“Huh,” I said, “the guy seems to have lived a long time with the disease.”
“Much longer than Ian, you mean?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Ian, dear God, he got one of the quicker brands. Isn’t that just dandy, different kinds of AIDS, slower and faster? Ian had PCP. Pneumocystis pneumonia. It can kill in a few months. Weeks even.”
“That name comes trippingly off your tongue.”
“Practice, Crang. I’ve repeated the damned words often enough in the past four months.”
Alex made an impatient gesture with his hand. “But this is getting ahead of things,” he said. “Just please, Crang, drink your cappuccino and listen and absorb.”
“Sorry.”
“Now I’ll tell you what Dugas looked like. He was drop-dead gorgeous. Debonair, you know, vibrant, sensual. It was no wonder everybody wanted him.”
“Pardon me, Alex, am I interpreting you correctly if I say it sounds like you personally knew Dugas?”
“Not knew. Met. At a Sunday brunch one time, and my lands, he was a catch.”
“Too bad for the guys who caught him.”
“He’s supposed to have had twenty-five hundred lovers in his short life, or some such astronomical number.”
“Couldn’t have left much time for hobbies. Stamp collecting and whatnot.”
“Indeed,” Alex said. “As I told you a minute ago, some doctors tracked down Dugas, immunologists, epidemiologists, scientific people. Patient Zero, they called Dugas, and I’ve heard they warned him to stop having sex, ordered him. But he kept right on almost to the very day he died. The very month, at any rate.”
“Lordy.”
“Some people say he got downright callous,” Alex said. “They say he’d have sex with some poor soul in a bathhouse, and afterward, after the poor soul had his brains fucked out, Dugas would turn up the lights and point out his Kaposi’s sarcoma spots. ‘I’ve got gay cancer,’ he’d say. ‘I’m going to die and so are you.’”
“Alex, that isn’t callous. We’re talking serious evil.”
“And wouldn’t you know it, he was one of ours.”
“Not of mine.”
“Canadian. He was a nice French-Canadian boy from Quebec. Better, he worked for Air Canada. A flight attendant. That’s how he got around so much. San Francisco, New York, Florida, coast-to-coast. He had hundreds of lovers in every town you could book an Air Canada flight to.”
“Infection in the jet age.”
“There’s even a case to be made that dear Gaëtan was the initial carrier, the son of a bitch who brought AIDS to North America.”
“From where?”
“Paris. The route is supposed to be from some place in central Africa to Paris and from there to us lucky folks over here.”
“Possibly via Gaëtan Dugas?”
“Stunning what a job at Air Canada can do for a lad,” Alex said in his most brittle tone. “Anyhow, you get the picture.”
“I get the picture, and something else, I have this terrible feeling I get the punch line, too.”
“Punch line?”
“Where you’re going with the Gaëtan Dugas story.”
“Someone,” Alex said, “should have shot Dugas at the very beginning.”
“That’s the punch line I had the terrible feeling you were going to deliver.”
“Think of the lives that would have been saved.”
“And next thing, you’re drawing an analogy between Dugas and the person who infected Ian.”
“Don’t debate numbers with me, Crang,” Alex said. “Dugas might have been responsible for dozens of deaths, maybe hundreds. The bastard who killed Ian killed only Ian, as far as we know. But death is death, and a murderer is a murderer, never mind the quantity.”
“Alex, come on, all this talk, the only thing’s likely to happen is you’ll screw up your own life.”
Alex’s face did funny things, as if it might crack into pieces.
“Ian is dead,” he said, his voice sounding rusty. “Can you honestly imagine I have anything else to lose at my age that I care about?”
“Well, sure. Your career, friends, lots of things, little things, the Bobby Short tapes you listen to on Sunday mornings.”
Alex lifted his bundle of magazines off the café table. He didn’t say anything, but his body language announced that the discussion had ended.
At the counter, I bought an almond cookie and fed part of it to Genet out on the street.
“That’s for your remarkable display of patience, sport,” I said.
“Crang,” Alex said, smiling a little, trying it out, “I think you like the beastie.”
“He’s no Wonder Dog, Rin Tin Tin, or One Hundred and One Dalmatians, that calibre, but Genet’s got his fine points.”
“Perhaps you’d care to keep him company while I’m gone.”
“What’s the alternative?”
“He’s booked into a doggy haven out near the airport, which isn’t his favourite resort judging by past performances. But I can cancel the reservation.”
“Why not?” I said. “Feed him and trot him through the park a couple times? That’s it?”
“An outing in the morning and another after his din-dins.”
We started up Beverley Street.
“One question,” I said to Alex. “One question about your intentions and state of mind and everything, just the one and I’ll lay off.”
“I doubt you will. Or Annie, for that matter. But go ahead, ask away.”
“How can you be so sure you haven’t got AIDS yourself? The impression I got last night, you haven’t asked a doctor to run tests. So how do you know?”
Alex pulled to a halt on the sidewalk. I stopped, too. Genet, trotting out front, stayed on the move. The leash jerked me forward. I did a Stan Laurel stumble, righted myself, and reined in Genet.
“Because,” Alex said, mostly in words of one syllable each, “Ian and I had no sex for the last eighteen months or more.”
“Uh.
