The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios. Yann Martel
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called Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, PCP to intimates. In mid-February Paul went to Toronto to see his family doctor.
Nine months later he was dead.
AIDS. He announced it to me over the phone in a detached voice. He had been gone nearly two weeks. He had just got back from the hospital, he told me. I reeled. My first thoughts were for myself. Had he ever cut himself in my presence? If so, what had happened? Had I ever drunk from his glass? Shared his food? I tried to establish if there had ever been a bridge between his system and mine. Then I thought of him. I thought of gay sex and hard drugs. But Paul wasn’t gay. He had never told me so outright, but I knew him well enough and I had never detected the least ambivalence. I likewise couldn’t imagine him a heroin addict. In any case, that wasn’t it. Three years ago, when he was sixteen, he had gone to Jamaica on a Christmas holiday with his parents. They had had a car accident. Paul’s right leg had been broken and he’d lost some blood. He had received a blood transfusion at the local hospital. Six witnesses of the accident had come along to volunteer blood. Three were of the right blood group. Several phone calls and a little research turned up the fact that one of the three had died unexpectedly two years later while being treated for pneumonia. An autopsy had revealed that the man had severe toxoplasmic cerebral lesions. A suspicious combination.
I went to visit Paul that weekend at his home in wealthy Rosedale. I didn’t want to; I wanted to block the whole thing off mentally. I asked—this was my excuse—if he was sure his parents cared for a visitor. He insisted that I come. And I did. I came through. And I was right about his parents. Because what hurt most that first weekend was not Paul, but Paul’s family.
After learning how he had probably caught the virus, Paul’s father didn’t utter a syllable for the rest of that day. Early the next morning he fetched the tool kit in the basement, put his winter parka over his housecoat, stepped out onto the driveway, and proceeded to destroy the family car. Because he had been the driver when they had had the accident in Jamaica, even though it hadn’t been his fault and it had been in another car, a rental. He took a hammer and shattered all the lights and windows. He scraped and trashed the entire body. He banged nails into the tires. He siphoned the gasoline from the tank, poured it over and inside the car, and set it on fire. That’s when neighbours called the firefighters. They rushed to the scene and put the fire out. The police came, too. When he blurted out why he had done it, all of them were very understanding and the police left without charging him or anything; they only asked if he wanted to go to the hospital, which he didn’t. So that was the first thing I saw when I walked up to Paul’s large, corner-lot house: a burnt wreck of a Mercedes covered in dried foam.
Jack was a hard-working corporate lawyer. When Paul introduced me to him, he grinned, shook my hand hard and said, “Good to meet you!” Then he didn’t seem to have anything else to say. His face was red. Paul’s mother, Mary, was in their bedroom. I had met her at the beginning of the university year. As a young woman she had earned an M.A. in anthropology from McGill, she had been a highly ranked amateur tennis player, and she had travelled. Now she worked part-time for a human rights organization. Paul was proud of his mother and got along with her very well. She was a smart, energetic woman. But here she was, lying awake on the bed in a foetal position, looking like a wrinkled balloon, all the taut vitality drained out of her. Paul stood next to the bed and just said, “My mother.” She barely reacted. I didn’t know what to do. Paul’s sister, Jennifer, a graduate student in sociology at the University of Toronto, was the most visibly distraught. Her eyes were red, her face was puffy—she looked terrible. I don’t mean to be funny, but even George H., the family Labrador, was grief-stricken. He had squeezed himself under the living-room sofa, wouldn’t budge, and whined all the time.
The verdict had come on Wednesday morning, and since then (it was Friday) none of them, George H. included, had eaten a morsel of food. Paul’s father and mother hadn’t gone to work, and Jennifer hadn’t gone to school. They slept, when they slept, wherever they happened to be. One morning I found Paul’s father sleeping on the living-room floor, fully dressed and wrapped in the Persian rug, a hand reaching for the dog beneath the sofa. Except for frenzied bursts of phone conversation, the house was quiet.
In the middle of it all was Paul, who wasn’t reacting. At a funeral where the family members are broken with pain and grief, he was the funeral director going about with professional calm and dull sympathy. Only on the third day of my stay did he start to react. But death couldn’t make itself understood. Paul knew that something awful was happening to him, but he couldn’t grasp it. Death was beyond him. It was a theoretical abstraction. He spoke of his condition as if it were news from a foreign country. He said, “I’m going to die,” the way he might say, “There was a ferry disaster in Bangladesh.”
I had meant to stay just the weekend—there was school—but I ended up staying ten days. I did a lot of housecleaning and cooking during that time. The family didn’t notice much, but that was all right. Paul helped me, and he liked that because it gave him something to do. We had the car towed away, we replaced a phone that Paul’s father had destroyed, we cleaned the house spotlessly from top to bottom, we gave George H. a bath (George H. because Paul really liked The Beatles and when he was a kid he liked to say to himself when he was walking the dog, “At this very moment, unbeknown to anyone, absolutely incognito, Beatle Paul and Beatle George are walking the streets of Toronto,” and he would dream about what it would be like to sing “Help!” in Shea Stadium), and we went food shopping and nudged the family into eating. I say “we” and “Paul helped”—what I mean is that I did everything while he sat in a chair nearby. Drugs called dapsone and trimethoprim were overcoming Paul’s pneumonia, but he was still weak and out of breath. He moved about like an old man, slowly and conscious of every exertion.
It took the family a while to break out of its shock. During the course of Paul’s illness I noticed three states they would go through. In the first, common at home, when the pain was too close, they would pull away and each do their thing: Paul’s father would destroy something sturdy, like a table or an appliance, Paul’s mother would lie on her bed in a daze, Jennifer would cry in her bedroom, and George H. would hide under the sofa and whine. In the second, at the hospital often, they would rally around Paul, and they would talk and sob and encourage each other and laugh and whisper. Finally, in the third, they would display what I suppose you could call normal behaviour, an ability to get through the day as if death didn’t exist, a composed, somewhat numb face of courage that, because it was required every single day, became both heroic and ordinary. The family went through these states over the course of several months, or in an hour.
I don’t want to talk about what AIDS does to a body. Imagine it very bad—and then make it worse (you can’t imagine the degradation). Look up in the dictionary the word “flesh”—such a plump word—and then look up the word “melt”.
That’s not the worst of it, anyway. The worst of it is the resistance put up, the I’m-not-going-to-die virus. It’s the one that affects the most people because it attacks the living, the ones who surround and love the dying. That virus infected me early on. I remember the day precisely. Paul was in the hospital. He was eating his supper, his whole supper, till the plate was clean and shiny, though he wasn’t at all hungry. I watched him as he chased down every last pea with his fork and as he consciously chewed every mouthful before swallowing. It will help my body fight. Every little bit counts—that’s what he was thinking. It was written all over his face, all over his body, all over the walls. I wanted to scream, “Forget the fucking peas, Paul. You’re going to die! DIE!” Except that the words “death” and “dying”, and their various derivatives and synonyms, were now tacitly forbidden from our talk. So I just sat there, my face emptied of any expression, anger roiling me up inside. My condition got much worse every time I saw Paul shave. All he had were a few downy whiskers on his chin; he just wasn’t the hairy type. Still, he began to shave every day. Every day he lathered up his face with a mountain of shaving cream and scraped it off with a disposable razor. It’s an image that has become engraved in my memory: a vacillatingly healthy Paul dressed in a hospital gown standing in front of a mirror, turning his head this way and that, pulling his skin here and there, meticulously doing something that was utterly, utterly useless.
I