to die before he was stable enough to be dumped back into County. But he got stable, and back he went. County discharged him almost immediately, and when he was unable to breathe the next day, they told him they no longer had an available bed. He waited two weeks, not quite bad enough to go back to the Masonic ER, until finally, too late to do much good, County readmitted him.
Yale knew he had to visit eventually. Partly because it was the right thing to do, and partly because in the worst-case scenario, he’d end up at County himself, and he needed to see it, needed to get it over with.
One night, he pulled on Julian’s dental floss and the last of the string came out, just long enough to use. He tried not to take it as a bad sign, but it felt like one. He decided to visit Katsu the next morning, before it was too late.
* * *
—
He’d been a finalist for a job at Saint Louis University, and he was still in the running for a regular development job at DePaul, here in the city, but he was still unemployed. Dr. Cheng had told him to take the first job that offered insurance. “The bigger the company the better,” Dr. Cheng said, “so you’ll get lost in the shuffle.” Meanwhile he was on COBRA, which would quickly drain his savings. He could afford it till January, barely, and then he’d have to choose between insurance and food.
In the meantime Dr. Cheng would keep the tests off Yale’s record. As far as he was concerned, Yale had only come to see him for a sore throat. When he applied for new insurance, Yale would just be asked about a history of AIDS—not about the virus. “You will not be lying when you say no,” Dr. Cheng said. “And then a month after you’re approved, you come in for the test again. Officially.” But it was risky, and if it was ever discovered—if the government seized test results, anonymous as Dr. Cheng claimed he’d kept them; or if Yale was in an accident, had blood drawn at the hospital, etcetera—he could be denied coverage forever. He’d wind up like Katsu, praying one of the beds at County would be open when he needed it.
Yale called Asher, hoping he’d say something reassuring, but what Asher said was “Get a job fast.”
Complicating matters was the fact that he could no longer get a letter of recommendation from Bill Lindsey. And it didn’t look great that Yale had worked at Northwestern less than a year.
Right after his own positive test, Yale had sent a note to Roman through campus mail, and then he’d addressed a letter to Bill at the office:
I have specific reason to believe that if you haven’t done so already, you might consider getting tested for HTLV-III, the virus known to cause AIDS. I hope you’ll advise your wife to take this test as well; please be assured that I have not contacted her and will not do so.
He’d thought for days about Dolly Lindsey, ways to reach out to her. He’d debated it with Asher, with Teddy, with Fiona. They all surprised him by shaking their heads in the same skeptical way, saying, “I don’t think you really can.” Teddy had thrown some Kant at him, made a particularly compelling argument. In August he heard from Cecily that Dolly had left Bill. “I’ve seen her around town,” Cecily said. “Shopping and stuff. Really, Yale, I don’t think they were even sleeping together, do you?” But he’d never heard back from Bill, with the exception of a note written in Bill’s spidery script, attached to a stack of semipersonal mail the gallery had forwarded him: It’s grand to hear you’ve landed on your feet! Yale had indicated no such thing. He heard from Donna the docent that Bill was no longer talking about retirement.
* * *
—
His visit to County would be short; Katsu was doped up, and Yale wanted to get the hell out of there. The beds were all in one huge room, separated only by hanging sheets, so that the sounds and smells of thirty different stages of death surrounded you. How anyone could sleep in that place, how anyone could harbor a single hope, Yale couldn’t fathom.
Katsu said to him—slurred, really—“My armpits hurt. Why do my armpits hurt so bad?”
Yale had brought him a milkshake, and he left it on his tray for when