Prelude to a Scream (12 page)

Stanley shifted in the wheelchair, stuck out his hand again, and retrieved the beer bottle.

The two great-grandmothers at the kitchen table murmured approvingly.

Stanley applied the mouth of the bottle to his own mouth and turned it up. The beer filled his mouth, surfed a shrimp down his throat, and left his tongue and cheeks tingling with spices and bubbles and coolness.

When he turned down the bottle he exclaimed, “Ahhhhh!” and smiled broadly.

Tseng, Hop Toy, his wife, the two old ladies at the kitchen table and Fong, watching from the open front door, cheered and applauded.

The last shot of morphine that Iris had kindly administered Stanley, just before Hop Toy had wheeled him out the door, was nearly worn off now, but the irritability that came along with its deliquescence was nowhere to be remarked. He had a few bottles of pills in a pouch slung over the side of the wheelchair, but he would take them only later, much later tonight, when Hop Toy and his wife and daughter and all of his neighbors and their children had gone home, when the pain of the unexpected incision in his lower back would come to reassert itself—along with the solitary habituations of whiskey, television, insomnia, now complemented by the enforced contemplation of his looming mortality.

The next week, maybe the week after, he wasn't sure when or how, but, one day soon, he would begin to seek a certain woman about a certain kidney.

Fucking Up At Someone Else's Expense

Chapter Ten

E
XCEPTING A FEW PROPS, THE
C
ITY
C
LINIC FOR
S
EXUALLY
T
RANSMITTED
Diseases looked like any other over-used and understaffed information dump run by a metropolitan government. Given the microfiche viewer and a few rolls of plans, the interchangeable bureaucrats and computers, olive drab wastebaskets and four-color cat posters, the water dispenser that sounds like the first aqualung, fluorescent lights that hum like a tramline, the vast indestructible linoleum floor that undulates over its post-quake substrate like the swell on a checkerboard sea, the ringing telephones, the mutter of a hundred hushed voices, monuments of paper, and the terrible clock staring down on it all—the clinic might just as easily have been the bureau at which to apply for a building or parking or parade permit, a dispensation from jury duty, or to find a map to any gas line in town.

Since the city wide ban on smoking in the workplace (“Effective February 1, 1994: To get help dial 1-800-QUIT NOW…”) the waiting room to which smoking previously had been ghettoed had assumed the exhausted neutral air of a neglected solarium in a convalescent hospital, where a dying ficus drooped in a corner like a badly laundered shirt next to a rack of two-color pamphlets vaunting the appropriate issues—just about everything that can happen to a human body as a result of unprotected sex.

Waiting for test results without smoking while reading about how your appendages might be rotting from the inside out requires nerves of Kevlar. To alleviate suspense for the literate and ennui for the illiterate, the City Clinic for Sexually Transmitted Diseases had commissioned a videotaped lecture for its waiting patients, entitled “A Brief, Illustrated History of Sexually Transmitted Diseases,” narrated by a noted Mark Twain impersonator.

But what distinguished this waiting room from those of other municipal bureaus was the litter of pink squares of paper strewn about its floor by day's end. Lending a distinctly parimutuel aspect to the room, without the smells of cigars and horse manure, these particular pink slips told a remarkably analogous tale of chance, misfortune, and the miraculous.

A preliminary interview between case worker and client precipitated such a sheet of pink paper, with a varying number of its pre-printed boxes checked according to the tests required. Upon concluding this interview, the patient carried the test requests to a nurse within the warren of examining rooms at the opposite end of the building—thereby passing again through the waiting room, with its street exit.

HIV testing had become a standard request on the form. Depending on symptoms described or exhibited there were many other tests, none no more unpleasant than the drawing of blood. But no test was so nerve-wracking as that for the presence of the human immunodeficiency virus, with its freight of imminent doom. Thus at the end of a given day, the litter of pink slips represented a sum-total of the persons who had lost their nerve at the last moment, who had decided not to follow through with the HIV test, spontaneously shedding the pink form and its onerous potential, preferring to hit the door to the street beyond which fresh air might be greedily inhaled, and with it the dubious comfort of an ambiguous future.

Stanley had been here three months before. Now he was back, because, until three weeks ago, outside of some functionary or computer inside this clinic, nobody else in the world could know that his blood type was O-Negative.

He had quickly divined the meaning of the pink litter. He'd made a little joke to himself concerning the cliché of what a pink slip meant to somebody who had a regular job, as opposed to what it meant to somebody about to discover his real job was called Life. He'd even had the time to wonder about the sense of humour of the bureaucrat who'd chosen the color. But, today at least, the pink slips reminded him not of the dozen or so people he already knew to have been killed by AIDS; rather, they reminded him of what it had been like, once, to have good health—of what it had been like to smell brisk salt air without wheezing, to piss but twice or three times a day and that without wincing, to drink all night and weep not at all.… Such was health, that condition most people don't realize they're in until they aren't in it anymore.

McAllister Street was the second or third location for this clinic in as many decades. Its very existence had once been predicated on the sexual mores of the late sixties. Stanley remembered those days, when sexually transmitted diseases were rarely more insidious than various more or less microscopic insects. When all was innocence mitigated by sympathy. And at some later midnight you'd meet your case worker, standing on line outside Winterland.

The next in severity were yeast infections, non-specific urethritis, syphilis, gonorrhea—most of them curable by a course of antibiotics concomitant with abstinence from sex and alcohol, usually for about two weeks. If taking yet another pill was cause for no surprise among one's peers, abstinence confirmed upon its victim a certain beatification. No social stigma accrued.

Toward the end of the war, diseases unknown to Western medicine began to appear. There were rumors of sprawling clandestine military hospitals in Japan devoted exclusively to the warehousing of Vietnam veterans with untreatable venereal diseases, and of devices like rotary-blade catheters and urethral-wart-cauterizers used to treat them.

“Cures were developed or they weren't,” the videotape said. “Venereal warts were dealt with, but
herpes simplex
wasn't. Unless they wanted to pretend they were in the nineteenth century, and indulge themselves in mercury baths and tertiary symptoms (madness, arthritis, good poetry, bad philosophy, death), only through sheer neglect could a sexually transmitted disease kill a free-love hippie or a bathhouse homosexual.

“There were consequences, of course. Life is a series of consequences. Women, for instance, who had experienced variety and number in their sexual partners, later often encountered difficulty in conception.…”

And scars on the soul? Stanley thought sourly.

“…By the middle eighties, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome had changed American sexual behavior forever. Unprotected sex became the moral equivalent of Russian roulette, consummated with the fervidity of a pre-emptory funeral rite. The United States, the most developed country in the world, ironically found its official self reluctant to recognize the symptoms of AIDS, or to commit funds to study it. A coldly calculated political decision was taken. To commit resources to the virtually unrealizable proposition of using ground-based laser beams bounced off orbiting mirrors to knock down intercontinental missiles in flight—in order to protect less than 10% of the world's population—was deemed more important than undertaking to discover a solution to a plague threatening 100% of the world's population. For eight long years, the term AIDS was not uttered in public by a Federal official.…”

Stanley's number was called. They used numbers here, at least at first, in order to preserve privacy.

Stanley limped down an aisle along one side of a field of shoulder-high partitions, within which hummed a colony of case workers, interviewers, health officials, nurse-practitioners, and perhaps, somewhere deep within, an actual doctor or two.

And perhaps a criminal or two?

The case worker wore a tie and a button-down collar beneath a sleeveless sweater-vest, was clean-shaven, Caucasian, his hair not so closely cropped he couldn't neatly comb it. Though he wasn't twenty-five years old, a little gold-rimmed pair of half-lens reading glasses perched on the tip of his nose, and from them depended a beaded lanyard.

“Ah, Mr. Fifty-six,” he smiled, waving at an empty wooden chair in front of his desk as he peered over the top edge of Stanley's pink slip. “Ahearn, that is, what seems to be troubling you today?”

Hopeful. They always start out hopeful. A functionary such as this man, this boy, this boy above all, knew he might most immediately serve his client as a direct portal to damnation.

“Nothing specific,” Stanley said, taking a seat. “I've, uh, got a new girlfriend and we've reached that stage in our relationship where we, uh, think it would be a good idea if we both got checked out for, you know… Everything.”

“An excellent idea, Mr. Ahearn. And is your girlfriend with you today?”

“No,” said Stanley, “she prefers to use her own physician. She'll probably get a little more thorough workup, fitted for birth control, and whatnot.”

“I see. Here's a pamphlet on that very subject, Mr. Ahearn.” He pushed it across the desk.

Stanley let it lay. “I thought I'd take some notes.” He showed the clerk a pen and a little spiral notebook.

“That's fine.”

“You're called…?”

“Oh, forgive me.” The young man reached an open palm over his desk. “Giles MacIntosh.”

“Hey,” said Stanley, shaking the hand. “Like the computer.”

“Well, it's spelled differently…” He spelled it. “But yes,” sighed Giles, not smiling. “Like the computer.”

“Oh, sorry,” said Stanley, jotting the correct spelling. “I'll bet you hear that one every day.”

“Apology accepted, Mr. Ahearn…”

“You can call me Stanley.”

“Nice to meet you.” Giles poised his hand with its mate above his computer keyboard. “And have you visited us before, Stanley?”

“Yes.” Stanley adjusted his chair so he could watch the computer screen. “I was in here… Let me see…”

“No matter, Stanley,” said Giles, his fingers flying over the keyboard. “Let's see what your name brings up.”

“Wow,” said Stanley. “You're a fast typist.”

“A hundred and twenty words a minute,” Giles said proudly. “I used to be a travel agent. Speed was everything.”

Stanley radiated admiration. “With how many mistakes?”

Giles feigned a frown. “No mistakes at all, Mr. Ahearn. What possible good would a mistake be to a reputable travel agent? You wouldn't want to book a flight for Moscow and wind up in Puerto Vallarta, would you?”

“I believe I would.”

“Ah ha. Very funny. Here we are. Ahearn, Stanley Clarke. You visited us about three months ago. Your case worker was a Ms. Dunkirk. Correct?”

“Yes. That sounds right.”

“And your mother's maiden name, please?”

“Smith.”

“Thank you, Stanley. Let's see. Measles, chicken pox, herpes simplex…”

Stanley shifted his chair, and the computer screen suddenly went blank. The whine of the hard drive lowered in pitch like a descending bottle rocket.

“Whoops,” said Stanley.

“Oh, no,” said Giles, his face falling in direct proportion to the rotational momentum of the disk. “What happened?”

“Damn, Giles,” said Stanley, shuffling his feet beneath Giles' desk. “My foot's become entangled in the power cord. I fear I've unplugged you. Dreadfully sorry.”

Giles pushed back his chair and looked under the desk.

“So you have, Stanley. Let's untangle it.”

“I'm sorry. Here, let me…”

“No, no. I'll get it.”

Giles crawled under the desk, uncoiled a loop of cord from around Stanley's ankle, and plugged in the machine again.

“I'm afraid I'm a little nervous,” Stanley said. Suddenly rising out of his chair he began to limp about the small cubicle. “In between the last time I was here and today, I've had some
wild times
. This medical stuff makes me nervous. I get clumsy when I'm nervous. Ever since I was a kid… well… I hope I haven't hurt your computer. Have I erased my own records?”

“Now, take it easy, Stanley. I quite understand your nervousness,” Giles said soothingly. “Although, if you'll permit me to make an observation, anyone who has the nervous energy you seem to possess usually doesn't have any serious health problems.”

“Gee, thanks,” said Stanley. “I'll accept that. A person with your expertise, who can type so fast…”

“I'm no doctor,” Giles cautioned, reseating himself before the keyboard. “But I like to think positive.” He looked sternly down his nose at the screen. “Flame on.”

Stanley paused beside the desk, as if curious. “Is there a there there?”

“Yes…,” said Giles. “It takes a minute for this machine to handshake the server. Then I have to log on myself.”

“Password and all that,” Stanley supposed aloud, with undisguised inquisitiveness.

Giles watched the screen. “It's no big deal. They make an effort toward security, around here. For confidentiality.”

“I appreciate it. Though I must say, I remember when it was all on a first-name basis.”

Giles looked over his shoulder and over his glasses at Stanley. “The sixties, no doubt.”

“How'd you know?” Stanley said innocently.

“Oh,” Giles smiled. “A little birdie told me.”

“I wish one had told me,” Stanley said.