Free Nightswimmer by Joseph Olshan Page A

haven’t you?” I said finally.
    A nod.
    “You never bothered putting the machine back on.”
    “I know.”
    “Don’t you like getting messages?”
    “People have my work number; they can always leave word for me there.”
    “So where did you go?”
    “Down to Pennsylvania … a friend of mine passed away. The funeral was held in his hometown.”
    “Young?” I said, which tactfully meant “AIDS?”
    You nodded.
    “What a shame,” I said.
    At your lead we’d turned off onto Twelfth Street and traveled west toward the Hudson. And then I had the oddest sense of the air around my ears warping as something whizzed by. A thudding sound echoed from the hubcap of a parked car. Somebody had thrown a rock.
    We both jerked to a halt and saw the shadowy forms of people standing under a street lamp next to a warehouse. One of them grabbed something that looked like a pipe, banged on a car windshield until a horizontal rain of green shards showered the street like crushed ice. “Hey, Sean—ice princess!” somebody said. A warble of laughter echoed through the street as they vanished into the alleyway.
    You shook your head dumbfounded and then looked at me, alarmed.
    “What’s all that about?” I asked.
    “How do I know what it’s all about? They’re obviously drunk.”
    “Cut the bullshit. Why did they call you that?”
    You frowned at me and said grimly, “Your guess is as good as mine.” Hesitating another moment, you eventually said, “But I think I recognize one or two of them from the funeral. They all seem to know one another.”
    “So what’s that got to do with you?”
    “You certainly ask a lot of questions.”
    “Come on, what’s going on here? What’s the story?”
    You sighed. “I dated the guy, the guy who died, for a while.”
    “How long ago?”
    “We met around a year ago. It took a few months to get involved. The last time I saw him was way back in February.”
    I couldn’t help asking, “Are you at all worried about yourself, your health, I mean?”
    You shook your head slowly as you fitted the toe of your tennis shoe on a single fragment of glass that had managed through the impact to scatter like a seed as far as where we stood. You tried to break it down even further, but it refused to pulp. “I recently got tested again … I was negative.”
    I waited for you to ask me my status, and when you finally did I stammered, “I’ve never taken the test.”
    “How come?”
    Like a recording on an answering machine, I announced how there was no tried and true early intervention, how for years I’d been practicing sexual behavior that assumed either I or my partner might be HIV-positive. That there were just too many opinions of what safe sex was, too many variable possibilities of becoming infected. Which meant, if one stayed single, running on the treadmill of having to get tested every six months. HIV-negative or -positive were labels that reminded me of Jews being constrained to wear yellow stars during World War II. No matter what anybody said, HIV-positive still spelled discrimination—outside as well as within the gay community. For the sad fact remained that many HIV-negative people were finding it difficult to make love to an otherwise healthy HIV-positive man. This made the otherwise healthy HIV-positives feel like outcasts.
    And finally I explained that, for myself, keeping my HIV status a mystery made me live harder, kept me aware that I could not necessarily count on being in the world for more than the next few years and let me identify with both camps.
    You were looking straight ahead, toward the West Side Highway, and I almost thought that you’d lost the thread of our conversation. But then you said, “Sounds like a lot of justification to me, Will. Sounds like you’re just afraid of getting it—getting the test.”
    It was difficult to disagree, because I knew there was some truth in what you said.
    We started walking again and the silence held sway over us