The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV

The Unexpected Coda: May 24, 2011

316 Contact TheUnexpectedCoda:May24,2011 Osama bin Laden is still dead and I’m still HIV positive. Lucky me. As I’m completing the first draft of my manuscript, I’m looking back on five years. I, America, and many people around the world are heading toward the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and of the invasion of Afghanistan. A couple of weeks ago I was back in my doctor’s office. Although the nurse didn’t take me to the same exact room as five years earlier and the purpose of my visit was far more benign, it was the same doctor. I hadn’t seen him in a while. I have, after all, been cheating on him with the guy at infectious diseases. So he asked me how I was doing, meaning AIDSwise of course. I told him I had just completed this book and that he was the hero of the opening section. And before we knew it we found ourselves talking about that day five years earlier, a day, as it turned out, he remembers as clearly as I do. (“You were supposed to go to Canada.”) His attention had focused on different details—­the friend who had given me a ride was sitting in the waiting room looking“like a deer in the headlights”; and he remembers walking toward the examination room as vividly as I remember the car ride to his practice—­ as a short trip we both had taken on many occasions before but that was this time saturated with sadness and anxiety. In the end,our brief five-­year anniversary conversation wasn’t especially complex or meaningful—­ at least, not on the surface of it, not in the transparent sense of the words we exchanged, but like the nicest anniversaries it was sweet and resolutely unshowy. It all felt very restrained, a bit hesitant and a bit awkward, with a touch perhaps of the sort of shyness that isn’t quite shyness but, with eyes averting other eyes, looks like it when it must give palpable form to the fear, inexpressible by nature, of upsetting a delicate balance. My doctor’s lament about how difficult it is to give bad news to patients did not come out as tactless at all, like the erasure of my own pain. What makes this task so difficult is the fact that, as was the case with me, patients who are called in urgently to discuss their test results already know what the news is and that it isn’t good. The doctor finds himself or herself in the position, obvious to all present, of mimicking the giving of the news already received while well aware that, as a result, much more than news must be conveyed, and with far greater delicacy, by the silent edges that surround these brutal words. Similarly, beyond the words of our recent conversation, or perhaps beside them, near them, lay an unspoken, delicate Contact 317 reality: he hadn’t given me some bad news five years earlier; in his own way he had shared it. And violent as this initial contact may have been to both of us, its ripples caress us softly now. (To the unusual suspect I hope that you are well) This page intentionally left blank ...