Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir by Paul Monette Page B

so weak and overwhelmed by then, and the hardest thing to watch him lose in the early days was the spring in his step. He'd always had a quickness about him, a vigorous enthusiasm that I can still see in picture after picture out of the past, like a great store of potential energy. The wellspring of it wasn't athletic; it flowed from a joy of life. In the steepening decline of the previous months he'd lost the physical edge of that delight—lost it for good. Though he had reservoirs of deeper and sweeter tones to compensate, I missed the boyish energy most. Perhaps because mine went with it.
    Sunday night, Vertigo happened to be on television. We'd both seen it decades ago but never since, especially not with the drift of learned exegesis that has developed around the fifties Hitchcock. We lay close in bed to watch it and were soon transported into its spiral subtext. The worry about tomorrow seeped away a little, or maybe it was just a relief to watch somebody else—in this case Jimmy Stewart—be torn apart by suppressed hysteria.
    On the way to UCLA on Monday morning, driving along Sunset to the west side, Roger asked quietly: "What if it's really serious?"
    Despite the positive talk all week—all month—and despite the fact that my last nickel was riding on denial. I don't know if I answered the right question, but I know my voice was steadier than I would've thought possible. Rog, I said, you have to understand how much everyone loves you. He had nobody out there even approaching enemy status; I'd never heard anyone say an unkind or quarrelsome word about him. The same could not be said of me, by a long shot. I gave a little encomium on his talent for friendship and loyalty, the idea being that everyone would be there for him if the going got tough. I'd learned this tactic of human grounding from Roger himself, who would always be saying as we drove away from a dinner party, about someone I hadn't even noticed, "Such a nice man. So unpretentious." Unless we were driving home from a migrainous Hollywood party, in which case he might grumble about some hustling producer or other: "Too noisy. So full of himself."
    I can't really separate the March 11 check-in on the tenth floor of the medical center from a dozen others. Amateurs still at the system, I expect we appeared like two meek refugees, with the overnight bag and a briefcase full of work. The tenth floor at UCLA is called the Wilson Pavilion, all private rooms and food prepared to order, the carpeted veneer of a hotel corridor not quite masking the naked hightech sick gear. There was a waiting room across from 1028, dedicated to Nat King Cole, where we plunked the parents down with their thousand-page potboilers. I stayed with Roger throughout the day, working in fits and starts on The Manicurist, as the interns came in and drew his blood.
    We would both grow grimly accustomed to the first day of a hospitalization, with the interns sweeping in as if by revolving door, trying to look serious in spite of their comical youth, mad with backed-up things to do and racing like the White Rabbit. There would come a time when I would take over this phase, give the tedious history, answer the bald questions: Are you a homosexual? Are you or have you ever been an IV drug abuser? On March 11 I couldn't tell one intern from the next, intern from resident. I didn't realize that in a teaching hospital like UCLA every patient is one more unit to cover as they cram for the test of their budding careers. And here in the presence of a new disease, each kid doctor wanted an A. But remember, Roger was only supposed to be there overnight, so I held them all at arm's length and resisted differentiating.
    Roger bore the process very well, and we seemed to be taking a proper stand of firmness in saying he was feeling not too bad. Not sick enough, not sick enough —I kept repeating Cope's phrase. It was still so, wasn't it? The pulmonary man came in to explain how the bronchoscopy worked.