John Irving - In One Person

“These are Dad’s old friends, from school, Emily,” Peter said irritably to his little sister. “You knew they were coming.”

The girl stalked across the room to her far-flung book; when she’d retrieved it, she turned and glared. Emily definitely glared at me; she may have been glaring at her brother and Elaine, too. When the thirteen-year-old spoke, I felt certain she was speaking only to me, though Elaine would try in vain to assure me later, on the train, that Tom’s daughter had been addressing both of us. (I don’t think so.)

“Are you sick, too?” Emily asked.

“No, I’m not—I’m sorry,” I answered her. The girl then marched out of the room.

“Tell Mom they’re here, Emily. Tell Mom!” Peter called after his angry sister.

“I will !” we heard the girl shout.

“Is that you, Bill?” Tom Atkins asked; I saw him try to move his head, and I stepped closer to the bed. “Bill Abbott—are you here?” Atkins asked; his voice was weak and terribly labored. His lungs made a thick gurgling. The oxygen tank must have been for only occasional (and superficial) relief; there probably was a mask, but I didn’t see it—the oxygen was in lieu of a ventilator. Morphine would come next, at the end stage.

“Yes, it’s me—Bill—and Elaine is with me, Tom,” I told Atkins. I touched his hand. It was ice-cold and clammy. I could see poor Tom’s face now. That greasy-looking seborrheic dermatitis was in his scalp, on his eyebrows, and flaking off the sides of his nose.

“Elaine, too!” Atkins gasped. “Elaine and Bill! Are you all right, Bill?” he asked me.

“Yes, I’m all right,” I told him; I’d never felt so ashamed to be “all right.”

There was a tray of medications, and other intimidating-looking stuff, on the bedside table. (I would remember the heparin solution, for some reason—it was for flushing out the Hickman catheter.) I saw the white, cheesy curds of the Candida crusting the corners of poor Tom’s mouth.

“I did not recognize him, Billy,” Elaine would say later, when we were returning to New York. Yet how do you recognize a grown man who weighs only ninety-something pounds?

Tom Atkins and I were thirty-nine, but he resembled a man in his sixties; his hair was not only translucent and thin—what there was of it was completely gray. His eyes were sunken in their sockets, his temples deeply dented, his cheeks caved in; poor Tom’s nostrils were pinched tightly together, as if he could already detect the stench of his own cadaver, and his taut skin, which had once been so ruddy, was an ashen color.

Hippocratic facies was the term for that near-death face—that tightly fitted mask of death, which so many of my friends and lovers who died of AIDS would one day wear. It was skin stretched over a skull; the skin was so improbably hard and tense, you were sure it was going to split.

I was holding one of Tom’s cold hands, and Elaine was holding the other one—I could see Elaine trying not to stare at the Hickman catheter in Atkins’s bare chest—when we heard the dry cough. For a moment, I imagined that poor Tom had died and his cough had somehow escaped his body. But I saw the son’s eyes; Peter knew that cough, and where it came from. The boy turned to the open doorway of the room—where his mother now stood, coughing. It didn’t sound like all that serious a cough, but Sue Atkins was having trouble stopping it. Elaine and I had heard that cough before; the earliest stages of Pneumocystis pneumonia don’t sound too bad. The shortness of breath and the fever were often worse than the cough.

“Yes, I have it,” Sue Atkins said; she was controlling the cough, but she couldn’t stop it. “In my case, it’s just starting,” Mrs. Atkins said; she was definitely short of breath.

“I infected her, Bill—that’s the story,” Tom Atkins said.

Peter, who’d been so poised, was trying to slip sideways past his mother into the hall.

“No—you stay here, Peter. You need to hear what your father has to say to Bill,” Sue Atkins told her son; the boy was crying now, but he backed into the room, still looking at the doorway, which his mom was blocking.

“I don’t want to stay, I don’t want to hear . . .” the boy began; he was shaking his head, as if this were a proven method to make himself stop crying.

“Peter—you have to stay, you have to listen,” Tom Atkins said. “Peter is why I wanted to see you, Bill,” Tom said to me. “Bill has some discernible traces of moral responsibility—doesn’t he, Elaine?” Tom suddenly asked her. “I mean Bill’s writing—at least his writing has discernible traces of moral responsibility, doesn’t it? I don’t really know Bill anymore,” Atkins admitted. (Tom couldn’t say more than three or four words without needing to take a breath.)

“Moral responsibility,” I repeated.

“Yes, he does—Billy takes moral responsibility. I think so,” Elaine said. “I don’t mean only in your writing, Billy,” Elaine added.

“I don’t have to stay—I’ve heard this before,” Sue Atkins suddenly said. “You don’t have to stay, either, Elaine. We can go try to talk to Emily. She’s a challenge to talk to, but she’s better with women than she is with men—as a rule. Emily really hates men,” Mrs. Atkins said.

“Emily screams almost every time she sees a man,” Peter explained; he had stopped crying.

“Okay, I’ll come with you,” Elaine said to Sue Atkins. “I’m not all that crazy about most men, either—I just don’t like women at all, usually.”

“That’s interesting,” Mrs. Atkins said.

“I’ll come back when it’s time to say good-bye,” Elaine called to Tom, as she was leaving, but Atkins seemed to ignore the good-bye reference.

“It’s amazing how easy time becomes—when there’s no more of it, Bill,” Tom began.

“Where is Charles—he should be here, shouldn’t he?” Peter Atkins asked his dad. “Just look at this room! Why is that old oxygen tank still here? The oxygen doesn’t help him anymore,” the boy explained to me. “Your lungs need to work in order to have any benefit from oxygen. If you can’t breathe in, how are you going to get the oxygen? That’s what Charles says.”

“Peter, please stop,” Tom Atkins said to his son. “I asked Charles for a little privacy—Charles will be back soon.”

“You’re talking too much, Daddy,” the boy said. “You know what happens when you try to talk too much.”

“I want to talk to Bill about you, Peter,” his father said.

“This part is crazy—this part makes no sense,” Peter said.

Tom Atkins seemed to be hoarding his remaining breath before he spoke to me: “I want you to keep an eye on my boy when I’m gone, Bill—especially if Peter is ‘like us,’ but even if he isn’t.”

“Why me, Tom?” I asked him.

“You don’t have any children, do you?” Atkins asked me. “All I’m asking you is to keep one eye on one kid. I don’t know what to do about Emily—you might not be the best choice for someone to look after Emily.”

“No, no, no,” the boy suddenly said. “Emily stays with me —she goes where I go.”

“You’ll have to talk her into it, Peter, and you know how stubborn she is,” Atkins said; it was harder and harder for poor Tom to get enough breath. “When I die—when your mom is dead, too—it’s this man here I want you talking to, Peter. Not your grandfather.”

I’d met Tom’s parents at our graduation from Favorite River. His father had taken a despairing look at me; he’d refused to shake my hand. That was Peter’s grandfather; he hadn’t called me a fag, but I’d felt him thinking it.