Dorian (17 page)

Tenderly, Baz removed the cigarette butt from Wotton’s lips and dropped it into the teacup. There was another fizz. He looked down at the waxen face. The ill man’s veined eyelids twitched and his lips parted to reveal yellowed incisors. He whimpered, as might a sleeping dog that was hunting in its dreams. ‘I wonder if you heard that, old friend, before you gouched out?’ Baz murmured. ‘I say “friend”, Henry, because I think of you as a friend, whatever it is that’s happened between us. I think of you as a dying friend, someone just like me.’

Baz sighed, rose and went over to the glass partition. He peered through into the next room, where the remains of another young man’s life were being meted out by the mechanical ‘choof’s of a respirator. He returned to his bedside vigil. He ran his hands over his crew cut and ground his fists into his eye sockets. He felt he had to appease the ghosts of his and Wotton’s tumultuous past. He felt he needed to protect himself from his old friend’s madness in the present. The future was simply terrifying. He felt – and that was the worst thing of all. A swollen emotional dyspepsia, compounded in equal parts of love, pity, fear and a desire for self-preservation that – all things considered – seemed ludicrously out of place. Still, at long last Basil Hallward had a measure of calm; there was nowhere to race to or escape from any more. He readied himself to soliloquise.

‘Perhaps it’s worth speaking to you now, Henry, speaking to you in a way that I’ll probably never have the guts to when you’re awake. Who knows, maybe you’ll hear me. Fuck it – believe me – I’m not doing it for you or me, I’m doing it for us both.’ Baz took a deep breath. Even when he was unconscious, Wotton’s expression was mocking. ‘Look, I think I know you, I think I know what that mask of cynicism obscures – a child, desperately frightened of his own capacity to feel and to be felt, to love and be loved. I was like that, and the mask had to be picked away at, and picked away at… as if… as if it were a hard scab protecting my raw features, until the vulnerable Baz underneath was exposed.’ He got up again and began to pace around three sides of the bed.

‘I escaped from New York, Henry. Or rather, one of the guys who’d been on the fringes of the scene, a wealthy gay guy with impeccable ethics – yes, such people exist – paid for me to go to rehab in the Midwest. I’m not saying it was easy – it fucking wasn’t – but it was the beginning of my recovery. When I got there, Henry… it was as if I’d woken up in a surreal orphanage… All these people wandering around… They’d been devious fucking addicts and brawling drunks on the outside, but in this place they were children… Arrogant children screaming defiance – I want my sweetie drugs! As you can imagine, I was one of the loudest.’

Wotton’s eyelids moved more rapidly. Was he asleep, or merely dreaming that he was – his opiated visions interleaving themselves with Baz’s word pictures to create a flick-book that could be viewed only from an exact angle? From a point in between him and Baz, here and there, now and then.

It was a wooden room full of splintered people. There was pitch-pine cladding and polished pine floorboarding. Outside, evergreens shaded in the mid-ground and cancelled out any background altogether. In the foreground crouched more hutments, obviously part of the same camp. In this one there were slogans on the walls – ‘I Can’t – We Can’, ‘Keep It Simple’, ‘Just for Today’ – that cumulatively implied the marketing of a suspiciously intangible product, such as invisible snake-oil. The strip lighting, the fire extinguisher, the laminated card printed with directions saying where to point the squirty foam, everything in sight screamed ‘Institution!’; and while everybody in the room had their mouths shut tight, nevertheless their fidget language was strident. The motley collection of ten deadbeats sat in a loose circle of plastic stacking chairs, scratching, picking, jiggling and rubbing. Clearly, shit had been going down, and the one who appeared most dumped upon, most curled up in his chair, was Basil Hallward.

Billy, who had hair pressed into frizzy earphones by his baseball cap, and acne the same red as the fire extinguisher, felt moved to speak. You’re full of shit, Baz, all you wanna talk about is the celebrities you’ve hung out with, an’ all the ass you’ve had –

—Ass y’may’ve ’fected yo’sel’ with AIDS. Y’wanted t’bring the whole fuckin’ world down widya? Was that it, Baz? added Bear, a man who justified his moniker by reason of his size, his colour and his bushiness of beard.

Ashley, a preppy Percodan abuser, felt prompted to pipe up, You say you’ve loved people, Baz – I don’t think you can have loved anyone ever, not even this Dorian guy you’re so obsessed with. I don’t think you know what love is.

Sven, the counsellor running this group, was, with his clipped sandy hair and smooth sandy beard, suitably Nordic in appearance. He looked very fit, absurdly fit, so fit it was difficult to believe that he too was a recovering addict. What substance could he possibly have abused – wood? OK, he said, that’s enough, people; we’ve heard Basil’s life story and you’ve read him your peer evaluations. What I want you to share with us, Basil, is – how do you feel about what your group is saying to you?

—What do I feel, Sven?! I feel faintly nauseous, and if it weren’t so absurd to imagine that these people are my peers, I expect I’d be offended by it. Very offended. But forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do. Baz’s bravado was belied by the tears that leaked from his eyes.

It never failed, Sven thought, the peer evaluation. It didn’t matter how smart or savvy an addict thought they might be, it was impossible for them to escape the verdict of Judge Junky. Do you think you’re like Jesus, Baz? he said. That you’re a martyr to your disease?

—And which disease would that be, Sven?

—The disease of addiction, Baz.

—Ha! That bullshit again. Where’s the fucking virus that gives it to you then?

—Not all diseases are caused by viruses, Baz, you know that.

—OK, Sven, in that case what’s the cure?

Before answering, the odious Odin flexed his mighty biceps in a luxuriant motion evocative of complete and healthy embodiment. There’s no cure, Baz, you’ve been here long enough to know that. But maybe if you got offa that cross you’re dangling on you might find what it is we here have to offer you. We can’t cure you, Baz – but we can help. Am I right, people?

‘Who knows whether any kind of treatment really works, Henry. Treatment for the disease of addiction or AIDS. I don’t want to sell you on the idea of rehab. Looking back, I’m not so sure I didn’t stay clean
despite
rather than because of it. But it did give me the opportunity to put things in their correct place.’ As Baz spoke,
sotto voce
, he was putting things in their correct place. He emptied the ashtrays into the bin and the dregs from the bottles into the sink. He stacked the hospital crockery on the hospital tray, and folded Wotton’s clothing over the trouser press. If nothing that Baz had softly said could convince a cynical onlooker of his change in character, then these actions at least spoke pleasantly of practical alterations.

‘It’s language that you’d find laughable – repugnant, even – if you were conscious, but I had a form of spiritual awakening in rehab. Naturally’ – he nearly chuckled – ‘finding out you’re going to die a fuck of a lot sooner, rather than the hoped-for hell of a lot later, does help. You also make intense friendships in those places, Henry; you’re thrown together with all kinds of people, and either you learn to like them or you end up going mad with hatred for yourself. I made friends with a guy called Bear. He’d been a fucking gangster, he’d killed, he was from the Chicago projects, he was black. Shit, he was even a straight guy who’d
raped
queers in Federal Pen – but he was the one who helped me when I was diagnosed.’

As in some promotional film for a cancer hospice, two men walked beside a lake, the brilliance of the sunlight on the blue water rendering them insubstantial. Baz was walking with Bear in this suitably sylvan setting, and the big black man had his arm tight around Baz’s narrow shoulders. Listen, Baz, he said, there ain’t nothin’ no one can say to make this one good.

—You’re fucking right there, Bear.

—I remember when they tol’ me, I jus’ cried an’ screamed. It called to mind every goddamn time I’d cranked up in my whole sorry life. All them spikes diggin’ inta me, like spears or arrows. I hollered so much they hadta put me in County for a night. Counsellor drove me there himsel’ –

—What? Sven?

—Yeah, an’ I tell you, Baz, that man cares. He really does.

—Yeah – whether he cares or not, we’re still gonna fucking die, Bear. We’re still gonna die – what’s the point in staying clean, working a programme, all that shit, only to die at the end of it? And Baz broke down.

—’Cause you’re worth more than that, Baz, you’re worth more. We’re all worth more… He cradled Baz’s head in his big hand, as a mother might protect the skull of a baby… I’m gonna do what they say, he continued, I’m gonna stay clean. I ain’t gonna die hatin’ mysel’ for jus’ another dumb motherfuckin’ junky.

Done with the housekeeping, Baz sat on the chair beside the bed, looking down at his friend. In keeping this vigil Baz was freed to speak of earlier vigils, because that was the temper of the time. Wotton himself lay sinisterly calm. But maybe he wasn’t sleeping, merely lying stock-still, for fear any admission that he could hear what Baz Hallward said would make his own bravura in the face of death quite untenable.

‘He did die, Henry. I was there. It wasn’t in a ward like this one either, with hip nurses and halfway decent doctors. It was a run-down Medicare ward on the south side of Chicago. A joint where the orderlies zipped guys with pneumonia, and covered with fucking KS, into body-bags days before they died, because they knew they were going to and they didn’t want to fucking
touch
them. Those guys wailed and screamed, lying in their own piss and shit. But I and guys from Bear’s group sat vigil with him, we cleaned him up, we hassled the medics for pain relief. We looked after him. And I tell you, Henry, that man died with
dignity
. He died with
grace
. A fucking no-hope ghetto boy, an addict, a fucking crack dealer, a killer. He died with dignity because he could love himself a little – and let others love him too. I wonder if it can be like that for us, Henry? I have my regime. I spend an hour and a half every fucking day boiling up Chinese herbs and drinking the vile broth. I shove selenium suppositories up my arse – the only thing that gets shoved up there nowadays. I do the acupuncture, I take other prophylactics. But every year the virus gets a little stronger, outwits me a little faster. Every year I end up in hospital for longer, like you, with a drip pumping AZT and DDC and DDI into me. And every year the mollusca – as you so coyly put it – proliferate, while the shingles sprout in my fucking colon and my weight falls. We’ve been lucky enough already Henry, you and I, but no one dies lucky.’ He leaned forward and snapped off the light; the room was plunged into the unquiet grave of a night-time hospital. ‘Well, goodnight, Henry. I’d like to say I don’t envy you at all, smacked out of your fucking gourd, but at times like this… I do.’ And at last, Baz left the room. But perhaps if he’d paused outside for a few moments he would have heard some snuffling, evidence that his words had been heard. Perhaps.