They had me put on a sterile robe, and wash my hands in alcohol before going into her room, but the measure was rather half-hearted. The damage had already been done. How a woman with so few white blood cells left in her body was still alive bewildered me, and stepping through the door into the room where she would soon be deceased, I could see how obviously, how clearly, death approached.
Her hair had fallen out, leaving a pocked skull of crude bones protruding up like mismatched tectonic plates. I hadn’t ever seen her without any hair before, but now I realised how egg-shaped her skull truly was. To say her eyes had sunk into her sockets would be a lie, rather it was that every ounce of flesh, every line of softness in her features had been eroded away, leaving no more than a skull thinly coated in muscle and protruding remnants of nose, ear, lip, eye dangling off it like baubles off a withered Christmas tree. She was physically younger than I, but in that place, at that time, I was the sprightly infant, she the ancient one, dying alone.
“Harry,” she wheezed, and it didn’t take a doctor’s training to notice the crackle in her voice, the holes in her breath. “Took your time.” I pulled up the empty chair by her bed, sat down carefully, bones creaking a little despite my exercises. “You look good,” she added. “Old age suits you.”
I grunted in reply, the only sound I felt was really apt. “How are you, Akinleye? They wouldn’t tell me much outside.”
“Oh,” she sighed, “they don’t know what to say. It’s a race as to what will kill me off first. My immune system, you know. And before you tell me that AIDS is a lifestyle disease, I think you should know that you’re an idiot.”
“I wasn’t going to say—”
“The others look at me, you know, as if I was evil. As if having this–” she may have wanted to gesture, but the movement was little more than a twitch at the end of her fingertips “–is somehow a result of being morally bankrupt. Instead of the fucking cheap condom splitting.”
“You’re putting words into my mouth.”
“Am I? Maybe I am. You’re all right, Harry, always have been. Stodgy old fart but all right.”
“How long have you got?” I asked.
“My money’s on the pneumonia getting me–couple of days, maybe? A week if I’m unlucky.”
“I’ll stay. I’m booked into a hotel down the road…”
“Fuck’s sake, Harry, I don’t want your pity. It’s just dying!”
“Then why did you call me?”
She spoke fast and flatly, words that she had already prepared. “I want to forget.”
“Forget? Forget what?”
“All of it. Everything.”
“I don’t—”
“Harry, don’t be obtuse. You do it sometimes to put people at ease, but I find it patronising and annoying. You know exactly what I mean. You try so hard to blend in, I find it frankly intrusive. Why do you do that?”
“Did you ask me here to tell me that?”
“No,” she replied, shuffling her weight a little in the bed. “Although now you’re here, I may as well inform you that this ridiculous notion you have that if people find you pleasant, you’ll have a pleasant time in return is stupid and na?ve. For fuck’s sake, Harry, what did the world do to you to make you so… blank?”
“I can go…”
“Stay. I need you.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re so obliging,” she replied with a sigh. “Because you’re so blank. I need that now. I need to forget.”
I leaned forward in my seat, fingertips steepling together. “Would you like someone to talk you out of it?” I said at last.
“Absolutely not.”
“Nevertheless, I feel a certain obligation to try.”
“For God’s sake, as if you could say anything to me I haven’t already said to myself.”
I put my head on one side, flicked at the seam of my hospital robe, ran my nails down either side of the line, tightening it to a ridge along my sleeve. Then, “I told my wife.”
“Which one?”
“My first wife. The first woman I married. Jenny. She was linear and I was not, and I told her, and she left me. And a man came, and he wanted to know the future, and he wasn’t very polite when I said no, and I wanted to die, the true death, the blackness that stops the dark. That’s why, in answer to your question. Why I… go along with things. Because nothing else I’ve done seems to work.”
She hesitated, sucking in her lower lip, rolling it beneath her teeth. Then, “Silly man. As if anyone else has got the right idea.”