Free Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath by Andrew Holleran Page B

indiscriminate flu, leaving each person alone in a solitary confinement of fear. Conversation, like so much else in New York these past few years, was not much fun.
    Perhaps that was why I called O. each time—O. was out of New York as much as he was in it and would be able to describe not only his trip to London, but place in context, perhaps, all that was happening here. “Are you in town?” he said one evening in 1985. “Come by and have supper with us!” Yet the park I walked across that twilight seemed deserted now—a few men sat on the usual benches in the Rambles, seemingly as ignorant as the rats scampering across the path in front of them. And when I got to O.’s, only three of us—O., his boyfriend, and I—sat down in a corner of that large white room, at a small table by the window, in a shrunken pool of lamplight; the rest of the apartment in shadow, like some house whose owners have died, and whose furniture is all under sheets. We ended up discussing, after the amusing topics (the topics that had formed, I realized now in retrospect, the entire menu of our lives), the gloom of the city. “Most of my friends,” O. said in a weary voice, “are having trouble negotiating middle age.” What did he mean by this? I wondered, even as I admired the expression. The city was so full of secrets now—a minefield, and we the mines—I could not be sure what he was referring to. I finally took it on its face: O. meant that the plague was not the only thing happening to New York. Time had passed, too, and even O. had a distinguished silver streak down one side of his thick black hair. AIDS and middle age were but two very different versions of the same thing: dying. The first beyond our power of comprehension, the second all too familiar. So this is what even O. has come to, I remember thinking: middle age. A few months later, I learned this remark was more subtle and detached than that, was only his dry and characteristic way of alluding to something I did not know at the time: While in Japan—fascinated, observant, doing business—he had discovered he had AIDS.
    When I returned to New York that fall, I called O. from a pay phone on Thirty-fourth Street. It was the middle of an October afternoon; I gathered he was at home alone and asked if I could stop by. I wanted to see O. for several reasons: One, I always wanted to see him; two, I wanted to learn the stage of his illness; and three, I thought I’d better see him one more time—combining, in one uneasy mixture, the past, present, and future. The past: the good times, the happiness. The present: How far along is he? The future: Why didn’t you see him, tell him how you feel, let him know you care for him? (A friend who runs errands, sleeps over, takes someone to the hospital, does not have to say this. Only those who don’t wonder how they can.) The park was empty when I walked through it. I had been thinking since I heard the news I should write or phone O. about his diagnosis, but had been unable to find the words. And even now as I walked west, there seemed to be nothing to say that would sound right. I hoped in the act of visiting him that words would make themselves known. I rang the doorbell; the buzzer released the door; I went up the stairs, my heart accelerating not only with the climb; I heard a door open before I reached the top, and a moment later, there was O.—in his socks, looking much the same. We imagine from a distance all sorts of things. I walked in with the familiar pleasure of a child entering a chocolate shop—a place in which everything pleases—surviving even this, and we sat in the big white room and talked.
    We talked about the novel he was reading that lay open on the table between us—a historical trilogy about the Balkans by a British writer. Then about mutual friends. And his trip to Tokyo. It was about the Japanese he talked at length in the way I loved: O. was such a good observer. He looked a bit haggard, but not