Silent Echo (2 page)

Do you blame them?
I think again for perhaps the thousandth time.
They value their lives. Contact with a diseased man isn’t valuing their lives, now is it? It’s putting themselves at risk, or so they think.

Wrong or not, I get it, and so I sigh as Eddie gestures awkwardly towards me. He opens his mouth to speak but nothing comes out. His hand sort of flops around like something dying on a hook. Finally, he drops it to the table, unsure of what to do with it or himself or what to say to me.

So I help a brother out. “Eddie, I have AIDS. Full-blown fucking AIDS with a lung cancer chaser. I’m as good as dead. So stop behaving like a scared dick. I don’t have time for dicks. Just be real.”

He nods. We’ve known each other since high school, where he and I had been close friends. Eddie went on to marry his high-school sweetheart, Olivia, a girl who had been my sweetheart as well. Secretly, of course. Eddie and I had met Olivia on the same night. We both liked her, although I suspected that I liked her more. As I had been working up the courage to go talk to her, Eddie had beat me to the punch. I had hated him for that at the time, but went on to accept it. Eddie and Olivia hit it off, although once, when she had been drinking, Olivia admitted to me privately that she wished I had asked her out instead of Eddie.

My connection with Olivia would carry on into our adult lives. A sweet connection really, since we never acted inappropriately. Still, more than once we had discussed what life might have been like if the two of us had gotten together. It was a sweet thought, and often I caught her looking at me sadly.
Eddie,
I think,
caught us looking at each other as well, but said nothing.

Now Eddie looks sheepish and finally says, “I’m sorry this happened to you.”

“So am I.”

“I should have come by more often.”

Numi, who is sitting perfectly still with his hands folded in his lap, says, “By
more often
you mean
never one time
?”

Numi and Eddie have never liked each other. Numi had always thought Eddie was an asshole. Probably because Eddie made it a habit to cheat on Olivia. And Numi knew of my fondness for Olivia.

Eddie looks at Numi long and hard. Numi continues staring forward, hands resting comfortably in his lap. He literally doesn’t move a muscle.

Finally, Eddie looks back at me. “I just didn’t know what to say, you know?”

I nod. This is coming from my closest high school friend. A guy I had spent most of my youth with. Hell, I had been his best man, watching him as he married a girl I knew I had feelings for.

“It’s okay,” I say as Numi frowns. “You’ve been busy.”

I know I’m making excuses for Eddie; I’ve done this for most of my life. Eddie was always getting into trouble, and getting me into trouble as well. I also know that most people aren’t so busy that they can’t take a few minutes to visit a dying friend. But I’m not here to make people hate themselves. I do enough self-hating for everyone.

“No, man. I’m unemployed again. I have no excuse. I don’t know what to say.”

I like that about Eddie. He can be real and honest. Most of my friends are honest. It’s a trait I look for in friends. If you’re dishonest, then beat it. Who needs you, right?

Anyway, Eddie is growing a goatee and I see a tattoo hiding under his short sleeve. I wonder about both, especially the tattoo. I try to grasp its meaning: two vertical lines topped with a horizontal one, kind of like a capital T but the two lines make it plain it is a symbol of some sort. The horizontal top is curved a little. Maybe it’s his name in Chinese or Sanskrit or who the hell knows. I figure Eddie is going through some kind of midlife crisis with the tat and goatee.

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“Look, I’m an asshole. I’m the worst fucking friend.”

“No,” I say. He doesn’t need to be down on himself. His reaction is normal, after all. I didn’t expect any more, or any less. “You’re not an asshole.”

Numi makes the smallest movement of his head to indicate that he disagrees with me. I ignore Numi.

Eddie doesn’t notice. He says, “A friend of mine, a good friend of mine is…”

“Dying,” I say.

“Yeah, that. And I don’t even have the balls to see him.”

“You do have little balls,” I say. It is part of our humor. My balls are big, his balls are small, and vice versa.
Har, har.
It’s what guys do. Simple creatures we are.

But Eddie isn’t up to my playful ribbing. I’m barely up to it myself. That joke took a lot of energy. He says, “How… how did this happen?”

“How did I get AIDS?”

He nods and shrugs a little. Even mentioning the word makes him clearly uncomfortable. More so, I see that he’s embarrassed that others might have overheard us. Numi misses nothing. He sees Eddie’s embarrassment and frowns even more.

“I had a steady girl,” I say. “She had it and didn’t know it. A few weeks into our little relationship, the condom came off and never went back on. We saw each other on and off for a few months. Months that were filled with lots of sex. She had some random blood work done, and the results came back. She had it, and now I have it, too.”

Eddie turns a little pale. I avoid using the word “AIDS” for his benefit. He says, “But I thought, you know, guys didn’t really get it from girls.”

“Not common, certainly, but there are times when it’s not safe to have sex with a woman.”

He nods. “Her period.”

I nod. “Bingo.”

“Jesus.”

“It happens,” I say. “It’s in the blood. I must have been chafed at the time. Like I said, too much sex.”

“But I thought AIDS was, you know, treatable these days. You know, Magic Johnson and all.”

“Sure,” I say. “Except when it’s not.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do the doctors. Not really. It’s called AIDS-related cancer, and the connection is not completely understood, but the link probably depends on a weakened immune system. Had I just had AIDS, I would probably beat it. My AIDS was the prelude to my cancer.”

“And having AIDS…”

“There’s no fighting the cancer,” I say. “Although we tried.”

Months of radiation had proved fruitless. It had only proven to weaken me more.

“I’m sorry,” says Eddie.

“I’m sorry, too.”

We’re both silent. Numi’s silent, too, but he doesn’t count. He’s usually silent, especially when Eddie’s around. Numi, I think, was glad that Eddie disappeared. Showed his true colors, as Numi tells me. I watch a small, fat bird nibble on some fattening crumbs.

“Do you still see her?” Eddie asks me.

“The girl who gave me HIV?”

“Yes.”

I shake my head. “She lives with her family in Montana. Last I heard, she’s living a fairly normal life, just with HIV.”

What I don’t tell Eddie is that she doesn’t talk to me, which I find hard to believe. She’s ruined me, but I’m not worthy of a phone call?

She didn’t ruin you, asshole.

I know this. I have to take ownership of this. It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do: taking responsibility for my AIDS. A hundred times a day, I’d wish I’d never met her, I'd wish I’d never pressed for sex, I'd wish I’d never developed a relationship with her, I’d wish the condoms had stayed on, I’d wish I hadn’t been so reckless.

I’d wished for a lot of things. Now I wish for nothing.

That’s the funny thing when you’re given a few months to live. You quit
wishing. You quit hoping. You quit dreaming. There’s not enough time for dreams to come true, and if they did, there isn’t enough time to enjoy them.

Dreams are dead for me. Hope is dead. All I want is my morning latte.

The day isn’t half over and I’m already losing my strength. I need to sleep, and badly. A week ago, I could make it until evening. At this rate, I will soon not be able to even get out of bed.

Numi sees this. Numi sees everything. He’s always watching me, studying me, monitoring me. In Numi’s eyes, Eddie is wasting my time and energy, neither of which I have in spades. Although Numi has okayed this meeting for reasons I still do not comprehend, Numi doesn’t like the way things are progressing. I know this, because I know Numi, too. As well as he knows me.

“What do you need, Eddie?” asks Numi.

Eddie looks at him, blinks, and realizes for the first time that when you talk to me, you also talk to Numi. Eddie looks back at me, and seems to size me up again. I can’t imagine what he’s thinking, but it can’t be good.

“Maybe this is a bad idea,” he says.

“The man is on borrowed time,” says Numi, leaning forward. “Maybe we can waste a little more of it?”

Eddie is a smart guy and gets Numi’s drift: Get to the point or get the hell out of here.

“Right, sorry. Shit. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t need your help, Jimmy. Wait, that didn’t come out right. I mean, I should have been here anyway. I’m a shitty friend.”

He is a shitty friend, but I don’t kick a man when he’s down. I look over at Numi, a very un-shitty friend. Numi is sitting back again, eyes half-closed, looking somewhere beyond the table and into eternity, for all I know.

“It’s okay,” I say.

My friend is acting strange. My friend is generally the picture of cool. Or, at least, that’s what he always projected in the past. Now, not so much. His eyes seem unhinged, moving around in his skull like a compass going
apeshit. He’s having trouble focusing on any one thing. He runs his fingers through his greasy hair. I’ve never known Eddie to have greasy hair. The Eddie I remember cared a lot about his looks. Too much, perhaps. His knee is bouncing, too. I figure Eddie is either on something or something’s really wrong.

He finally nods to himself, looks down. Then he closes his eyes, which is probably a good idea since he can’t seem to focus on anything longer than a nanosecond. He takes in some air, holds it, and then says, “Olivia’s missing.”

I sit forward. Or try to. My sitting forward consists of a minor tremor that runs through my body, followed by virtually no movement at all. Sitting forward, or other such wasted movements, is a luxury for the healthy.

Even though I have not seen Olivia since my disease reared its ugly head, she had kept in touch with me via text or e-mail or even Facebook. Whether or not Eddie knew we kept in touch, I didn’t know or care. The e-mail exchanges were light and frivolous, rarely touching on anything heavy, other than she missed seeing me and was sorry I was going through what I was going through. Her concern seemed genuine, and I always appreciated hearing from her. I knew she cared about me and she knew I cared about her. That she never stopped by to see me was, I figured, more Eddie’s doing than hers.

“What do you mean by
missing
?” I finally ask.

Eddie looks from me to Numi and says, “It means I haven’t seen or heard from her in almost forty-eight hours.”

CHAPTER THREE

“What happened between you two in the forty-eight hours just before Olivia disappeared?” I ask. This information is important to any missing person investigation. I squelch down my sense of panic that Olivia is missing and turn on my private-eye persona. I give him my most serious no-bullshit glare.

He looks away. “Remember my friend Jewel?”

I do. I also remember that Eddie had cheated on Olivia with Jewel… on more than one occasion. How and why Olivia stays with him, I still don’t entirely know. But she has.

“I remember Jewel,” I say evenly.

My skin is burning now, actually reddening. Still, I don’t move my arm. The burning makes me feel alive, and, for all I know, this might be my last sunburn.

Numi stares impassively forward, but his attention is still on me, even if he isn’t looking directly at me. He is like a dog who keeps its ears directed towards its owner, ever alert for walks or treats or both. If I should make any movement, Numi’s eyes will snap around to me. So I make no movement. No indication that the sun is burning me. Numi would adjust the umbrella, or insist we sit inside. I enjoy the burning. I enjoy it more than I should.

A small wind blows over us, although I am perhaps the only one who feels it. I close my eyes for a few seconds and feel the sun and I briefly feel more connected to the earth than I ever have.

I relish these small moments. I wish I had relished them more when I wasn’t living on borrowed time.

My private-eye instincts kick into high gear, and so I ask, “What does Jewel have to do with Olivia’s disappearance?”

Eddie answers casually, as if he is talking about the weather, “Two weeks ago, Jewel committed suicide.”

The words hit me like a gut punch. Even Numi turns his head slightly to regard Eddie. For the stoic Nigerian, this is akin to a cartoonish double take.

“What do the police say?” I ask when I’m over the shock. I look at Eddie’s face for signs of grief that his on-again, off-again mistress took her own life. He dips his head away from my intent gaze and when he lifts it again, his expression is neutral.

“I haven’t mentioned Jewel’s suicide to the police yet.”

This surprises me. I have to wait a second or two to find the energy for my next question. “Why not?”