Free And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition by Randy Shilts

than reassurances of liberal tolerance, he thought, the New Yorkers would get the shaft.
    Late August
    V IRGINIA B EACH , V IRGINIA
    The psychic sat stoically listening to Nick recount his problems. Nick’s steel-gray eyes betrayed his desperation. He had been sick all year now. Would anything help?
    Enno Poersch had wanted his younger lover to try the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, but Nick instead made the trip to the psychic healer in the Shenandoah Valley. The psychic turned on the portable tape recorder and lapsed into a trance. “You are suffering from toxoplasmosis,” the psychic said, finally.
    Nick didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.
    The psychic spelled it out, but that didn’t help much. Toxoplasmosis, it turned out, was some cat disease. Big help.
    After his return to New York City, Nick stayed with a friend while Enno closed up the house on Ocean Walk. Though Enno remained optimistic, Nick deteriorated rapidly. Just rising from his bed required a herculean effort of thought and strength. First, Nick would consciously take some moments to make the decision to rise; there was no longer any spontaneous physical movement. Once decided, he would set about each separate act required in rising, from moving his legs, and his back, to each movement required to put on his shoes and pants. By September, such a process of rising and dressing consumed an hour. When Nick walked, every step commanded more conscious effort, placing one foot in front of the other. At times, Nick looked as though he would collapse from lack of support.
    Most frightening to Enno were the bizarre changes in Nick’s body. His frame seemed to be curling in upon itself. Nick became pigeon-toed while his trunk hunched over, his shoulders turning toward each other as if he were returning to some macabre and wasted fetal position.
    Nick’s friend was right, Enno realized. Nick was dying. He replayed the psychic’s tape, trying to scour some clue that might resurrect his friend. The cassette again revealed only that strange word, spelled out slowly by the psychic: “T-O-X-O-P-L-A-S-M-O-S-I-S.”

4
FORESHADOWING
    September 1980
    C OPENHAGEN
    Gasping, struggling for breath, the thirty-six-year-old fought against suffocation in his small, neat room in the Rigshospitalet. His palms were flushed light blue from lack of oxygen. The chart dangling from the foot of his bed had categorized the illness in a noncategory: unable to find specific diagnosis. By now, the young man’s doctor, Jan Gerstoft, knew there was little he could do except watch his patient die.
    Gerstoft knew why the agricultural engineer was left to so fiercely struggle for oxygen; that was not the mystery. Microscopic protozoa were filling the tiny air sacs of the man’s lungs. A typical man has 300 million of these air pockets where the oxygen from inhaled breath eases into the bloodstream as part of the body’s most basic fueling process. The air sacs, Gerstoft knew, also offer a warm, even tropical climate for the unseen Pneumocystis carinii organism.
    This newly discovered protozoan had been found in guinea pigs back in 1910 by a Brazilian scientist, Dr. Carini. Three years later, doctors at the Pasteur Institute deduced that it lived quite comfortably in the lungs of ordinary Paris sewer rats. Not until 1942, however, was the tiny creature found to be living in people. A few years later, the first known outbreaks of pneumonia caused by the Pneumocystis carinii organism were reported in the orphanages of postwar Europe. Subsequent studies showed that the insidious protozoan, which traces its heritage directly to the most primitive one-celled animals from which all life evolved, can be found just about everywhere in the world’s inhabited terrain. It is one of tens of thousands of creatures that are easily held in check by people’s normally functioning immune systems.
    Immune problems were what had always presaged the appearance of Pneumocystis pneumonia, whether among