Every Wednesday morning at eleven o’clock, I left our apartment on West 55th Street and made my way toward Columbus Circle, where I took the B train forty-one blocks north to walk across Central Park in the direction of Mount Sinai Hospital. After a quick coffee, I would take the elevator to the seventh floor and check in with Shaniqua Hoynes, the supremely dedicated and authoritative nurse in charge of the volunteer program who frankly terrified me. On my first day there, having skipped lunch out of an almost overwhelming feeling of anxiety, she’d caught me stealing a candy bar from her desk and given me a severe dressing-down before deciding forever that I was an untrustworthy person.
Shaniqua, who was part of a growing team reporting to Bastiaan, always began by asking me the same question—“You sure you’re ready for this today?”—and when I confirmed that I was she would reach over to a never-decreasing pile of patient folders, remove a list from the top and run her finger along a page before calling out two numbers: the number of the patient I was seeing that day and the number of their room. Occasionally, she might offer some particulars about how advanced his or her condition was, but more often than not she’d simply turn her back on me, shooing me out of her office. Typically, many of the patients on the seventh floor had no visitors at all—in those days, even some of the hospital workers were terrified to go near them and the unions were already asking questions about whether or not medical personnel should be put in danger’s way—but in moments of depression or extreme isolation they had put their names to the list of people hoping for an hour’s company with a volunteer. One never knew, however, what to expect; sometimes they could be grateful, wanting to tell you their life stories, but occasionally, in lieu of family members, they were simply looking for someone at whom they might lash out.
Patient 497/Room 706 was one of the older people I had visited so far, a sixty-something man with plump, exaggerated lips. He glanced over warily as I entered the room and let out an exhausted sigh before turning back to stare out the window in the direction of the North Meadow. Two intravenous drips were standing next to his bed, their bags filled with a fluid that seeped hungrily through the feeding tubes into his veins, while a heart monitor, its wires disappearing like thirsty leeches beneath his gown, beeped quietly in the background. He was pale but his skin remained unblemished, as far as I could see.
“I’m Cyril Avery,” I told him, standing next to the window for a few moments before pulling a chair out from the wall and sitting down. I reached out to pat his hand in a pathetic attempt at making some form of physical connection between us but he pulled away. Although I had been thoroughly educated by Bastiaan on the various ways in which the virus could be spread, I still felt nervous whenever I entered rooms like this and perhaps it showed, despite all my attempts to appear brave. “I’m a volunteer here at Mount Sinai.”
“And you came to see me?”
“I did.”
“You’re very kind. You’re English?” he asked, looking me up and down, apparently judging my fairly nondescript clothing.
“No, Irish.”
“Even worse,” he said, waving this away. “My aunt married an Irish man. A total bastard and a walking cliché. Always drunk, always beating her up. The poor woman had nine children by him over eight years. There’s something animalistic about that kind of behavior, don’t you think?”
“Well, we’re not all like that,” I said.
“I never liked the Irish,” he said, shaking his head, and I looked away when I saw a snail’s trail of spittle seeping down his chin. “A degenerate race. No one talks about sex and yet it’s all they ever think about. There’s not a nation on the face of the planet more obsessed with it, if you ask me.” His accent was pure New York—Brooklyn—and I wished he’d mentioned his racial prejudices to Shaniqua when placing his visitor request. It might have saved us both a great deal of trouble.
“Have you ever been there?” I asked.
“Oh for Christ’s sake, I’ve been everywhere,” he said. “I’ve been all over the world. I know the side streets and hidden bars in cities you’ve never even heard of. And now I’m here.”
“How are you feeling? Is there anything I can get you?”
“How do you think I’m feeling? Like I’m already dead but my heart keeps pumping blood around my body just to torment me. Get me some water, will you?”
I glanced around and reached for the jug that sat on the bedside table—“There! Over there!” he snapped—holding it close to his mouth as he sipped on the straw. Those enormous lips were flecked with white and I could see how deeply his yellow teeth were sunk inside his mouth. As he dragged the water through the thin plastic tube, an act that required enormous amounts of effort on his part, he stared directly at me with pure hatred in his eyes.
“You’re shaking,” he said, when he pushed the jug away.
“I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. You’re frightened of me. You’re right to be frightened of me.” He laughed a little, but there was no lightness in his tone. “You a fag?” he asked eventually.
“No,” I said. “But I’m gay if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I knew it. There’s something about the way you’re looking at me. As if you’re afraid you’re having a vision of your own future. What did you say your name was, Cecil, was it?”
“Cyril.”
“That’s a fag name if ever I heard one. You sound like a character from a Christopher Isherwood novel.”
“But I’m not a fag,” I repeated. “I told you, I’m gay.”
“Is there a difference?”
“There is, yes.”
“Well, let me tell you something, Cyril,” he said, trying to sit up a little in the bed but failing. “I never had any problems with fags. I worked in the theater, after all. Everyone there thought there was something wrong with me because I liked pussy. But now they all think I’m a fag too because of this disease. They think I was hiding it all these years, but I never hid a goddamn thing. I don’t know what bothers me more, the fact that they think I’m a fag or that they think I didn’t have the balls to be honest about it from the start. Believe me, if I’d been a fag I would have told them and I’d have been the best goddamn fag out there. I would never have lied.”
“Does it matter what people think?” I asked him, already tired of his aggression but determined not to allow him to drive me away. That was what he wanted, after all: for me to leave so he could feel abandoned again.
“It does when you’re lying in a hospital bed feeling the life seep out of you,” he said. “And the only people who walk through the door are doctors, nurses and do-gooders who you’ve never laid eyes on in your life before.”
“What about your family?” I asked. “Do you have—”
“Oh fuck off.”
“All right,” I said quietly.
“I have a wife,” he told me after a moment. “I haven’t seen her in two years. And four boys. Each one a more selfish prick than the last. Although I guess I can blame myself for how they turned out. I wasn’t much of a father. But show me a successful man who’s given his family everything they ever demanded of him who can say differently.”
“And they don’t visit you?”
He shook his head. “I’m already dead to them,” he said. “Once my diagnosis came through, that was it. They told their friends that I had a heart attack while I was on a cruise around the Mediterranean and that I’d been buried at sea. You have to admire their creativity.” He shook his head and smiled. “Not that it matters,” he said quietly. “They’re right to be ashamed of me.”