“I know a few doctors, I’m sure I’d be able to get you whatever drugs are available.” I told her the story of my stay in the hospital. She said she would find out about doctors and call me back.

I told her that I would be at the apartment. That night, she rang from an office in Washington to say that she had material which she wanted to fax me and she also had the name of an American doctor who was in Buenos Aires, Doctor Cawley. I told her that I had already been in touch with him. He was, in fact, the doctor who broke the news to me.

“Everyone I spoke to thinks very highly of him,” she said. “He says there’s no cure.” I could feel my eyes filling up with tears.

“I’m going to fax you all the information I have,” she said. “You should perhaps go and collect it yourself, you probably don’t want your secretary to see this stuff.”

“I’ve broken up with Pablo,” I said.

“You’ve done what?”

I told her what had happened.

“You mean you’re on your own down there?”

“Yeah, I’m on my own. No one else knows. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“I can’t ask you to come and stay here, because it’s my mother’s house, and Donald is behaving like a wild animal, but I’ll come down if you need me.”

“I’m all right.”

“You should get in touch with Pablo.”

“I tried before, but I’ll try again.”

When we finished speaking I walked over to the office and stood by the fax machine. Soon the paper began to roll out, page after slow page, explaining the disease and all its strange manifestations, eye disease and how it could be treated, brain disease, stomach disease, skin disease, and all the strange new words which I never heard before and barely knew how to pronounce—toxoplasmosis, cytomegalovirus. Each page gave details about what they called opportunistic infections, AIDS-defining illnesses. I glanced at the beginning of each section, looking at the words and the descriptions of symptoms and treatments, wondering which of them I would get, which would come first, which words I would hear in the hospital, would it be my brain, my stomach, or my eyes, or my skin?

Reading the pages which came out of the machine was like catching a glimpse of hell in some storybook version of life and death, all the possible punishments, all the different tortures which could be inflicted, except this was all true. Some of this was going to happen soon, these words were for actual things which I was going to suffer, which were going to happen in my own body, as my immune system was washed away by disease. I sat there reading versions of how I was going to die.