I GAVE THE old apartment as my address, and I constantly thought of going back there. I dreamed of sitting in the tiled hallway looking out of the window, I dreamed of moving quietly and slowly from room to room like someone frail and retired, with not long left to live. I told them that I wanted to go home, that my mother would look after me. I hoped that Gloria, the counselor, who came to see me sometimes, would not mention to the medical people that my mother did not exist, she was buried under the ground. Gloria thought that I was strong; other people, she said, had cried for days and could not be consoled. I had not cried at all. I simply asked the doctors when I could go home. I no longer had a temperature, and I was able to eat and drink and sit up in the bed. This was good, the doctor said, as some people became worse in the early stages of treatment. When my secretary came every day I went through the post and the list of messages. I had to turn down work, but nobody, as yet, knew that I was sick. She asked me if I had had my stitches taken out, and I remembered that I had told her that I had appendicitis. I said the stitches would be taken out any day now.

I asked her to buy me some Agatha Christie novels in English. I had not read them for years, but I remembered staying awake into the small hours to find out who had really committed the murder, and I thought they would be useful when I woke in the night and began to think about how I was going to die. But the books never worked, even though Luisa brought me five or six paperbacks. When I woke, the thinking took over, and no plot, no matter how exciting, could disturb my thoughts about how my blood was poison and my sperm was poison, how my body was a danger to anyone who came too close to me. I have AIDS, I said to myself over and over, I have AIDS and I am going to die.

Sometimes, it seemed easy: I thought about death as a falling asleep, a long rest. But then in one sudden, unexpected moment it would come: I would realize what was going to happen, I would gain the sharp knowledge like a needle in my back that there would be more times in the hospital, with pain and weakness and nurses putting on gloves before they would approach me. Soon there would be nothing. My body would be put under the ground and left there. Sometimes, I lay in that bed terrified. I could not believe that this was happening to me. It was like worrying about money or work, and then trying to put the problem out of your mind, and realizing that it was not a problem that would ever go away, or be solved.