Loving the unknown

Inevitably, when people ask me questions about HIV, they are simple questions -- how, when and who. \nThey are questions asked to fill in newspaper responses, quick and to the point. They focus both on how I live now, and how, as I lived before, HIV happened to me. \n They assume an easy relationship between cause and effect, that it can be objectified, as it would be in a newspaper story. \n Sometimes, the questions assume I knew when I was infected. That I was an actor in a scenario well rehearsed.\nEvery question should be answered, I think, and with better than a demurred response -- too personal? Not usually. It is not as if I'm a snake who has shed an unlucky skin for a new year of living, but my life up to the point of HIV is a hide of a life I lived. Living differently now, thinking differently, reacting differently, that person's life isn't just mine anymore -- some of it belongs to you. \nI know of certain places within it that are entry points for HIV, but it's difficult to view the past as a bloodstream waiting for an infection. It loses the whole point.\nFor me, as for you, combinations of choices brought me to the present, and will deliver me into the future. More considered ones from me now, perhaps, but born of the same hurly-burly as always.\nWhen choices end in traumas, we'd rather forget them. As if we could etch-a-sketch the looping trails of our epic struggle to do the right thing, then shake them clean. The mind is a washing machine. \nUntil I became a person with HIV, when I was a person without it, the educational zeal I have today just didn't exist. My advocacy was limited to supporting the death sentence for bad drivers in New York City, my zeal -- well, I don't know that I had any. I lived as people often do, from choice to choice. \nI came back to Indiana because my parents were aging, as were my nieces and nephews. I didn't know the younger ones, I had lapsed communication with their parents. I was tired of city living at the time.\nI came back to the scenes of my earliest possibilities for HIV infection. I drove by houses I knew the inside of, that looked much the same. Points on a sexual tour of an undergraduate life. Within the last few years, one of my last connections to those days, one of my last living possibilities for transmission died. He never acknowledged to me that he had HIV. I knew it by accident.\nI knew it by seeing a medical record in passing; a diagnosis of complications from primary HIV infection, a routine problem. I knew about it after we had sex.\nI knew nothing we had done sexually would be likely to transmit, except oral sex.\nThis was a person for whom I had deep, unrequited feelings -- I don't know if it was love, as that never had a chance. From a different culture and a different time, he was never gay in the way we consider gay now.\nQuestions of where and when and how provoke me to privately reconsider my list of suspects, to go through an endless loop of experience checks, like a sound-check roadie at a rock concert. \nI can't erase him. Our sexual liaison had possibilities. My work as a test counselor has benefited from it -- you can't discount oral sex as a route of transmission.\nHe was in all ways a beautiful man. A potent intellectual, a great sense of humor, a fascinating talker, generous with ideas, a natural gymnast in the ways of the body; I would have taken him home to meet mother.\nI could never talk to him about HIV, I could never admit I saw what I had no business seeing. He never talked to me about it. We last spoke on the phone when he was ill, an illness he said he would get over, and never did.\nI first met him at Bullwinkle's, I was out with my friends; he was with his gay friends, the ones who knew what his life was really like. It was summer.\nIt was ice cold, January, when he died, almost 15 years later. \nDid he infect me? Obviously he did, but not with a mere condition of health. He infected me with his charm, his curiosity about the world; he infected me with an idea of who I wanted to be with -- they would, I knew, have to measure up to him.\nOf the points of entry for HIV in my life, each one of them has a name, and I remember them. They weren't faceless partners, or nice smiles from across a smoky bar. They had, and still have, a place in my affection. Each one of them was interesting, virtuous to various degrees, all of them were talented; they didn't pass through like sailors and no, I wasn't a port.\nWhen I visit them, and I do, our conversations are stuck on tape, the image is scratchier each time. I shouldn't call it conversation, it's more like amateur seance. Each of them is dead. \nI want to talk about HIV all the more because of this, because I can't discuss it with them. I can't pin a date and know whether I should apologize or be apologized to; there are no heroes and no victims, my life is a bad literature.\nWe were all a lot like you.