"Unsung the noblest deed will die" -- Pindar, Fragment 120
In 1986, Paul Monette began writing "Borrowed Time, An AIDS Memoir," choosing the quote from Pindar as the epigraph to his book. The book was a tribute to his friend, Roger Horowitz. As he wrote, he tested positive for the virus Horowitz had died from.
"I don't know if I will live to finish this," he said. "Maybe it's just that I've watched too many sicken in a month and die by Christmas, so that a sort of fatal realism comforts me more than magic. All I know is this: The virus ticks in me. And it doesn't care a whit about our categories -- when is full-blown, what's AIDS-related, what is just sick and tired."
Mr. Monette was sick and tired. He and his friend had been fighting pneumonia, blindness, meningitis, dementia: AIDS-related diseases that would eventually claim his friend's life. The battle began in 1985 when Horowitz was diagnosed with Pneumocystis Carinii -- AIDS pneumonia. It continued another 19 months.
"Roger, we'll beat it," Mr. Monette had promised. "I won't let you die." The two men created a "liturgy of bonding:" "When I recollect the times we made it through the dark, I remember feeling as if I were pulling him in from drowning . . . then breathing life back into him."
But they didn't beat the disease. Neither did thousands of others. "New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles," Mr. Monette wrote, "Ten or 15 cases in every gay man's life. And the clock kept counting."
Nothing had so tested the medical system and broken its weakest links. "The disease had brought its scythe down among us now," Mr. Monette said, observing the young composer walking around with Kaposi's sarcoma; the friend with the gland that wouldn't heal; the writer who kept getting sicker and sicker, but who didn't fit any of the categories. What made it worse was the lack of attention.
In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, no one seemed to care. Mr. Monette described men left incoherent in their own excrement, abandoned overnight by friends, shipped back to a fundamentalist family to pay the wages of sin. . . .
AIDS, at this time, was considered a gay disease. It was the tragedy that everyone ignored -- even the New York Times, as Mr. Monette pointed out. The Times devoted front-page space to a disease that felled 17 Lipizzaner stallions in Europe. Yet no story about AIDS had ever appeared on Page One.
Now, AIDS receives front-page attention, partly because it is no longer considered a gay disease -- a recent study shows that the highest percentage of new AIDS cases occurs among heterosexual women between 24 and 45 -- and partly because of writers like Mr. Monette. He wrote his book wishing to immortalize his friend and their relationship. But the book did much more than that. It became the first personal documentary about the AIDS virus.
It was a deeply moving love story: "How do I speak of the person who was my life's best reason?" Mr. Monette asked. "The most completely unpretentious man I ever met, modest and decent to such a degree that he seemed to release what was most real in everyone he knew."
In his own way, Mr. Monette was also able to release what was most real. His words gave a name and face to statistics. Numbers became Roger Horowitz and Paul Monette. One was a lawyer with light hair and blue eyes. One was a curly-haired, dark-eyed poet. They considered themselves to be two names for the same person.
"Life," said one of their Viennese friends, "is like a curtain pulled away from a window, and you see the beautiful landscape, and then the curtain drops." The curtain dropped when Roger Horowitz got sick. "What am I going to do?" Mr. Monette asked the doctor. "Write about it," he said.
"Borrowed Time" would be nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Mr. Monette would write several more books. One was an account of his homosexuality, "Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story," which won the National Book Award for 1992. Another was a book of poems, "Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog." The poems were called gorgeous, heart-breaking screams. The book was compared to Sylvia Plath's "Ariel" in its intensity.
In the book's preface, Mr. Monette observed, "I learned too well what it means to be a people, learned in the joy of my best friend . . . that all there is is love."
That lesson takes on a greater meaning in the shadow of Mr. Monette's own death from AIDS on February 11.
Diane Scharper teaches writing at Towson State University.