“And what did he say to that?”
“He basically shrugged his shoulders as if he didn’t care. But later that same day I was coming out of the press room and making my way toward the West Wing to check a quote about something else entirely when Reagan just happened to pass me in the corridor and I pigeonholed him. I guess he’d forgotten me from earlier in the day, ’cause I got him to stick around by throwing a few softballs at him to get his attention, and once I had him hooked I asked him whether he was aware that since he had first come into office over twenty-eight thousand cases of AIDS had been reported in the U.S. and that of those twenty-eight thousand people almost twenty-five thousand had died. More than eighty-nine percent. I don’t know if that’s entirely accurate, he said”—and here she did an even better Reagan impression than I had done—“and you know what they say about statistics, don’t you?”
“What do they say about statistics?” I asked.
“I interrupted him, which you’re not supposed to do with a President, and asked him whether he thought the administration should be responding in a more serious way to a pandemic of such enormous proportions and one that showed no sign of slowing down anytime soon.”
“There are three types of lies,” said Alex, looking at me. “Lies, damn lies, and statistics.”
“And did he give you an answer?” asked Bastiaan.
“Of course not,” said Courteney. “He just grunted a little and smiled and his head twitched a bit and then he said, Well, you gals in the press room know all the gossip, don’t you? And then he asked me whether I’d seen Radio Days yet and what I thought of Woody Allen. He’s a leading man? he asked me, scratching his chin. In my day he would have been working in the mailroom. Basically, he just ignored my question and before I could drag him back to it, the Press Secretary came running down the corridor and told the President he was needed in the Oval Office. Once Reagan had gone, he gave me the mother of all dressings-down and threatened to take my press pass away.”
“And you think he spoke to your editor about your promotion?” asked Bastiaan. “You think he was punishing you for that?”
“Him or someone else in the administration. The fact is they don’t want anyone asking questions on this subject. Especially not someone so closely connected to it, someone who just happens to be married to an AIDS doctor and has the inside scoop on what’s actually happening on the ground.”
“Please don’t call me that,” said Alex, grimacing. “I hate that phrase. It’s so reductive.”
“Well, it’s what you are, isn’t it? Essentially? It’s what you both are. There’s no point in sugar-coating it.”
“The fact is, until the heterosexual community accepts that this affects them too,” said Bastiaan, putting his knife and fork down, “nothing is ever going to get any better. There’s a patient in Mount Sinai at the moment, Patient 741. You know him, Alex, right?” Alex nodded. “Have you volunteered with him?” he asked, turning to me.
“No,” I said, for I had a pretty good memory for patient numbers, they seemed to tattoo themselves into my brain, and I hadn’t encountered anyone in the seven hundreds yet.
“He was first referred to me last year by a doctor at the Whitman-Walker clinic in Washington. This guy had been getting terrible headaches for a few weeks and then he developed a cough that he couldn’t shake. He’d tried antibiotics but they hadn’t done any good. His local doctor ran some tests and she had her suspicions about what it might be, so she sent him to me for a consultation. I knew when I saw him that she was right, I could tell just by looking at him, but I didn’t want to alarm the poor guy unnecessarily by saying anything until I was absolutely certain, so of course I ran the usual tests.”
“How old is he?” asked Courteney.
“Around our age. No wife, no children, but not gay. He had that sense of entitlement and arrogance that goes with really good-looking straight guys. He told me how he’d spent a lot of his life globetrotting and was worried that he’d picked up a bug along the way, malaria or something, and I asked him whether he was sexually active. Of course I am, he said, laughing as if the question was ridiculous. I’ve been sexually active since I was a teenager. I asked him whether he’d had many partners and he shrugged and said that he’d lost count. A couple of hundred at least, he told me. Any men, I asked him and he shook his head and looked at me as if I was crazy. Do I look like I have sex with men? he asked, and I didn’t bother answering him. When he came back in for his results a week later, I sat him down and told him that I was very sorry but that I’d identified the HIV virus in his bloodstream and although he had yet to develop full-blown AIDS and we might be successful in warding it off for some time, there was a distinct probability that the virus would mutate into the full-blown disease within a few months and of course, as he probably knew, there was no cure at the moment.”
“You know how many people I’ve had that conversation with this year alone?” asked Alex. “Seventeen. And it’s only April.”
I had a sudden flashback to a moment I hadn’t thought about in years. Sitting in a coffee shop in Ranelagh on the morning of my wedding and somehow finding myself looking after a nine-year-old boy, the son of the woman who ran the tearoom in Dáil éireann, while she tried to phone Aer Lingus to book a flight to Amsterdam. You’re a bit of an oddball, Jonathan, I’d said to him. Has anyone ever told you that? / Nineteen people this year alone, he’d told me. And it’s only May.
“So how did Patient 741 take it?” asked Courteney. “You know, I feel like I’m in a science-fiction movie calling him by a number. Can’t you just tell us his name?”