Free Lucky Us by Joan Silber

young, brisk guy with a shaved head and a bow tie. He was too jovial for my taste.I went with her to the office, and she didn’t faint this time. When the needle went in, she shut her eyes. I thought she might be praying. I looked at the blood going into the ampoule and I thought,
please, give her more time
.
    And when we went back the next week, Dr. Bowtie was even more cheery. Elisa’s CD4-cell count was 720, not that far below normal, and her viral load was 5,300, not a big deal. Elisa didn’t say a thing. I think part of her had hoped they would find out the whole thing was just a big mistake. She looked disappointed. “I’m very pleased,” the doctor kept saying.
    I asked a few direct questions, since Elisa, who was so gabby as a rule, wasn’t piping up. What drugs was he going to put her on? Maybe none. It was up to Elisa. Some doctors still said hit-early-and-hit-hard but with someone like Elisa, who’d probably been infected for a few years, his own philosopy was to wait until there were symptoms, or until the counts started moving in the wrong direction. What did Elisa think? The drugs were no picnic to take and once you were on them you really shouldn’t go off or you’d become resistant. Elisa?
    â€œThat’s it, right?” Elisa said. “Are we done?”
    She was out of her seat while he was still explaining.
    F OR A MONTH I had comforted myself by thinking about how powerful the medication would be, and I took it hard that she wasn’t getting anything. Didn’t she want to think about it more? “That’s the last thing I want,” she said.
    This was not a passing mood, it turned out. You could not mention the words viral, immune, or positive in front of Elisa without her saying, “Will you stop this right now, please?”
    How could I stop? I was pretty obsessed with the subject. At night or on my lunch hour I worked my way through books with titles like
Viral Sex
or
HIV Infection: The Facts You Need to Know;
I got very devoted to a magazine called
POZ
; I read doctors’ accounts of their time in clinics; I read guides to spiritual uplift. Hardest of all were the AIDS memoirs, a genre that had risen in the eighties and peaked in the mid-nineties, just before the new drugs; these books were often very beautiful but I could only get through them by constantly noting the ways the people depicted were different from Elisa and how many years ago anyone had died. Elisa herself asked why I had to read this crap. The answer was that I couldn’t stay away. I would start some mystery novel and find myself instead sneaking looks at the latest copy of
Treatment Issues
.
    â€œWhat did you read before?” Elisa said.
    Our bookshelves were lined with what I’d read before, but they were like hobbies from my boyhood, trivia I didn’t have time for now. For her part, Elisa wanted to read
Vogue
and watch the
X-Files
and reruns of
Law and Order
. She had poked around a little in my piles of data at first, but no more.
    â€œIf you don’t mind,” she said, “I’d like to be a regular person in my spare time. Get this out of my sight, please.”
    It is hard to get anything out of anyone’s sight in a two-room apartment, and I didn’t think she meant this literally. But she did. I’d look for hours for the book I was reading and discover she had put this month’s
ARTnews
over it to hide its ugly face.
    â€œDenial is sort of out of style these days,” I said.
    â€œWho’s denying anything? Didn’t I go tell the whole world?” Elisa said. “I just don’t want this
literature
staring at me all the time.”
    â€œYou could be a little better informed,” I said. “You don’t want to be ignorant when you have to make decisions.”
    â€œGabe,” she said, “it’s my goddamned disease.”
    I HAD NEVER before felt like Elisa’s parent. People thought