Dear Old Dead(67)

I’m going senile, Augie thought. I’m descending into schizophrenia. I’m losing my mind.

She got to the door of Michael Pride’s examining room and stopped. The door was open. Augie looked inside and saw Michael with his back to her, standing next to his desk, going through a stack of papers. There was always a lot of paperwork to be got through these days. The Manhattan City Council didn’t like the Catholic Church much, or anything connected to her. They had closed down two of Mother Teresa’s AIDS hospices for “zoning violations,” and Augie knew they would close the Sojourner Truth Health Center if they could. They didn’t push it because Michael was no self-effacing, saintly nun. He wouldn’t accept defeat in meek resignation. He’d go to the newspapers and he’d get their attention, too. Still, the council felt free to harass. The center had to file document after document after document. Fire inspectors and health inspectors and other city inspectors showed up so often, Michael kept a volunteer lawyer on duty at the center at all times, to follow the inspectors around, to make sure the inspectors didn’t bribe anybody or intimidate anybody into believing the inspectors had to be bribed. It was crazy. And this was what happened when the mayor and the police department and the vast majority of ordinary citizens supported the center. What would happen to them if that support was ever withdrawn?

Michael looked away from his papers and stretched. He didn’t look at her. Augie came into the examining room and shut the door softly behind her. Michael turned and raised his eyebrows. It was worse than déjà vu. This had happened a million times before. This had been her life for over a decade now. Michael. The center. Herself.

Michael looked down at the papers he had been working on and then back at her again. He was smiling slightly. “Hello, Augie. I’ve been expecting you to show up. You’ve been banging around like a drummer all day.”

“Have I been that obvious?”

“To me, you have.”

“I talked to Eamon Donleavy,” Augie said. “He’s—let’s not use the word upset. It’s a stupid word. Upset.”

There really were a lot of papers in the stack Michael had. He picked them up and carried them across the room to his file cabinet, moving deliberately, as if he were playing a part in a dramatic dance. He looked fine, Augie thought, feeling how insane this meeting was. Michael looked fine. He couldn’t possibly have AIDS.

Michael opened the top drawer of the file cabinet, took out a nearly empty manila folder, and put the papers inside. Then he refiled the folder and closed the file cabinet drawer.

“Prescription records,” he said absently. “I’ve been meaning to get to them for a couple of weeks.”

Augie came farther into the room and sat down on the edge of the examining table. “I’m not Eamon Donleavy. I’m a nurse. I want you to tell me a few things.”

“I’ll tell you anything you want to know, Augie.”

“Do you actually have AIDS or are you just HIV positive?”

“I’ve got AIDS. The Kaposi’s sarcoma showed up about two weeks ago—at least, that was when I noticed.”

“If you noticed it, other people might notice it. People you were… intimate with.”

“I’m not intimate with anybody, Augie, you ought to know that. Not intimate in that way.”

“You could spread it.”

“I could if I wasn’t careful. But I am careful, Augie, I’m very careful. I’m careful at the center and I’m careful when I’m out.”

“You can’t always have been careful. If you had been, you wouldn’t have caught it.”

“I don’t know if that’s true,” Michael said. “We don’t really know much about how people catch AIDS—oh, we know about the contact of bodily fluids and all that, but for somebody who lives the way I do—”

“You don’t have to live that way,” Augie said harshly. “You really don’t.”

Michael made an impatient gesture. “I live the way I live because I want to, Augie, you ought to know that by now. I work at the center because I want to. I’ve never had a single reason for doing anything in my life except that it was what I wanted to do. I’m not a religious person, Sister Augustine. You ought to know that by now, too.”

Augie looked down at her hands. They were an old person’s hands, wrinkled and veined. She wouldn’t see the fair side of fifty again. Michael would never see fifty at all. Augie’s head ached.

“I’ve been thinking of the City Council,” she said. “Of what they could make of this. I’ve been thinking of the papers. I’ve been thinking of the center. What’s going to happen to the center?”