I asked Gloria how much longer they would keep me in the hospital. They were always hesitant about letting people out, she said. There was always one more test they wanted to do; it was always easier to postpone decisions. But once they needed a bed, they would look down a chart and make an instant decision to let you go. It usually happened when you least expected it, she said. And what she said turned out to be true. On a Tuesday morning when I had been in the hospital for just over two weeks, the staff nurse came and said that I could go home on condition that I had someone to look after me there. I had the keys of the apartment in my pocket. I said that I had someone to look after me. I think she thought that I meant I had a boyfriend and she looked at the ground and said nothing.

Gloria came and gave me her number in case I needed her help. I had to wait until I made an appointment with Doctor Cawley for the following week and then I had to sit in the room and wait for all my drugs. Up to now, I had swallowed whatever I was given, but before I left the hospital I had to go through each drug with the pharmacist so that I knew what it was. I wished that Mart and Jack were here to see me now; I wished that someone I knew would be at home when I went there.

I got a taxi from the hospital to the apartment. I looked at the people in the street and the back of the driver’s head and thought about them: they were not full of disease, they were not going to die soon, they were wandering around believing that they were going to survive. I selected people at random from the taxi window and wished that they were sick, that they had AIDS, and not me. Gloria had asked me if I felt angry, and I said that I did not. But now I felt singled out for all this pain, I felt that I had nothing in common with all of these people in the street.

When I arrived at the apartment building, I stood at the bottom of the stairs for a while leaning against the wall. I walked up the stairs. I opened the door and went back into the apartment. It seemed darker than ever before, and smaller. I opened some of the windows and I sat down in the hall as I had planned to do and closed my eyes. I wished I were a baby again, or a small boy, I wished I could go down now to my parents’ bedroom and get into bed with them, tell them I was sick and I was having bad dreams and lie there in the warmth between them and the smells of perfume and lavender and talcum powder, snuggle up there and sleep, and wake knowing that it would be all right. You gave me ten talents, the voice from Sunday school came back to me, and look what I have returned with, a poisoned bloodstream, a terrible disease. I sat in the chair in the old apartment with my eyes closed and then I went into my old bedroom and lay on the bed and tried to sleep.