Bleeder Page 5

  “Is this about your operations?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Well, I just wanted you to know that your scars don’t bother me.”

  “It’s not that. It’s about some blood I received through a transfusion.”

  Ana pauses, her mind sifting for meaning. “Oh, no,” she exhales. “Oh, no,” she repeats. Her eyes water. “You?” she asks softly. She wipes away a tear. “You?”

  “Yes, me.”

  She buries her face into my chest while her body shakes against my heart. My arms enwrap her, my face looks skyward, and I cry, too. I flashback to those nights with Ana: our naked bodies, the bitter scent of passion.

  “How long have you known?” she asks after a long and labored lull.

  “They told me when I turned eighteen. After I graduated high school.”

  Ana sobers. She dabs her tears with a Kleenex drawn from my bedside dispenser. “Were we . . . ?”

  “Safe?”

  “Were we?”

  “Yes. We were safe. We always used condoms.”

  Ana straightens herself in my bed, leans against the headboard, and looks out the window. She wipes a pale hand across her wet eyes. I gaze past her.

  “So, we’ve been safe? Just tell me that what we do is safe. Just tell me that.”

  “Yes, Ana. It is safe.”

  She draws herself to me, stares at me with red eyes. She straddles me and yanks off her shirt, revealing the tiny birthmark above her navel. Then she pushes her shirt up to her stomach and frees her pink panties where I can feel the press of her wetness on me.

  “What are you doing?” I ask as she unclasps my belt.

  “Well . . . I can’t be in a relationship without sex. Not now. Not with you.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She kisses me. “Yes. I’m sure.”

  We say nothing, but lock hands and squeeze one another and reach for protection when we are ready. And later, when I trace my finger along the curve of Ana’s arm, which rests outside the sheets, she breathes quiet in the afternoon while my own mind labors over the burden of HIV.

  Outside, a steady rain drizzles on the coastal pines, wetting the rusted needles that litter the winter courtyard. The constant patter of rain reverberates off the roof, the window, the sidewalk. There is nothing but this sound, stillness and quiet.

  The next weekend when I visit Ana, we have sex and sleep and have more sex, only breaking apart to eat, to shower, or to shift ourselves after sex. We press our bodies together to assure we are real. Ana explains how HIV has brought us closer, how it has given everything urgent clarity.

  “Now I love you even more,” she declares.

  April. Having spent Easter with our families and now, the holiday ended, we say goodbye before heading back to school. Wrapped around one another on her parents’ couch, Ana and I press together and then catch our breath while the television flickers blue light over our skin.

  “I’m going to miss you,” Ana says, turning to face me. “I can’t wait until summer. Then we’ll see each other every day.” She hugs me tightly and rubs her bare ankle along my calf and settles her face to my quiet heart. I hold her loosely and trace the notches of her spine. “I feel your heart beating,” she says. “It’s really fast.”

  “We did just have sex.”

  “I know, but it’s really loud and fast.”

  She continues to listen, and then I feel a tear against me.

  “You okay baby? What’s wrong?”

  Ana wipes her eyes. “I worry about you. What if you get sick? What are we to do then?”

  Ana’s question hangs in the dark gulf between us. “What if . . . ,” I say, trailing off.

  She breaks my hold of her so our noses touch, and I can see the sorrow her eyes veil.

  “It’s not like it’ll happen right away. It takes time.”

  “But what if you start? What if you get your first infection?”

  “Then I’ll deal with it. I can’t live constantly imagining how I might die.”

  “I know that, but what about us?” Ana plays our fingers together and makes a steeple of them. “If you get sick, you have to promise me something.”

  “Promise you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t promise till I know what it is.”

  “Just promise, okay. For me.” She places her palm on my face. A tear slides the short line of her nose. “Promise me that if you start getting sick that you’ll marry me. You will marry me won’t you?”

  “Is that what you want, Ana? To marry someone who will likely leave you a young widow?”

  “No, I don’t want that to happen. But if it does, I want to have something of yours to carry on. I want to have your name. Promise me that. Say it for me.”

  “Okay. I promise that if I get sick I’ll marry you.”

  She throws her arms around me and cries into my chest. “I love you so much,” she says. “I love you so much, I love you so much,” she repeats as an unending chant.

  When Ana quiets, we remain gripped to one another in silence. The television bounces light through the room and gives us laughter where there is none. Then we fall into a light sleep and let it renew our troubled hearts as much as it can.

  When I awaken, I have no sense of the time, but can feel that it’s late, so I nudge Ana.

  “I have to go. It’s getting late.”

  “No,” she says sleepily. “Not yet. Just a few more minutes.” She curls herself into a ball next to me, tightens her arms around me. I lie against her and watch as her mother’s cat grooms itself underneath the hazy lamp light. The cat methodically licks a paw and swipes it across an ear, repeating this movement several times before settling its head against the carpet.

  “Ana . . . Ana, I have to go. It’s a long drive to Wilmington.”

  “I know.” She rises and drapes a coverlet over her while I dress. “I’ll show you out.”

  Over the threshold of her open door, we hug goodnight while a moth flutters near our kissing faces and then disappears inside her house.

  “See you in a few weekends?” she asks.

  “Yes, two weeks.”

  “That seems like forever right now.”

  “It’ll pass and soon we’ll have the whole summer together.”

  “Yes. That’s something to look forward to.”

  I wave one last time from my truck’s cab and Ana waves back, wiping her tears with her other hand. Then the night tents around me. The brilliant stars scatter themselves across a dark canvas while the faint scent of dogwood drifts through my cab and is then gone. And when I think of Ana and of marriage, fear envelops me. Would we be happy? Would I? My stomach twists with the thought of such a sad matrimony.

  SANDWICH INTERLUDE

  SUMMER 1991. ANA AND I SPRAWL ONTO ONE OF OUR PARENTS’ couches every evening and, when we are alone, we shed our clothes and press our desire until we are shaking with pleasure. Then we settle into familiar spoons and twirl fingers in the dark.

  “Oh, I’m going to hate when summer ends,” she says. “It’s so great having you here every day. It’s spoiling me.”

  “Me, too.”

  We kiss and kiss and Ana slips her hand to my hips to see if I’m ready again.

  During the day, however, I work at a sub shop. I earn minimum wage and am congratulated on my hard work and dependability by my manager. And while the job gives me money for gas, dinner dates, movies, and CDs—after work, my legs ache, my ankles swell like oranges, and my knee joints crackle like puffed rice. Tonight, I can hardly walk, so I lumber to the refrigerator for my factor. I take it out, treat, and fall asleep, exhausted and hurting, only waking when Ana calls to come over.

  Through the June heat and into July, I sweat over the steak grill, and every few days, my ankle flares up, and I must treat. Tonight, my ankle pounds pain, and I’m limping severely as I slice ham, grill steak, and heat meatballs. Hopeful that I can leave when we close at eleven, I start the cleaning list: Take apart meat s
licer and wipe; Windex display case; store extra meat, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, and cheese in freezer; scrape grill; clean countertops; scrub toilets; mop floor; take out trash. And at 10:50 as I heft the last bag of garbage into the dumpster, a Caravan cruiser circles into the empty parking lot and a six-member family unloads and lobs toward the restaurant. If I let them in, I’ll have to reclean everything, and it’ll be another hour before I can clock out, so I act quickly: I rush the door with the keys, secure the lock, and scurry away to cower behind the counter. A man yanks on the door. Then again, louder and with more force. My heart palpitates. He pounds the glass.

  “I know you’re still fucking in there,” he huffs. “You ain’t supposed to be goddamn closed. Your sign ain’t even off.”

  His anger echoes throughout the sub shop while I massage my swollen ankle, praying for him to leave.

  “Goddamn, you. Goddammit.” He pounds again, beating the glass front in rapid-fire succession with the neon open sign flashing beside him. Hairs lift along my arms. I pull my legs to my chest and pray again for him to leave. Then I hear the scruff of retreat, doors slamming, a vehicle coughing to life, and the skid of tires pealing off.

  I count to twenty and, feeling safe, ease my head above the countertop. The parking lot glows from the streetlights and, save that weak yellow light, is black and empty. I slowly rise and, scanning the lot to reassure myself he’s gone, I scurry to unplug the open sign, noticing then the smear of handprints and boot-marks on the glass; so I fetch the cleaner and hastily scrub away these marks before locking up and limping to my truck.

  At home I infuse and then comfort my ankle atop a pillow and gently rest it against an ice pack. I lie back on my mattress and exhale deeply. Upstairs, Mom calls down.

  “Your dad and I are going to bed,” she says. “What time do you work tomorrow?”

  “Early. I have to leave at ten.”

  Then the house quiets. The night chirps, and I drift off.

  The next morning, I wrap my ankle in an Ace bandage, and I fit on my shoe as best I can. I swallow several Tylenol and pocket a handful more. Then I leave.

  When lunchtime arrives, the Caravan returns and my heart seizes with panic. In overalls splattered with white paint, the man saunters in and motions to my manager, and they talk. The man smiles a large mouth of yellow teeth when I am told to make him a free meatball sub. I return his smile, but neither of us speaks. When he finishes eating, he balls up the wrapper and tosses it toward the trash, missing the hole and spilling food.

  “Oops,” he says. “Guess you’ll have to clean that up.” Then he leaves.

  After lunch, my boss corners me around a boxed fortress of sub rolls and tells me I won’t get my monthly raise and that, additionally, he’s knocking my pay down by ten cents an hour. He debases my qualities as an employee, and I lowly hang my head, offering my subservience.

  Angry, I huff outside and slump against the stairwell. The hot air chokes me and sears my lungs. Sweat beads on my forehead and dampens my work shirt. Leaning across the railing, I think of what to do and decide that I should quit. The job is wearing me down and I need to heal.

  So I limp inside, and I find my boss at his desk, leaned back with his feet propped up.

  “I’d like to put in my two-week notice,” I say.

  He glances up. “No. Don’t bother. You can quit now.”

  “Okay. I quit then. And here’s the shirt for your next employee,” I say, tearing off the shirt and throwing it at him.

  He jolts up and aims his finger at me. “Don’t ever ask me for a recommendation! You won’t get it from me!”

  “Fine!”

  “I mean it. Ever!”

  “Fine!”

  When I leave, he slams the door and my restaurant career ends forever.

  COLLEGE

  SEPTEMBER 1991. ANA AND I HAVE BEEN SEEING EACH OTHER EVERY other weekend since school resumed, but that’s getting harder to manage. I’m busy; my workload has increased threefold; consequently, I’m in the library every evening and now need the weekends for study.

  Tonight, I recline in my favorite chair—the one tucked against the large window that stares out upon the campus walk—and my heavy bookbag rests at my feet, yet instead of reading my coursework, I thumb another medical journal in the hope of understanding more about me. In college I’ve learned about research, about finding answers to things you don’t understand. But today the news isn’t promising. Long-term studies of AZT indicate that side effects such as nausea and muscle contractions develop, or worse, that HIV becomes resistant to AZT.

  I let the journal slip into my lap while my gaze drifts outside to the longleaf pines blowing in the campus breeze. I think of a night not long ago when I awoke with a muscle spasm in my calf, another when my foot curled itself inside my shoe and required coaxing to return to normal. And then there is my nausea. Sometimes in the early morning as I eat breakfast, or later in the evening during dinner, it comes. I ignore it, blame it on a steady diet of coffee, and cure it with slow steady breathing or perhaps by lying down, or if nothing else works, I rush to the closest toilet and unload my insides. I have thought that HIV caused this, but now I wonder if it’s AZT. And if so, what can I do? It seems I am moored to illness. My stomach sinks.

  In my chair as the sun descends behind the campus lawn, I recline in the casual pose of a college student caught up in deep thought. I have now carried the knowledge of my HIV for a year. My only confessions have been to William and to Ana. Still, I hide it. And I suppose, too, that I am still dying, a thought too difficult to conceptualize with any honest attachment.

  Here I’ve stumbled too close to reality, and I must let it out. This is not uncommon. Tears spill forth in the quiet of an untraveled book row, or in the morning shower, or in the cotton sheets I sleep beneath. And when I’ve folded my torn heart over and wrung it dry of ache, when I’ve embraced mortality and squeezed it hatefully and lovingly and hatefully again, I must then move on.

  October 1991. Friends persuade me to join the crew team as a coxswain, and today is my first morning of practice. As I wait in front of my suite for my roommate to return with his car, the cold bites at my gloved hands, so I cup them to my mouth and breathe heat into them. Last night was the season’s first frost. The campus lights shine through the pines around me, and the crackle of a frigid wood sounds from that cold darkness. I rub my hands together, breathe on them again, and place them in my jeans’ pockets. Eventually, from the other side of the woods where the incoming road lies, headlights shine, and when my roommate pulls to the curb, I get in. Neither of us speaks as we drive down Market Street through downtown Wilmington and toward the Cape Fear River. The sky lightens, and by the time we unlock the boathouse and lay out the paddles for the rowers, the morning is a pale gray.

  When the rowers arrive, we lug the boat to the riverside. The rowers grab underneath the shell’s hull, and hoist it and carry it to the water where—there being no dock—it is rolled over and gently placed in the river while I give commands and follow along nearby. My bare toes sink into cold muck, squishing the sand, slime, and slick grit of the polluted river bottom, and the river soon numbs my feet beyond sensation. They feel thick as they knead the doughy river floor. I lower myself into the coxswain’s position, knock my feet gently on the boat’s tender side to shake mud from them and revitalize some feeling. Then we push out into the river that fogs with cold.

  We row a four-man. Old, wooden, and not like the newer and lighter fiberglass models, it is heavy, but still we stroke through the smooth-top river. I call out the commands hastily taught to me, and the rowers laugh when I get a few wrong. But we row, and from the river’s center I marvel at Wilmington’s downtown streets and her historic waterfront.

  As the temperature rises from frigid to just cold, plumes of vapor hover just above the river’s surface while, nearby, the tread of cars crossing Memorial Bridge breaks the quiet. On the opposite shore an egret dives for food, dipping its beak close to where
the battleship is permanently docked. Then there is the barge: moving heavy in the water, heading downriver on a course set to collide with our fragile skiff.

  “We’ve got to get out of its wake,” one of the rowers yells, panic visible on his back-turned face.

  I shout out power strokes that require the men to use all their might, and, trying to outpower the other ship’s mechanical motor, we stroke feverishly to the other shore. As the barge passes, the men use their oars to balance atop the large waves that curl from its bow and churn whitely from its stern. We rock dangerously, but keep our bodies centered, our minds focused, and soon the river calms again and the skiff no longer bobs. We are safe.