth it, but such matters are hard to resolve when you’re alone. She tells me that she felt terrified and lost. She insists that she regrets nothing. This is her discipline and self-assertion when, openly or not, one is in her charge—what she can give you, the power to give, is the chosen motto of her personal constitution. She will be omnipresent because she has to be in order to comfort you within her standards of bestowing comfort. One keeps stumbling on the rocky ground of this half-hidden omnipotence, which is the governing element of any household she runs, any love affair she is in. It is half of every kiss she gives.

Ellen’s secularity is combined with a sense of miracle and of meaningful destiny. She absorbs bad news but it is advisable to offer her hope, a way out, a line of inquiry. She is incredibly self-willed, as I’ve said, incredibly full of getting-on-with-it. Yet there was nowhere to go. She indulged me, followed my uncertain lead. She cried when she learned that she was clear of the virus; she said it depressed her to be so separated from me. And I felt that if I had AIDS, she had the right, perhaps the duty, to leave me; my having that disease suspended all contracts and emotions—it was beyond sacrament and marriage. It represented a new state, in which, in a sense, we did not exist. What we were had been dissolved, as if by radiation or the action of an acid. Perhaps the sacrament remained, but it was between her and her beliefs now: care wasn’t, in my view, owed to me anymore. I wasn’t me, for one thing. And she had suffered enough.

As for me, I would find a way through. I had rarely been ill as a child or an adult, but when I was, it was always serious, nearly fatal. I have been given up by my doctors three times in my life and for a few minutes a fourth time. This time is more convincing but otherwise it is not an unfamiliar or unexplained territory.

I was a hypochondriac, but for a good reason—I could take no medicine, none at all, without extreme, perverse, or allergic reactions. Essentially I never got sick. I was gym-going, hike-taking, cautious, oversensitive to the quality of the air, to heat and cold, noise and odors, someone who felt tireder more quickly than most people because of all these knife-edge reactions, someone who was careful not to get sick, because my allergic reactions to medicines made almost any illness a drastic experience.

I had an extremely stable baseline of mood and of mind, of mental landscape. Well, that’s gone; it’s entirely gone. From the moment my oxygen intake fell to about fifty percent and the ambulance drivers arrived in our apartment with the gurney and the oxygen, from that moment and then in the hospital until now, I have not had even one moment of physical stability. I am filled off-and-on with surf noises as if I were a seashell, my blood seems to fizz and tingle. I have low and high fevers. For a day I had a kind of fever with chills and sweats but with body temperature below normal, at ninety-six degrees. I have choked and had trouble breathing. I have had pleuritis, or pleurisy, in my right lung, an inflammation of the thoracic cavity which feels like a burning stiffness of the muscles and which hurt like hell if I coughed, moved suddenly, or reached to pick something up.

And, of course, one can die at any moment or discover symptoms of some entirely new disease. My life has changed into this death, irreversibly.

But I don’t think the death sentence bothers me. I don’t see why it should more than before. I have had little trouble living with the death-warrant aspect of life until now. I never denied, never hysterically defined the reality of death, the presence and idea of it, the inevitability of it. I always knew I would die. I never felt invulnerable or immortal. I felt the presence and menace of death in bright sunlight and in the woods and in moments of danger in cars and planes. I felt it in others’ lives. Fear and rage toward death for me is focused on resisting death’s soft jaws at key moments, fighting back the interruption, the separation. In physical moments when I was younger, I had great surges of wild strength when in danger—mountain climbing, for instance—or threatened in a fight or by muggers in the city. In the old days I would put my childish or young strength at the service of people who were ill. I would lend them my willpower, too. Death scared me some, maybe even terrified me in a way, but at the same time I had no great fear of death.

As with other children, when I was very young, death was interesting—dead insects, dead birds, dead people. In a middle-class, upper-middle-class milieu, everything connected to real death was odd, I mean in relation to pretensions and statements, projects and language and pride. Death seemed softly adamant, an undoing, a rearrangement, a softly meddlesome and irresistible silence. It was something some boys I knew and I thought we ought to familiarize ourselves with. Early on, and also in adolescence, we had a particular, conscious will not to be controlled by fear of death—there were things we would rather die than do. To some extent this rebelliousness was controlled; to some extent, we could choose our dangers, but not always. All this may be common among the young during a war; I grew up during the Second World War, when confronting unnatural death became a sad routine. And a lot was dependent on locality, and social class, on the defense of the sexual self or the private self against one’s father or in school.

Having accepted death long ago in order to be physically and morally free to some extent, I am not crushed by this final sentence of death, at least not yet, and I don’t think it is denial. Why should it be different now? Ought I to crack up because a bluff has been called? I am sick and exhausted, numbed and darkened, by my approximate dying a few weeks ago from Pneumocystis, and consider death a silence, a silence and a privacy and an untouchability, as no more reactions and opinions, as a relief, a privilege, a lucky and graceful and symmetrical silence to be grateful for. The actual words I used inwardly read ambiguously when written out: it’s about time for silence.

I’m sixty-two, and it’s ecological sense to die while you’re still productive, die and clear a space for others, old and young. I didn’t always appreciate what I had at the time, but I am aware now that accusations against me of being lucky in love were pretty much true and of being lucky sexually, also true. And lucky intellectually and, occasionally, lucky in the people I worked with. I have no sad stories about love or sex.

And I think my work will live. And I am tired of defending it, tired of giving my life to it. I have been a figure of aesthetic and literary controversy, the object of media savagery and ridicule, also at times of praise. I have been sniped at in the gossip-flood of New York and Europe and used up enormous amounts of energy dealing with it all. But I have liked my life. I like my life at present, being ill. I like the people I deal with. I don’t feel I am being whisked off the stage or murdered and stuffed in a laundry hamper while my life is incomplete. It’s my turn to die—I can see that that is interesting to some people but not that it is tragic. Yes, I was left out of some things and was cheated over a lifetime in a bad way, but who isn’t and so what? I had a lot of privileges as well. Sometimes I’m sad about its being over but I’m that way about books and sunsets and conversations. The medicines I take don’t grant my moods much independence, so I suspect these reactions, but I think they are my own. I have been a fool all my life, giving away large chunks of time and wasting years on nothing much. I had a mania for brave talk and some flirtation with or sense of possibility—and then I wanted to lie down and think about it. (Bernard Malamud once said that I had talked away a dozen books I might have written. I never told him how much time I spent lying down and staring at nothing.) And maybe I am being a fool now.

And I have died before, come close enough to dying that doctors and nurses on those occasions said that those were death experiences, the approach to death, a little of death felt from the inside. And I have nursed dying people and been at deathbeds. I nearly died when my first mother did, leaving me practically an orphan at almost two years old. (My real father, Max Weintrub, was an illiterate local junk man, a semipro prizefighter in his youth and unhealably violent; I saw him off and on when I was growing up but never really knew him as a father. I was told that after my mother’s death, he sold me to relatives—the Brodkeys—for three hundred dollars.) As an adult, at one point, I forced myself to remember what I could of the child’s feelings. The feelings I have now are far milder. My work, my notions and theories and doctrines, my pride have conspired to make me feel as I do now that I am ill.

I have always remembered nearly dying when I was seven and had an allergic, hypothermic reaction coming out of anesthesia. When I was thirty, a hepatitis thing was misdiagnosed as cancer of the liver, and I was told I had six weeks to live. The sensations at those various times were not much alike, but the feeling of extreme sickness, of being racked, was and is the same, as is the sense of real death.

I have wondered at times if maybe my resistance to the fear-of-death wasn’t laziness and low mental alertness, a cowardly inability to admit that horror was horror, that dying was unbearable. It feels, though, like a life-giving rebelliousness, a kind of blossoming. Not a love of death but maybe a love of God. I wouldn’t want to be hanged and it would kill my soul to be a hangman but I always hoped that if I were hanged I would be amused and superior, and capable of having a good time somehow as I died—this may be a sense of human style in an orphan, greatly damaged and deadened, a mere sense of style overriding a more normal terror and sense of an injustice of destiny. Certainly, it is a dangerous trait. I am not sensible … At all times I am more afraid of anesthesia and surgery than I am of death. I have had moments of terror, of abject fear. I was rather glad to have those moments. But the strain was tremendous. My feelings of terror have had a scattered quality mostly, and I tended to despise them as petty. I have more fear of cowardice and of being broken by torture than I do of death. I am aware of my vulnerability, of how close I come to being shattered. But next to that is a considerable amount of nerve—my blood parents and real grandparents were said to have been insanely brave, to have had an arrogant sangfroid about their courage and what it allowed them to do. They had, each of them, a strong tropism toward the epic. My mother, before I was born, traveled alone from near Leningrad to Illinois in the 1920s, a journey that, at her social level, took nearly two months. The year before, her older brother had disappeared in transit, perhaps murdered. My father once boxed a dozen men in a row one evening on a bet and supposedly laid all the women under thirty who lined up afterward. Another time, better attested, with two other men he took on a squad of marching local Nazis in St. Louis, twenty-five or thirty men, and won.

One of the things that struck me when I was first told that I had AIDS was that I was cut off from my family inheritance of fatal diseases—the strokes and high blood pressure and cancer and tumors of my ancestors. My medical fate turned out to be quite different.

I felt a bit orphaned again, and idiosyncratic, but strangely also as if I had been invited, almost abducted, to a party, a somber feast but not entirely grim, a feast of the seriously afflicted who yet were at war with social indifference and prejudice and hatred. It seemed to me that I was surrounded by braveries without number, that I had been inducted into a phalanx of the wildly-alive-even-if-dying, and I felt honored that I would, so to speak, die in the company of such people.

What will happen to us? Is death other than silence and nothingness? In my grazing experiences of it, it is that disk of acceptance and of unthreading and disappearance at the bottom of the chute of revenant memories, ghosts and the living, the gauntlet of important recollections through which one is forced in order to approach the end of one’s consciousness. Death itself is soft, softly lit, vastly dark. The self becomes taut with metamorphosis and seems to give off some light and to have a not-quite-great-enough fearlessness toward that immensity of the end of individuality, toward one’s absorption into the dance of particles and inaudibility. Living, one undergoes one metamorphosis after another—often they are cockroach states, inset with moments of passivity with the sense of real death—but they are continuous and linked. This one is a stillness and represents a sifting out of identity and its stories, a breaking off or removal of the self, and a devolution into mere effect and memory, outspread and not tightly bound but scattered among micromotions and as if more windblown than in life. Or this is what I imagine, on the approach.

AIDS had never been one of our serious fears. It was not one of my secret dreads. I am so shaken by what has occurred that I tend to remember crazily or like someone tortured. I have lost much of the discipline of memory, yet I remember what should have seemed significant at the time. Ellen and I were in Berlin and then in Venice, meeting with publishers and translators, and some people—everyone, really—said I was too thin. Ellen began to worry when a blackish, caved-in spot appeared in my right cheek, but I thought it was the macrobiotic diet I was trying to follow. The poetry of being recognized and accepted as an important writer in Berlin and then in Venice while I was sickening in some way I could not understand presents to me a dark beauty of complete wreckage. I think, too, that when I heard the news from Barry there was already in part of my mind some literary sense of death, of suicide, as the appropriate outcome. I had written a novel in one year, a novel I liked, that I was proud of; I had expected the effort to kill me. I was subject to strange exhaustions and was wobbly on airplanes, but beyond that I was strained past my level of strength by the difference in reputation and treatment I received in various countries—great artist here, fool there, major writer, minor fake, villain, virtuoso, jerk, hero.

Life is a kind of horror. It is OK, but it is wearing. Enemies and thieves don’t lay off as you weaken. The wicked flourish by being ruthless even then. If you are ill, you have to have a good lawyer. When you are handed a death sentence, the newly redrawn battle lines are enclosed. Depending on your circumstances, in some cases you have to back off and lie low. You’re weak. Death feels preferable to daily retreat.

Certainly people on the street who smile gently at me as I walk slowly or X-ray attendants calling me darling or lovey are aware of this last thing. A woman I know who died a few years back spoke of the inescapable sympathy for weakness. She hated it. I don’t want to talk about my dying to everyone, or over and over. Is my attitude only vanity—and more vanity—in the end? In a sense, I steal each day, but I steal it by making no effort. It is just there, sunlight or rain, nightfall or morning. I am still living at least a kind of life, and I don’t want to be reduced to an image now, or, in my own mind, feel I am spending all my time on my dying instead of on living, to some satisfying extent, the time I have left.

If you train yourself as a writer to look at these things—this vulnerability, when the balance is gone and the defenses are undone so that you are open to viruses and their shocking haywire excitement—then facing them becomes almost habitual. You will have the real material, and it will arise from this new-to-you, dense memory of being jostled by medical and natural violence to the edge of life.

People like to speak of what really happened…. The New York agreement among people of my sort is that everything about one another’s lives is knowable. You take a few clues, regard them with sophistication, and you know everything. In the end, this is a city that acknowledges no mysteries, one that is set on prying, or getting, or revealing. I find New York talk horrendous, the personal conclusions stupid, the idealization of others’ experience and the demonization of others’ experience hateful and contemptible. And the bottom-lining, the judgments made as if all were known, the lies, the fraud, the infinite oral thuggery here of Jews and Gentiles alike, the cold ambition is, I repeat, unlivable.

What we really have in this city are able people, competent people, who as they rise in the world have more and more complicated professional lives. Quite logically, that eats them up, and the monstrous residue that is left is beyond emotion, but with an appetite for it, and a terrible and terrified longing and unsuitability for it. This monstrous residue is beyond friendship, beyond anything. (It is capable of truly marvelous, if ogreish, companionship.)

I have been lectured on this subject, told I am wrong when I say what dregs they are, what dregs we are, what a creeping madness our adulthood becomes. The above has been denied to me by nearly everyone in New York. But surely they must know.

I have no shyness now.

I can without hysterics describe the anal diddling that probably led to the transmission of this virus and to my death: I did go to bed with men, nameless, not famous, men, who could not ask me for anything or blame me for anything or expect revelation from me. I could offer a list of the men I have had (or the women I have had). But the real truth is that in this country sex is not yet regarded as a fact of life.

The arts in the twentieth century have not pictured the reality of actual sex and actual love as they are in life, on actual days, over actual time, but instead have tended to recoin them as, oh, socialist bliss, or as paradise before the nightmare strikes, or as nonexistent (Joyce and Beckett, the sexual yet sexless Irishmen), or as obsession and victimization (Freud and Proust), or as some idyll of heat and whatnot. For me, the greatest portrayer of high-art sexlessness was Balanchine, because he captured and beautified so physically the rage and longing and the attempts to escape loneliness. And then there is Eliot; one should remember that Lawrence was driven out of England while dry, sexless Eliot came to be idolized. And perhaps rightly. Sex, after all, is unwise: look at me. The foolish nature of sexual love is there in front of you, always. Civic duty, ambition, even personal freedom are opposed to it. One appreciates the urge to sanitize and control, the punitive framework and the denial of sexual authenticity. (Think of Jon Vickers’s singing, for instance. He caused embarrassment in American audiences as Sinatra never did. He caused embarrassment in the way Billie Holiday did—people sometimes called her impact sinister.)

But what happens in a competitive city, among people who are clever imitators, students, really (more or less sedulous apes), is that the paucity of such authenticity leads to the constant manufacture of what you might call a sore-nerved and sensitive counterfeit sex. Counterfeit sex is a large part of what New York is. People here rebel by means of a jealous promiscuity, a jealously restless sense of the possible happiness of others. What we have and live with is the institutionalization of sexual terror and sexual envy.

As for me, I will say peevishly that I was never accepted as gay by anyone, including someone who lived with me and claimed to be a lover. I did think that, for me, no decent relations were possible with women back then; the women were rotten with their self-expectation, their notions of femininity, their guilt. And I saw no male role I could play that was acceptable to me. Toward the end of my experience of homosexuality, before I met Ellen, I underwent the most outrageous banishment to a role of sheer, domineering, hated and worshipped masculinity.

I was never handsome. But until I was fifty, I almost never wore clothes in private. My nakedness had all sorts of meanings, including those of a goodish body for a vain man with insufficient money to buy good clothes. And a body to counterweigh the lost head. I stopped being interested in my body five years or so ago when I published Stories in an Almost Classical Mode—it was as neat as that. Now I have the strangest imaginable tie to my own flesh; my body to me is like a crippled rabbit that I don’t want to pet, that I forget to feed on time, that I haven’t time to play with and get to know, a useless rabbit kept in a cage that it would be cruel to turn loose. It doesn’t have a prayer for survival. Or any chance of an easy death. It is mere half-eaten prey. Like a captured snake or rabbit in an Audubon.

But I know people, crippled and uncrippled, who have felt that way all their lives. So I am not complaining now. I am even a bit amused at the irony that I might complain. I am only saying that I am prejudiced toward a nakedness in print—toward embodiment in black-and-white.

Not constantly but not inconstantly either, underneath the sentimentality and obstinacy of my attitudes, are, as you might expect, a quite severe rage and a vast, a truly extensive terror, anchored in contempt for you and for life and for everything. I believe that the world is dying, not just me. And fantasy will save no one. The deathly unreality of Utopia, the merchandizing of Utopia is wicked, deadly really.

Now Ellen and I traded places on physical strength. I wanted to be a good sport about it. In what I once called our regular life, because of the disparity in our sizes (she is nearly a foot shorter and weighs at least sixty pounds less), we had been physically close in a defiant way encoded with all sorts of mutual mockeries and defenses against each other—all of which were still present, in ghostly irony, in pallid nostalgia. The sensitive and tactful nursing she did included a startling respect for what was left of my strength. (This re-created me at moments, as when I woke from a nap in pain.) She wasn’t tearful about its disappearance. She watched it ebb with tenderness. To be honest, it kept as a presence in the raw air a quasi-sexual intimacy.

I understood it but not entirely. The pattern was just the two of us in a room, with her, in her usual defiance of ordinariness, performing a honeymoon-of-death observance with a kind of gravity, a bit like a Japanese ceremonial occasion. Extinction was just a piece of shit off to one side: who gave a shit about death? Everything that mattered was in the pride and utter seriousness of the ceremony. It was a kind of snobbery toward death.

An American male idiom is this fucking intimacy. (The phrase can, as you know, imply a kind of impatience with intimacy as well as the sexual nature of it, depending on your voice and on whether you smile when you say it.) In Ellen, who reconstituted me, this was expressed as a kind of merciful echo of my moods. She was hostess in the narrow hospital room to my mothers, my mothers’ ghosts or spirits, and to the line of fathers, the four millennia of unkillable Jewish males in their conceited stiffneckedness, then to all the dead and dying literary figures, then to all the characters who die in the books I most admire (I can’t bear death scenes in movies)—Prince Andrei and Hadji Murad and Proust’s narrator’s grandmother—and then to all the widowed women back to Andromache or Hecuba. And she made room for the nurses and the nurses’ aides, for the interns and the residents, for Barry. I have never seen such intent or such subtle seduction: I cannot even begin to describe the silent promises, the hidden blessings she promised them, she promised them all, the ghosts, too. And Death, standing over me and stirring up the muck that refused to be the bottom in the onslaught of the revolting pneumonia.

I lived through Ellen’s will from time to time during those days. I had her agility and subtlety vicariously. I had that merciful depth of her female self at my disposal. It was like that as long as she was awake, anyway, and as long as her strength held out. At the same time I felt a bit cheated, while she was awake, of the mortal solitude that I expected to meet with at what I took to be the end.

Our regular lives, our once-usual life together, had been reproduced in a truncated form in a hospital room: flowers, fruit, a newspaper, quibbling with each other, a certain seclusion, a habit of judging—the usual things, even at death’s door, in death’s presence.

But it was a hospital room, and I was dying, and I didn’t have many private emotions. The husband in this marital scene was drugged to the teeth with prednisone, a steroid that walls off physical pain and depression by creating a strange pre-craziness of its own. I felt a rather awful clarity of humor, a nauseated comic sense; I was in an odd state. And the wife in the scene was overly gentle, sickroom gentle, terrified and obstinately hopeful—not her usual self. She was afraid of gloom in this well-intentioned parody-caricature of our former life. The moments of grief I had were immediately contagious—well, the room was very small.

We would hold hands and I would say, “Oh shit” or “This is shitty,” and we would cry a bit. It seemed like a sufficient amount of poetry. I would say, “Well, who cares?” or “I don’t like this mushy stuff. Let’s stop.”

Equally invasive were the tender moments, Ellen bathing me and turning me, ninety-seven-pound Ellen, or changing the bed. Or helping me into the bathroom. I had to be propped on her and on the wheeled pole of the IV. I was determined to spare her my excrement. My head lolled. My legs gave way.

I had no strength, but it is true that willpower can do a great deal. It can’t halt or cure AIDS, but it can mock death and weakness: it can mock these things sometimes. Our bedtime talk or our toilet talk had to avoid sentiment; I had no strength for sentiment. I showed off for Ellen. I talked about business and money, about the information I’d negotiated from the doctor.

But she was the one with hope. She was the one with the sense of drama. She was the one who, with some, ah, degree of untruth, exclaimed on being told that she was HIV-negative, “Oh, I don’t want to be clear. I want to have it, too.”

An emotional remark. A bit of a marital lie, of marital manipulation. But true enough in that if I decided to kill myself she was still determined, so she said, to kill herself, too.

She wanted to die of what I was going to die of.

“That’s bullshit, honey. It isn’t what I want. Just can it, OK?”

I am peculiarly suited to catastrophe because of my notions and beliefs; I am accustomed to reconstituting myself in the middle of catastrophe. And my ideas, my language, support me in the face of disastrous horror over and over. I am like a cockroach, perhaps—with vanity, now with AIDS, with a cowardice much greater than that of Kafka’s Samsa.

Ellen is not like that. She has an identity, of the real, familied sort. (She has written two novels, both of which illustrate this.) A good many people, including me, care about her. Her children are never alone in the world, and that sometimes irks them. She was once rich and is at times so grateful to have her own feelings without reference to money that she can seem happy in the manner of an escaped convict. She is gullible toward bad news in a rebelliously saintly way that tends to irritate me. Her rebelliousness extends throughout her existence—it is toward God and death, toward society, toward men. How she reconciles that with the propriety she manifests day in and day out is beyond me. So little has been written (or at least published) by women who feel as she does that she has had to be, as a woman, her own prophet. Her code is unworded. You can categorize her emotion quite easily but you cannot define it. You cannot ever demand it. Or even trick her into it. She will let some people trick her, but she has a bored, brittle quality then. I tell her we are cowards and artists and are in flight and are and have to be awful people to get our work done. She ignores me when I talk this way. She does and does not believe what I say or what I believe. “I cannot live like that,” is what she says. I mean, I can see, often, the degree of enlistment in her being with me.

I have a number of kinds of humility, but I am arrogant. I am semi-famous, and I see what I see. I examine everything that is put in front of me, like a jeweler. I am a Jew from the Midwest, not at all like a New York Jew. I am so arrogant that I believe a formulation only if it has the smell or lift of inspiration. I have never, since childhood, really expected to be comforted.

I inherit from my blood father and my blood mother and her father considerable physical strength. One time, as I said earlier, when I was seven, I nearly died, because of an allergic reaction to an anesthetic, the ether derivatives then in use. (My real mother returned in a hallucination, and I found it unbearable.) I went into convulsions and, according to the machines and measurements, I died: my heart stopped, my breathing stopped. Some young doctors and nurses and one old nurse saved me. I can remember their bustling labor, even the nervous smell coming off them. I had been more or less legitimately dead, but I managed to get up and walk partway across the hospital room that evening. My adoptive father called me Rasputin for a while: “Nothing can kill you.”

Sick or well, all my life I’ve had enough strength for whatever I set out to do. But this time, no. That degree of strength was over. Now I knew how my parents felt when their strength failed. It is extremely irritating. Certain melodramatic speeches do come to mind: “Kill me and get it over with.” They both said that. I said it once or twice myself, but with more irony. I would save my strength and then leap—biliously, worm-in-the-muddishly—into speech: “This goddamn hospital bed is so uncomfortable you might as well kill me and get it over with.”

I was always aware mentally of the rather awful certainty of death, of the physical, sensory fact, but only in words. I mean the mind looked on, weakly, and saw the situation as a folkish joke, like a newspaper headline: THREAT OF DEATH FOR HAROLD, or HAROLD IS GOING TO GET IT THIS TIME, or H. R. BRODKEY FINDS WHAT IT’S LIKE TO SUCK MUD. With a subheadline: THIS IS ROTTEN, SAYS EX-AMATEUR ATHLETE. And then the subheads: “The Statistics Look Bad,” and “Killer-Diller Pneumonia Strikes ‘New Yorker’ Writer.”

My adoptive parents were ill for most of my childhood, and I was aware of the implacable dissimilarity between the people and events in the active world and the people and events in the grip of medical reality, the medicines scouring and wrecking, or surgical intervention doing that, or radiation. My adoptive father, Joe Brodkey, had raged and grieved. My blood father, Max, had suffocated—he had something that was described to me as senile asthma: the asthma starved his heart, and his heart gave out. And he had raged and cursed, as did my adoptive mother, Doris, who had cancer and told all those around her that they were getting on her nerves. I was prepared for the irritability or even madness of being a patient, but except for the suffocation, none of those things was happening to me. I felt very little of anything, I mean as comment. It was a relief to have the illness unmasked, to have Death be openly present. It was a relief to get away from the tease and rank of imputed greatness and from the denial and attacks and from my own sense of things, of worldly reality and of literary reality—all of it. In the last few years, mental and physical revulsion toward the literary empire-builders and the masters of fakery had grown to the point where hiding and containing it had been a bit like having tumors that cleared up whenever I was upstate in the wilds or in Europe. The inadequacies of the work these people did and in the awful work they fostered, the alternate revulsion and pity they aroused, I had had enough of. It was truly a perceptible relief to be out of their reach and into another sort of experience, even if it was terminal.

It was a relief to have the future not be my speculative responsibility anymore and to escape from games of superiority and inferiority.

Yet I couldn’t sleep; I was able on the prednisone only to doze in a kind of shallow unconsciousness, and perhaps in fear, I dozed better by day than at night. I believe in sleep. In the past, when I was ill, or even just sad, I would sleep it off.

When Ellen slept, I expected to meet, as it were, my own grief and mortal loneliness. When I dozed, I expected phantoms and nightmares. It was not like that. I woke each time precariously placed in horizontal stillness, protecting my heart and lungs as I had with my posture when I was awake. I woke aware that I’d dreamed, and there was a fraction’s hesitation before it became obvious I would not remember my dreams, that they had been about death and that my waking self would not reproduce any part of them for me. But I knew they had been gentle. I woke without the slightest confusion; in my weakness I knew who I was and where I was and what my predicament was. I did not once imagine myself well—or safe. I woke in a secondary mental chamber, as if I were an Olympic runner of illness and death, one who would lose this time but who had trained off and on throughout his life for this. And so I woke prepared to play the day’s game again.