Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir by Paul Monette

like a tortoise. Inside its armor crouched the "group of two" that Freud calls a marriage. Not career, not the past, the waste of errands or the state of the planet. Just us.
    I was taking Roger's temperature every couple of hours now, shaking down the thermometer till I had a twinge like tennis elbow. One crazed afternoon I accidentally broke the thermometer against a door and fell to my knees keening, trying to pick up the shards as the mercury beaded into the jade-green carpet. I was cooking in twice a day, shopping at Irvine Ranch, bewildered by the sunny vigor of what Randall Jarrell calls the "basketed, identical/Food-gathering flocks," with their nine-dollar purple peppers and the BMWs in the parking lot. Already I went about in public as if I were on the moon. I had to ventriloquize my way through various meetings at the studio and with Alfred. I began calling my brother late at night in Pennsylvania, needing his constant reassurance after Roger went to bed.
    "Paul, it's not AIDS," Bob said over and over, though he knew the tragic randomness of things far better than I. He was born with spina bifida, and had been in a wheelchair all his adult life. Six years younger than I, he spent months at a time in hospitals as a child. I have a vivid memory of visiting him with my parents in Springfield at the Shriners Hospital. Because I was under sixteen, I had to stand in the bushes and peer in a window and wave at him, lost in a ward of suffering. He's one indomitable character, my brother—an accountant's accountant and a teacher, married to his high school sweetheart, Brenda. Throughout the skirmish over my novel, Bob had been the buffer zone between me and my family, the one who understood being gay, who understood being a writer. In the summer of '83 a drunk plowed into his car head-on and put him in the hospital for a month. Oh, had he been there.
    All through the week of March 4, Roger's calendar is full of precise notations: 2.0 Godino will, 0.3 Scott Redman. The hours of a lawyer are broken down into tenths, and he kept the record in his calendar because he was home in bed, but he wouldn't stop working. The blood-gas results proved to be in the normal range, which was a relief, yet there was clearly some kind of infection in the lung. The issue at week's end was whether or not that infection was "interstitial." Pneumocystis carinii—the deadly AIDS pneumonia, so-called PCP—is an interstitial infection, which means it invades the interstices between the lung sacs. A battery of x-rays seemed to indicate no interstitial involvement, and this was taken to be good news, especially by our doctor friends, Joe Perloff and Dell Steadman. Joe is a research cardiologist, Dell an eye surgeon. We were pinning them down for opinions in matters that weren't their field, but they were generous here as they would be throughout. Once I heard the interstices were clear, I tossed the Pneumocystis file away. You become very primordial about data. What you need you eat whole, like a python consuming a rat. What doesn't apply right here right now is moontalk.
    Thursday or Friday a letter arrived from Craig. The doctor in Houston had confirmed the diagnosis: AIDS by reason of KS, no treatment at this time. Craig was writing to eight or ten friends to break the news, but otherwise he wanted to keep it private. He would widen the circle at his own pace. It couldn't have been more lucid or dignified, and I read it to Rog like a bulletin off the Kafka wire service. When is enough , I kept thinking, as if every tragedy mounting up would finally satisfy some savage god.
    Despite the positive sign on the interstitial front, Roger still wasn't getting any better. Still not worse, but Cope decided it would only be prudent to have Roger come in for a bronchoscopy, in which a flexible tube is inserted in the lung for a specimen of tissue. The bronc has become such a fact of all our lives now, it's hard to recall there was a time I'd never heard of