Read Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir for Free Online Page A

never stopped feeling safe, not when I had him at home. In the deep ultramarine of the night, nothing could really go wrong, and nothing ever did.
    In October we managed to get away to Big Sur as usual, though Roger was working time and a half, having taken on several projects for other lawyers. I was back into my novel about a nymph and a loveless man, very Aegean. At the same time I was steering through the Hollywood jabberwocky a project called The Manicurist , a comedy for Whoopi Goldberg. The trip up Highway 1 on an aching clear Sunday morning was our first long ride in the black Jaguar, a vehicle we had acquired by default, after my Mercedes was stolen at gunpoint on the Strip.
    Just before we left, Cesar was down for half a weekend. We tooled around in the Jag, and he seemed in fine shape. Relations had suddenly gotten tight with his friend Jerry, an antique dealer he'd known for years. They might've become an item once, but the stars were crossed. Now they were spending a great deal of time together, no term of attachment required. "Buddies" is what has evolved in AIDS parlance for the bond between the mainstay friend and the one in the ring doing battle. Jerry had clearly come forward to take that role, but Cesar wasn't acting as if it had anything to do with his illness, properly so. The bond between them had its own sweet Platonic tang, and Cesar was thrilled to have somebody else to talk about.
    It was the last time he would play down the swelling leg and the lesions, regaling us with tales of Spain. All summer long, when anyone would whine at me about some benign indignity of daily life, I'd stare and say, "Cesar's in Spain," as if to sting them with the challenge. What the fuck was their excuse? Now, in October, Cesar remarked to us offhandedly, "You know, I've traveled enough now," but it didn't seem morbid or ominous at all. He specifically meant he'd rather come stay with us when he had a little vacation. Enough of the world out there.
    Besides, we were clearly holding the line. A year into his diagnosis, and he'd still never been in the hospital. His doctors kept telling him there were drugs in the works nearly ready for testing. Research was galloping. Keep taking the chemo, they said, even if it didn't seem to be doing a thing. I don't recall seeing his leg naked during that brief visit. We'd dropped the fiction of the rural virus in the terminus at Benares, but only because AIDS was proving manageable. Management skills were what we needed now.
    The obverse of this optimism was the hair ball of fear at the pit of my stomach. I'd convinced myself by this point that I was more than likely in the direct line of fire. I can't say what was hypochondriacal here. It was certainty born of dread: The glands in my neck and armpits were no bigger than almonds; they didn't hurt; they were nice and soft. Moreover, they didn't appear to be growing, but oh they were most definitely there.
    My doctor's little speech about them, reiterated for two or three years now, came down to the same bland assertion that they could be anything. Dozens of things make the lymph nodes swell—stress, for instance, the blanket diagnosis of the age—but now the news was getting very specific about the lymph nodes being a flashing amber sign. Pre-AIDS. We still had that word then. Certain gay men I knew, in fact, were becoming obsessed with the notion. How deep exactly did pre go? Could you see it in a person's face? And how much time before pre burned down like a fuse on a keg of powder?
    I tried not to talk nonstop about it; it sounded vain even then. I simply redoubled my efforts to mount a holding action. Lifecycle at the gym, vitamins, writing in bed, monitoring my almonds like a sort of DEW line. I vividly saw the process as a struggle to keep it from breaking through—a wall of-water behind a dike, or the mangled son pounding on the door in Kipling's "The Monkey's Paw." "Breakthrough" was not then commonly used to describe the