(FALL Semester, 1986)
Mark watches the kids filing in and out of the main hall and wonders if any of them are scared. Fear does not seem to be a prevailing emotion on campus — righteous indignation, sure. Just the other day, he was stopped on the way to his office by a sea of shouting students in the throes of protesting apartheid. Apartheid is, Mark knows, worth protesting, though he also knows these very same students would be unable or unwilling to turn the lens inward on themselves, on the incredibly fucked up history of race relations in their own country.
There is also the question of what they are prioritizing in their demonstrations — foreign abuses, whereas right under their noses, people are dropping dead by the thousands. As he makes his way to his office, he wonders whether they might save some righteous indignation for the scores of dying men, their lives distilled into a series of bad decisions as they are written out of the narrative.
This is what anthropologists do. They look at choices. They say why this and why not that? They worry about publishing now, carving out their niche, making time work for them. They question the logic of a fallible universe, growing upset when it refuses to cohere.
Before, Mark felt like there was too much time — forty loomed, a strange landscape devoid of topographical markers, age casting his isolation into sharp and cruel relief. Now, his impending death having been predicted with a high degree of certainty, he starts to feel the urgency of the anger he has worked tirelessly to suppress. And the bitterness, though the latter comes across as incredibly unbecoming. So Mark does his best to be gracious.
Somewhere along the line, he had engaged in a successful undertaking. The Interpretation of Art and Culture. It was alright, he had demurred, for a first book. Booksellers billed it as pop science and it worked, lay people flocking to it en masse. The word “accessible” was thrown around a lot.
Mark can’t complain. It had landed him his job at Barnard, where he is afforded the privilege of fighting his way through throngs of protesting students. Now he is working on a second project, the as-yet-untitled book that will cement his tenure, if he can figure out what it’s about. This, and everything else, feels urgent enough — pressing enough — to crush him, the fleeting seconds grinding him into tendril strands like the machines behind the meat counter at the grocery store. Mark takes a number, waits, and tries to convince himself that he is ready to die, cowed by the fact that he doesn’t have a choice.
◆
He finds out on an unseasonably cool day in August. People are wearing cardigans, and the women in dresses have goosebumps on their legs. Mark watches them pull their hems down against the wind and hustle into the cavernous mouth of the train station on Lafayette. At the doctor’s office, he sits in the waiting room, listening to the grinding whirr of the self-cleaning fish tank.
He had assumed his life would stretch indefinitely before him, little disappointments paving his path towards oblivion, allowing him to grow old and die in the leisurely fashion he had been told he was owed. Then a doctor tells him what he already knows, that he will be lucky to even have time to consider how unhappy he is. Which is really the best that we, as a species, can hope for: the time and space and comfort and security to consider how unhappy we are.
The appointment itself takes about 10 minutes. There isn’t much to say. He is sick. He is dying. The doctor barely even expresses his condolences. Maybe he is too tired for condolences that day. But in his bones, Mark knows that isn’t the only explanation, just like he knew he had HIV before the doctor confirmed it. He has seen it before with his friends, friends that are dead now. He has also seen, borne out in the anthropological literature, the ways that societies stigmatize sex and death, their perfect confluence in his illness a mocking allusion to something he can’t quite wrap his head around.
He finds himself, as his world closes in even tighter around him, obsessed with doing right by his students, though their youthful idealism fills him with a sense of anger that creeps up slowly, an insidious tide. Still, they are the last people he is beholden to, never having been close to his family, never having had the kind of friendships that transcend the fickle boundaries of shared circumstance. He has always surrounded himself with an entourage of his intricate design, careful to keep the messiness at bay, others flocking to him for his easy and undemanding manner.
His students, he understands, will appreciate him regardless of what he does — they’re just happy to be in his class, the popular anthropologist whose book everyone and their mother has read. Before he enters the lecture hall each afternoon, he pauses, bracing himself with a smile, and prepares to talk to them about their majors, their interests, even their weekend plans. Although he is frustrated, although he can see his anger manifest in the tiny pricks of white that dot the edges of his vision when the students towards the back of the class talk and giggle among themselves, he wants them to like him in the ways he has grown accustomed to being liked. But the futility he feels is overwhelming, and when he thinks about the rigmarole of grading assignments, he seizes with dread. And he’s tired; the exhaustion hits him earlier and earlier with each day that goes by. When he finally makes it uptown on the train, he either wants to hide in his office or turn around and go home. But instead he pauses, smiles, and braces himself. He doesn’t give out any assignments, assuming no one will be upset about a lack of extra papers to write. Instead, he hinges his courses on a survey of anthropology so far, assigning hundreds of pages of readings that encompass the spectrum of the discipline and hoping no one complains.
Not that these students would complain. When he looks out at them in the lecture hall, he is met with a massive sea of eyes, as a whole, unblinking. The youngest ones are eighteen. Eighteen is so young. He doubts they’ve developed the vocabulary to complain.
His hope for them is not that they pursue anthropology, which is a brutal discipline, especially unkind to women. Instead, he hopes they will acquire the vocabulary of complaint. He hopes they will knock heads together like coconuts.
Though he supposes if a few of them want to become anthropologists, that wouldn’t be the worst thing, so long as they understand what they are getting into. There was, after all, a canon to rewrite, a task that Mark used to feel uniquely up to doing. He remembers himself as he was in college, young and buzzed off the terrible, unlimited coffee that was available 24/7 in the dining hall, every idea, no matter how derivative, a promise.
People found him off-putting as a kid, and he knew that, had known it since the conspicuous lack of bar mitzvah invitations in Junior High. But in college, where intelligence was currency, he found himself accepted into the fold in a way that he could never have foreseen. He had always been handsome, if overlooked in that unfortunate way late bloomers often are after establishing themselves as misfits in their prepubescent years. The result of his late-in-life Renaissance was an alluring shyness, an irresistible lack of self-awareness or sexual posturing. Girls wanted to sleep with him, and he slept with one or two, doing his best not to dwell on the fact that sex felt like a chore.
It wasn’t until the year after he graduated, when he was living in Brooklyn and working for an academic press in midtown, that he was honest with himself about why his romantic life had been so skimpy in college, when he should have been going wild with the rest of the country. It wasn’t the act of sex itself. It was the girls.
Now, decades later, he is again living alone in Brooklyn, around the corner from the first sublet he took when he moved in the summer of ‘68. He is honest with himself, if not his family, about the men he sleeps with. He didn’t mean to stay closeted forever, but when he thinks of his mother lighting the candles on Shabbat, of his younger brother, a full twelve years younger than he is, rushing through prayers and breaking the challah open as steam from its doughy center rises towards the ceiling, he wonders what there is to be gained, weighing it carefully against what there is to be lost. To be lost: the holiday dinners, the birthday calls, their pride in the life he has made. To be gained: the intimate messiness of unexamined closeness.
He understands these things. But he also knows from his study of people that some of them are unwilling or unable to change. Is what he tells himself. But he is also, at his core, full of a shame like caulking glue, a shame that has permeated the cracks of his foundation, shoring it up enough to propel him through the years. It’s so much easier this way. He speaks to his family only when the silences stretch so long that they threaten true estrangement.
At least he has Charles, which is something. A casual fling, devoid of expectation and carried out on Mark’s terms. He doesn’t have a nickname — not Charlie, or Chuck. Mark used to call him Chuckles for fun, though he has rarely seen him laugh or even smile. Charles is so intense that his temperature runs hot — when he places his hand on the small of Mark’s back, caressing him through the thin fabric of one of his worn-out t-shirts, Mark resists the urge to jump a little.
They have been seeing each other for a few months when Mark is diagnosed. They are not exclusive, or at least, Mark rationalizes, they’ve never talked about it. They are just friends and occasional bedfellows who have suddenly found themselves spending a whole lot of time together — platonic time, which sets Mark on edge. He is careful to avoid sex, but when he tries to warn Charles about his diagnosis, the words don’t come. He tells himself it has something to do with the sheer difficulty of saying it out loud, something he hasn’t done with anyone yet, but he knows it’s more than that — once Charles is gone, and Mark will make him leave, then he’ll be resoundingly alone.
To avoid the question of romance, he tries to throw himself into his work, bouncing back and forth between responsibilities, seeking refuge in the spaces of his life that are the least broken. In his office, shutting his window against the repetitive protest chants that drift inside from the courtyard below, Mark grabs the books he needs and heads for the lecture hall. His students stare at him blankly when he talks, no doubt expecting dynamism, instead receiving what Mark guesses based on the panicked, searching looks on their faces comes across as an angry diatribe. He never references the readings, or encourages students to ask questions. He wants quiet. He wants a space where he feels knowledgeable, where he can hold forth with minimal effort.
The bolder ones come to his office hours, seeking him out on more neutral terms. He has no idea how to help them, and by the time he meets with them in the late afternoon, he is too tired to think straight, like he is fighting through a fog. More than half of the semester has already passed in a flurry of introductions and logistics, a slow establishing of routine. Enough time has gone by for students to inhabit their roles, knocking on his door to regale him with credentials thinly disguised as questions. It feels as if they are speaking different dialects of the same language, these students, as though they are skirting mutual intelligibility. But still he leans forward in his chair and tries to listen.
◆
That night, Mark goes home and makes himself something bland and easy for dinner — he reads, watches the news, works intermittently on his book. Charles joins him, though lately his visits have been trickling off as Mark withdraws further. For the most part, he spends his nights alone, falling asleep on the couch and moving to his bed only when the complaints of his body reach a critical volume. Months fly by, dulled by the monotony of routine, and he dreads the days when he needs to be on campus, the students resembling a high-pitched whine in his ear. He is sorry, because he sees the way they look at him. But he can’t.
In the beginning of December, they are more subdued, the world outside already settling into night by the time class begins. When he brings up the necessity of a final exam, something by which to assign grades, he hears the rustling of papers, students shifting in their seats, anxiety as palpable as the drifts of falling snow outside. He doesn’t want them to worry, so he gives them a gift of an assignment: a one-page thick description of a setting or scene, the kind of ethnographic anthropology that is mostly imagination, saying more about the anthropologist than the population of study.
He spends the majority of finals week in his office with his door open to students, trying in vain to at least be a good professor in this respect, though the questions and visits have finally trickled off. They are busy with more important, high-stakes work, which is clear as they rush by to drop off their finals, smiling at him nervously and then rushing off again.
On the Thursday of finals week, he puts the papers in his briefcase and makes his way to the train, shuffling his feet against the suitcase tracks in the snow. Around him, students hug goodbye, alighting on yellow cabs or dragging their bags down the icy steps to the train, their hands red and chapped in the cold.
He does not see his family during the break. Instead, over the protracted period of solitude when the far reaches of the city shut down and its center is clogged by holiday tourists, he holes up in his apartment, throwing a heavy down coat over his pajamas and house slippers to shuffle to the bodega on the corner each morning. He subsists on bacon egg and cheese sandwiches for days on end, reading by himself in the insular quiet.
◆
(SPRING Semester, 1987)
Over the break, Mark also tries to work on his book. As he stares at his notes, it occurs to him that he hasn’t been able to write because he no longer cares about the project. To take a break, Mark reads his students’ exams, giving them each a check mark at the top of the page. Some are better than others — a few even catch his eye as inventive and smart, whereas others shouldn’t qualify as passing at all — but Mark treats them all the same. He prepares their final grades for the registrar, basing them on attendance. Next semester, he tells himself, he will be better.
One afternoon, as he shuts his curtains against the weak winter light and writes through the throbbing headache of a low-grade fever, he starts to work on something else, taking a break from the manuscript. When he is finished, he looks at the papers in his hand and realizes he has written a fragment of an essay on his diagnosis, on the shifting culture of the city, the way his favorite bars feel different now. It isn’t bad, and though he tries to avoid feeling excited, he makes the decision to keep going with it and see where he ends up, writing about his impending death in the investigative way he has been trained as an anthropologist to write.
Mark gets up to pace his apartment. The pages come much easier in this informal and friendly voice of his, the one that made his first book so popular. Around 6pm, he orders food from the Thai place on the corner. He works for hours without stopping, knocking out pages and tossing them to the side.
The next day, he gets up early and looks over what he has written, which in the morning light reads as sentimental drivel, as a desperate, last-minute justification of the way he has lived his life. He feverishly walks around the neighborhood, passing the canals that are tinged a sludge-like green and watching thin gray clouds descend on the rooftops of downtown Manhattan.
That night, when he sits back down at his desk, determined to edit, his attitude towards his pages softens, and he begins to see how they might harbor some promise. A solitary routine is born. Weeks and then months slip by and the stack of pages grows as Mark delves into his suburban childhood, the slight offness about him that kept him away from his peers, how he felt he had to wait until after college to explore his sexuality. He is somewhat embarrassed to be writing an autobiography — yet another career shift he justifies by weaving in strands of the cultural, juxtaposing it with the specific minutiae of his own life.
This new project makes the rest of his life easier, and his Spring semester classes at Barnard feel less like a hard pit in his stomach — he is finally able to plan for his lessons, and some of his enthusiasm for the subject matter, long lost, comes tumbling out of him, a surprise that makes him feel partially electric. One day in class, he even asks his students to consider the anthropology of New York, the current scene of sexualpolitik as displayed by the artistic zeitgeist. He cloaks his lesson in a shroud of academic language and resists the urge to scream at the students who have tuned out in the back, discomfited by his screed, twisting locks of hair around their fingers and looking around nervously.
Occasionally, he is dragged out by friends, usually having one or two cocktails before making an excuse to go home, but for the most part, he shuttles between his apartment and campus, settling into a groove. Even as he starts to feel the permanence of his slow burning fever, as the insides of his thighs break out in rashes, Mark is filled with a sense of purpose that he thought had been permanently lost.
On Charles’ birthday, Mark feels better than he has in a while, and even though they’ve been seeing each other less frequently, Mark agrees to join his birthday cavalcade. Charles chooses a gay bar called Badlands, which is set back from the main drag, a nondescript brick building that looms over the Hudson. When Mark arrives, Charles surprises him by putting his hand on the small of Mark’s back, slipping it beneath his layers, and leading him to the table Charles’ friends have commandeered. Mark isn’t drinking, but he watches Charles get pleasantly tipsy, his friends teasing him while Mark sits back and smiles. The group gets up to dance, migrating to the main room, and it is here that he sees one of his students sitting at the bar, slowly sipping a cocktail and pretending not to see him. He recognizes her because she always arrives to class early and sits in the front row — her wavy hair cascades down her back and her large, watchful eyes are ringed in blue liner. She is looking over at Mark and then looking away, as though wrestling with whether or not she wants to be seen.
Something washes over Mark. Some sense of futility and fury. He snaps in half, feeling the inevitable collision of his worlds, the spiraling chaos of his life. It isn’t that he is ashamed to be found here — after all, he is writing a book about his life with every intent to publish it under his name. But he has not come out to his students, preferring the clearly-defined borders of anthropological distance in his classroom. He just likes the neatness of categories. He just didn’t expect to see her here. And she looks like a bush baby with her eyes all wide and done up like that. How long had she been here? Had she followed him?
Before Charles can ask where he’s going, Mark makes his way towards the bar where she is perched on a stool. The girl does not stand up to greet him, and her eyes seem oddly blank, darting around, processing.
“Why are you here?” Mark asks, and he watches her scramble to answer. She looks afraid now. She had been watching him, he’s sure of it.
“I…I was…” the girl stammers, but Mark cuts her off.
“You’re in my morning section, right? Advanced Anthropological Methods? I let you take the class even though you’re a freshman.” He is remembering now, the way she came to his office to ask point blank for what she wanted, no small talk or wasted time, a skill that Mark only developed years into adulthood. A skill he was sure his students didn’t yet possess. He had been impressed, granting her immediate permission to take the class.
The girl’s mouth is open slightly, and her smudged lipstick sparkles under the red glare of the lights. Tears prick the corners of her eyes.
“So you’re what, eighteen?” Mark looks back at Charles, who is watching intently with his chest puffed out, ready to come to Mark’s defense against this willowy, still-teenaged girl. “You aren’t supposed to be here.”
“I didn’t…I was just going to leave.” Mark sees that the girl is quite drunk, that she is struggling to extract the correct amount of cash from her wallet. Mark sighs. He is suddenly exhausted. He can taste his breath in his mouth like something rotting.
“You’ll get back safe?” he asks, but she is already pushing open the door, throwing her coat over her shoulder and speed walking down Christopher. He watches the door close behind her, a cool breeze ferried into the bar.
◆
The party breaks up shortly after, and Charles invites himself over because Mark does not voice his desire to sleep alone. They crawl into bed, though the fluorescent light from the alley is still visible through a crack in the curtain. Charles gets up to fix it, and Mark reaches out to touch the broad plane of his back.
“That girl from the bar…” Charles says, recoiling from his touch. Mark’s circulation is poor and his fingers are freezing cold.
“A student of mine. I can’t imagine what she thought she was doing.” Charles slides back into the bed. His body is a furnace.
“Bold of her to be there by herself,” he says. Mark turns over slowly to face him.
“Yeah, bold is one word for it.” His voice comes out petulant and dismissive, which was not his intention. He feels himself slipping into a defensive register, something that happens a lot with Charles.
“I’m not suggesting it’s your fault or anything. Just saying you should be careful what you tell students. I know you want them to like you, and I get that, but…”
“I didn’t tell her anything!” Mark is irritated by Charles’ unwavering stare. He regrets telling him about his conversations with students, how they like to share their weekend plans. The two of them are quiet while Charles stares at the ceiling. Mark’s anger grows as he imagines Charles weighing his options, ticking through the things he could say, running a quick cost-benefit analysis. A businessman, he is so cold, and so calculating.
“What is going on with you?” Charles whispers. This takes Mark by surprise, stealing the breath from his chest. He had expected Charles to be angry, has raised his hackles in preemptive response, but is instead confronted with the tenuous, shifting tone of his fear. He pulls himself up in bed, floored by the realization that Charles cares for him, even though Mark has carefully relegated him to the margins of his life.
He knows he owes a confession to Charles, and he hopes it is enough to explain his behavior. When Charles sits up, resting his head in his hands, Mark considers the history of his ambivalence towards being alive. How it has affected his would-be loves.
“I think you should go,” Mark says.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
As for being alive, the great irony is that recently, he hasn’t been feeling so ambivalent. There are, he has realized with something akin to embarrassment, things he wants to do. Books he wants to write. Dance clubs he wants to attend one more time before deciding he is too old for them and slipping into the domestic fog of middle age. He wants to reach middle age. Mark pictures himself begging God to let him turn forty, pleading on his knees for the chance to fade into obscurity, a fear that used to consume his nights as he stared at his typewriter and wondered if his career was over.
Charles slowly makes his way into the kitchen where he fills a glass of water. In the bedroom, he places it on Mark’s nightstand. He tries to say something, to run the pads of his fingers up Mark’s spine, but Mark cringes.
“You should leave,” he says again. So Charles puts on his shoes and leaves.
Mark sleeps poorly that night, consumed by the knowledge that one of the last things tethering him to the city and his friends has left his apartment for the final time. He is kept awake by thoughts of his family, the dissolving line between guilt and shame. He still doesn’t plan on reaching out to them, and now he is sure of his choice, now that he is truly alone, a state he knows well enough to mistake for comfort. Nothing will seem amiss given that they speak to each other so rarely. He prefers to let his death be a sudden shock, a cold plunge into icy water.
The next morning, Mark makes the trek uptown to campus to work on his book and force himself to go outside, though he spends the majority of the afternoon staring blankly at the tiny slit of visible sky above the top of his bookshelf. In the afternoon, unable to keep his head up any longer, he permits himself to go home — it is relatively nice out, sunny but too cold to sit outside, though people still flock to the lawn. Mark heads to the train, waving at a few students he recognizes from his intro class. They smile at him, unsure, and one proffers a small wave of her own.
In the mailbox on the corner of campus, he drops the first chapter of his manuscript, sending it off to his editor friend who ran an interview with him several years earlier, when he was a rising star in the field of anthropology. It is only in his vulnerable exhaustion that he is able to take such a risk — had he been thinking clearly, he might have waited, agonized over the potential implications until he had lured himself into a state of paralyzing inaction.
To avoid thinking about the enormity of what he has done, he takes the train to Prince, walking to his favorite diner and cracking open a book as he waits for his food. He tries to celebrate, to feel that there is something worth celebrating about the decision he has made. He knows that the writing is good, maybe the best he’s ever produced. He knows that the topic is salient, and that the moment for it is now, but still he fears the repercussions — his parents reading it, the school reading it, his circumstantial friendships with the people in his peripheral orbit ended prematurely, his life being reduced to a story of plight rather than promise.
In the weeks that follow, he does his best to distract himself. He continues writing, spending more and more time in his little office on campus, which he has cleaned up to the extent that he can comfortably sit in the little niche he has carved amidst the sea of books. Sometimes students come to see him, and he plasters a smile on his face and hopes he doesn’t look too horrible, that no one wonders why he is bundled in layers when the weather has turned unmistakably pleasant. He covers his hand with his mouth when he speaks, doing his best to hide the sores that dot his lips, and is reminded how he used to speak through his fingers as a child, a habit of shyness that his mother worked overtime to break.
He spends what free time he has worrying constantly about his health. There is one thing he knows of that gives him hope, and he clings to it desperately, a promise he is afraid of seeking out, lest it disappoint — a new miracle drug for the HIV-afflicted, the miracle being a death that takes slightly more time. Not many people know that it exists yet — it has only been on the market for about a month — and Mark believes he is just healthy enough to get it, just sick enough to need it. In the Venn Diagram of possible patients, he is in the center, waving his hands, shooting up a flare gun to capture the attention of passing planes.
He signs up for the trials. He has as much reason to live as the next person. Again, he goes to the doctor. Again, he listens to the whir of the fish tank. They take seemingly life threatening amounts of blood for testing and send him on his way.
When he gets home, there is a package waiting for him. On the front, his editor’s name is printed in neat, almost typographical script, the writing of someone whose job it is to address envelopes. It feels heavy. He opens it, pulling out his returned manuscript, as well as the most congratulatory apology he has ever seen. The writing is triumphant, funny, candid. They can’t publish it.
He tries to keep working. He will finish this project. Is what he tells himself. He goes into his bedroom, peeling off the layers of his clothing, the soft cotton of the fabric giving off a sweet rankness, a body smell turned slightly sour. He crawls into bed. He needs to take a shower.
The call comes a few weeks later. It is the receptionist at the clinic, the one who smiles at him tightly whenever he comes in. She patches him through to a doctor, whose voice is tinny on the line, static, coming from somewhere far away. Mark barely hears him say that he is not a good candidate for the drug. It has to do with his platelet count, which is too low. In this respect, as well as others, he has waited too long.