Candy (25 page)

So he came and told me. That’s how he is—whenever anything happens that makes him upset, he runs and tells me right away. He looked as if he’d been up all night partying, and in fact he hadn’t eaten or slept in days. His face had a green-gray pallor, his breath was foul, his eyes were sunken and often crossed, his face was covered with fresh acne, and the skin just below the corners of his mouth was a mess.

That’s how chemicals are. You feel great for a while, but afterward all the bullshit that’s been troubling you comes back in full force, and you find yourself in even deeper shit than before.

He soon quit taking that stuff, telling me that he thought his old life was better for him. It was more solid.

The night he told me that, I lit all the candles in the house and brewed a pot of oolong tea. I said, Let’s pretend it’s a pot of magic-mushroom tea. That night I played DJ and played him some music, and for a long time we watched the shapes of the candlelight flickering to the music, and we talked about silly things, and once again we had the sensation that we were being lifted up together, in one of those rare peaks of experience you have from time to time. Bug was like Saining, one of those hard-to-find people who always understood me, no matter what nonsense I was talking. The more off-the-wall I got, the better they understood. Conversations like those were my favorite kind because they had nothing to do with everyday life. Some weekends, Saining, Bug, and I would get together, along with a few others we didn’t pay much attention to because they were just hangers-on. If we’d eaten E, we would emerge from a club on a weekend morning, sure to be bound for the café in the eighty-eight-story Grand Hyatt Hotel, where we could continue our bullshit session. Places like the Grand Hyatt didn’t feel so over-the-top if you went there with your closest friends. Saining said that the Grand Hyatt building was the only place he liked in Shanghai, and aside from wanting to be a fireman, he had another fantasy, which was to be a window washer at the Grand Hyatt and to hang by a safety rope. We always left the Grand Hyatt with black circles under our eyes because we always sat there for at least ten hours, blabbing about everything and nothing and gazing out the windows.

A month later, Bug told me that he’d been running a low-grade fever for two weeks, and he had had diarrhea. And there were other symptoms that were more serious. I said, What are you trying to tell me? He said, Can I show you something? He led me into the bathroom and took off his pants. He wasn’t wearing any underwear. He took my hand and said, Feel this. I said, What are you doing? He touched my hand to his inner thigh, and it felt as though there was something hard inside the muscle of his inner thigh, something rock-hard.

I said, I think this is where your lymph glands are. They seem to be swollen.

Bug stood there without moving. I looked between his legs and then back at his face. He was holding his neck very straight, with his head tilted up, but his eyes were looking down at me, and his gaze seemed to bore right through me. Then he looked away from me, straight ahead, and he said, I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I’ve gone through all the possibilities. I think I have AIDS. I had a lot of friends with AIDS when I was in America, and I remember thinking that if my neck ever started to swell up, it would mean that I was going to die.

Just then, Bug’s beeper went off, and he started hunting around for it.

I said, Who paged you?

He said, It isn’t mine; I don’t wear a beeper.

I said, Then what was that sound we just heard?

He thought for a moment and then said, Oh, yeah! That’s right! Now, where did I leave it?

I said, Getting high all the time has really messed you up!

It’s not the drugs; it’s AIDS.

What are you talking about? How could you have AIDS? That’s impossible.

Why is it impossible?

Well, in the first place, you’ve always used a condom.

I’ve never used a condom.

For God’s sake! That’s not what you told me before! Put your pants back on. Let’s not panic; let’s discuss this rationally. How could you not use a condom?

I don’t like them.

Who does? That’s not the point.

I’m not promiscuous.

How many people have you slept with?

Not that many.

Yes, but how many people had they slept with?

They were all nice, unsophisticated girls.

Nice, unsophisticated people are the most dangerous. The vast majority of what you call “nice girls” are incredibly ignorant. I don’t want you to get mad at me, but —

They were perfectly healthy. The problem is that I slept with
laowai.

The problem isn’t foreigners. It’s not who you screw; it’s how you do it.

You’re starting to scare me.

I doubt that you have AIDS. You probably haven’t been exposed to it.

What makes you think that?

Nothing in particular. It’s just a feeling.

But how do you explain all these symptoms? I want to get tested.

Where do you want to go?

A hospital.

Which hospitals do AIDS testing?

I don’t know. We can ask around.

Who are we going to ask? This isn’t an ordinary STD. I’ve been tested for HIV twice, but that was in rehab.

Bug sat down on the sofa, sucking nonstop on breath mints. He said, Why did this have to happen to me? Why me?

I said, Let’s not talk about that for now. First we get you tested. Then we’ll see about the next step.

Bug didn’t want to go home, so he stayed at my place. Every day I gave him all kinds of cold medicines, as well as medicine for diarrhea, and every day I checked his forehead repeatedly, hoping to find that his fever had subsided. But what I found troubled me. I couldn’t understand why things had to be this way. Every time he came out of the bathroom, he would stare at me inconsolably, and then he would say, I had diarrhea again. We spent our days in an ignorant haze, watching pirated VCDs. We would watch any pirated movie we could get our hands on. But finally I said, I can’t stand it any longer. Why don’t we get on the Internet and see what we can find out?

We visited every HIV Web site, but aside from having information about the history and medical aspects of HIV, they didn’t provide any detailed descriptions of the symptoms, beyond a slightly elevated temperature, diarrhea, swollen lymph glands, and a spotty red skin rash. That’s as far as it went. There were, however, a lot of phone numbers. I figured that this was because they didn’t want to encourage people who didn’t know what they were doing to sit at home and diagnose themselves. But all of the telephone numbers were for hot lines overseas, and we couldn’t call them from here. What’s more, neither of us spoke very good English. As it was, we’d had a hard enough time trying to decipher what we saw on the Web.

We got in touch with our mutual friends Xiaochun and Xiaohua.

I said, We have a serious problem. I think you may have guessed what I’m talking about. What should we do?

Xiaochun said, You can’t go just anywhere for testing. If you’re positive, they’ll haul you off and banish you to some deserted island, and they’ll never let you go. This scared us. Xiaochun was one of those people who spent the whole day sitting in an office reading the newspaper, so we figured she knew what she was talking about. Xiaohua said, Don’t get tested in China. She also didn’t think that the tests in China were reliable. She said that the last time she’d come back from abroad, they’d demanded at the airport that she be tested for HIV, and they took blood from lots of people and then put it all in different squares of a gridlike frame. They shook the whole thing several times, back and forth, and up and down, and then they pronounced everyone OK. She concluded from this that the greatest danger in China wasn’t from
laowai
at all, but from all of the Chinese who regularly traveled abroad.

We tried to imagine that “deserted island,” but we couldn’t exactly picture what it would be like. And because we couldn’t picture it, we felt even more afraid.

We thought about all of those Chinese people who frequently travel outside China. When they’re overseas, they sleep around. They’re careless, they don’t use condoms, and when they come home, they pass through immigration wearing dark glasses before vanishing into the crowd. And then they fuck around some more. Afterward the people they fucked go and fuck a bunch of other people. It’s terrifying, this promiscuous world we live in.

Bug launched into a silly chant: I’m tired, I’m wired, I’m tired, I’m wired.

He stripped off all his clothing and inspected every square inch of his body, and he found a couple of little red spots on his calves. He said, Hey, look at this. Can you see them? He was blinking hard as he spoke. A few days later, he discovered a gray stripe on his tongue, and this was followed by alternating sieges of diarrhea and low fever.

Every day saw new developments. It was always something, as if he’d been possessed by evil spirits and the wheel of life was spinning rapidly into the darkness. The whole situation just made us want to get high every day. We weren’t doing much of anything, but our appetites suddenly improved, and our metabolism sped up, and every day we devoured lots of different flavors of instant ramen like a pair of hungry ghosts. When we weren’t eating or sleeping, we were thinking about HIV, but we couldn’t think of a solution.

Xiaohua phoned. She said she’d gotten on the Internet. Her tone was grief-stricken as she announced, It doesn’t look good. What he’s got sounds pretty similar.

I called Kiwi in the United States, and he called a hot line over there. When he got back to me, he was using the same tone of voice that Xiaohua had. It’s not good, he said. It sure looks like that’s what he’s got. He concluded, Whatever you do, don’t treat him like a pariah. What he needs more than anything right now is understanding and comfort.

I couldn’t take it all in. How had words become reality in such a short time?

We started analyzing in detail each and every girl that Bug had ever slept with.

We soon realized that all of the girls he’d been with had at least two things in common. One, none of them had insisted that Bug use a condom. Two, Bug always knew at least one of the other guys these girls had slept with. But what other girls had those guys slept with? What were they like? Bug could always find at least one other girl that he knew. Following this information to its logical conclusion, we became increasingly alarmed. The more we knew, the more worried we became. Ultimately we estimated that Bug had, in effect, made love with hundreds of thousands of people (and because Bug and I were such close friends, I was soon infected with the same panic). As I multiplied all these numbers in my head, it started to seem likely that everyone was in trouble.

The next morning, I came upon Bug in the bathroom. He was staring into the mirror with a dazed expression on his face, and he asked, Is it OK if I brush my teeth? The vulnerable look in his eyes made me feel sad, and I said, Of course you can brush your teeth here. Please just don’t use my cup, because both of us have bleeding gums. Bug blanched. He said, It just hit me. I know how I got it. When I was in America, I used more than three different people’s razors. I said, Why would anybody let you do a thing like that? He said, They didn’t know.

This got us thinking about all of the potential hazards associated with our daily routines. Bug had borrowed people’s toothbrushes before, and even though they’d belonged to his lovers, it was still risky. And there was one time when Bug was making love and somebody’s skin had broken. He wasn’t sure who had bled, but it had been painful, and afterward he’d seen blood on his toilet paper.

My best friend Bug’s private life was bit by bit being exposed to the light. Things I hadn’t understood before were becoming clear. After he’d told me everything about himself, I started thinking about my own history. Life is hard to pin down that way. How can people be certain they know the truth? I didn’t feel I could trust anybody anymore.

Saining was in Japan on business, and I called him on the phone. He said, I can come back early. I know there’s a hospital in Shanghai for foreigners, and since I have a foreign passport, I can be seen there. We can go there and talk with one of the foreign doctors and get the doctor to agree to test Bug. Or maybe they’d be willing to put my name on Bug’s blood sample. I said, There’s no way anyone would agree to something that serious. Bug sat down next to me, his head hanging and his eyes riveted to some spot on the floor. I said, Why not send him to Japan for testing? Saining said, Getting a Japanese visa is too much trouble. He’d be better off going to Hong Kong to get tested! I said, But Hong Kong is China too. Wouldn’t they arrest him there as well? Saining said, I’ve been tested there—they don’t even ask for your name. I said, You’ve been tested in Hong Kong? Oh, so that’s what you do in your spare time. Why do you need to get tested all the time? You’re supposed to wear a condom when you sleep with girls! Although Saining and I were still living together, we hadn’t had a physical relationship in a long time. I slept with other men, so I didn’t think I had the right to criticize him. It was a sensitive subject. Finally, Saining asked me again, Are you absolutely sure that there’s nowhere in Shanghai where he can get tested? I said, Don’t even suggest it. Xiaochun said that he could get arrested, and everybody who gets tested is a junkie or a prostitute. We can’t send Bug into a place like that all by himself; we just can’t.

So we set about arranging a Hong Kong visa for Bug. Since he was broke, I didn’t have any choice but to lend him some money, although I didn’t expect that he’d be able to pay me back. That was when the reality of AIDS finally sank in. I was certain that my dear friend Bug had AIDS. I thought about how his sparkling Chinese eyes would soon be dull, about how his long, beautiful hair would be shaved off, leaving him bald. I thought about how his fingers would bleed when he played guitar, about how this talented guitar player was going to die of AIDS, and about the fact that he’d always dreamed of making his own record. I thought about how I’d never have to worry about his coming over and messing up my place anymore, or eating all my food, and as I walked down the street, I thought about how Bug wasn’t going to be bouncing along beside me anymore. I thought about all of the things we would have to face in the future, but how could we face them? We’d been left empty-handed. Sometimes I would break into tears and I wouldn’t be able to stop. It could happen anywhere, and I could be doing anything. If I thought about it, I would start to cry in fitful, choking sobs, and sometimes I cried so hard I couldn’t breathe.