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THE TESTS ARE MORE DETRIMENTAL
THAN THE DISEASE ITSELF
by Matthew Fox

I'm not OK.

I'm sorry I left Montreal without telling you. But there didn't seem to be enough time. Besides, leaving wouldn't have been spontaneous then.

I'm not trying to hurt you. Or maybe I am. I don't know. Am I being ambiguous again? You tell me. You know me better than anyone. And you know I am not a betting man. But tonight I took a big gamble. I had to do something dramatic. Something random. I love the fact that I did it. Left, just like that. It's so unlike me.

I don't know what it was about today that made me run. It was a day like any other: pills, espresso allongé. Worked on my go-nowhere play. Smoked. Talked to my mother. Woke you up (Will you leave me four cigarettes?). Went to class, went to work. Came home and went to the bathroom. Blood again, but that's normal.

Sometimes I'm sure that I'm going to die. Standing there, I have to look down at the redness slowly creeping across the toilet bowl. It's like the illness is evacuating all my body's worthwhile fluids in one shot. I have this image of someone opening the door and finding me there, exposed, lifeless on the cold bathroom floor, pants twisted awkwardly around my thighs. My last memory that of my belt buckle clanging against the tile. Shit, man, are you OK?

But then I am OK. I leave and sit with you and the roommates on the futons in that tiny living room, being quiet and aloof, in my shell. Don't coax him out! Don't open the floodgates! And when you don't, I wrap myself in my own self-pity. I go to bed early and wait for you to join me so I can hear you breathing, grinding your teeth. I feel you flopping about and I hope that somehow, inadvertently, you'll touch me.

But that's not what I did tonight. I took off. I ran.

It's February in Toronto, but it smells like autumn. The streets here are splashy and colourful, reflecting the traffic lights in squiggly lines down the centre of Spadina Avenue. It's warm here. The sidewalks even have people on them now, at 2am, shouting, drunk. As Canadians they appreciate the warmth. But I think I prefer the bitter, bitter cold. It has guts. It doesn't pussyfoot around. There's something concrete about it. Is it still cold in Montreal?

I'm sitting on the window ledge of room 442 of the Waverly Hotel, putting my thoughts on paper. The receptionist didn't even flinch when I asked her for this specific room. I started writing on the bed, but it smells rancid and the sheets are full of splotches. From here I can stare at half a woman's face that is sketched on the opposite wall. She is blaring white under the fluorescent lights, and looks almost animated when they buzz and flicker. Her skin is drooping, lived-in, and has been unintentionally blemished with dirty patches and cracks in the uneven drywall. She has half a set of teeth, crudely sketched, covered by a set of full lips, pinched at the corner into a sort of understanding, motherly smile. She was probably some sickly whore, drawn by someone in love with her. She seems unimpressed with the likeness. She looks a little uneasy, like she doesn't trust me, sitting here in the window. Don't fall. I name her Linda.

This is the room where I lost my virginity to a girl named Beth -- stout and solemn. I have told you about her before. In spite of an occasional sobby telephone call -- I could never be what you want -- we were just confidants; we knew each other's histories, like siblings; prom dates on acid, many years ago, when I wasn't gay. We danced, ate and left the prom early to get drunk on a bench along Philosophers' Walk. While she was peeing in the bushes, a group of frat boys from the engineering school called me faggot and beat me with orange, prickly sticks from a snow fence around a sewer reconstruction site. They tore my suit, bashed my face, kicked my weak kidneys. I saw Beth running towards us from the shrubs, flailing her lacy sleeves in the air. A final swing of that splintered wood as I pulled away. It sliced down my face, opening a wound at the temple and splitting my eyebrow, my eyelid and the top of my cheek, finally breaking my nose. I could feel the cut on my face opening and shutting and the warm rivulet of blood drizzle down around my nose, into the mud.

No hospital, we were on drugs. Beth checked us into the Waverly; the receptionist not asking any questions (it's that kind of neighbourhood). We got into room 442 and Beth stopped the bleeding with a pillowcase that eventually gave me scabies. Life is a series of tests, Beth said, and this is just one of them. But she was wrong, at least in part. Life is the disease, I told her. The tests just prove whether or not you're infected. She laughed and called me over-dramatic. We ended out numb, giggling, still drunk and high, having pounding, mechanical sex on those rusty bedsprings under Linda's watchful eye, IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou coming out as loud, wet whispers in the slurpy proximity of sex. IknowIknow. That night was a gamble too, one that didn't pay off. I barely spoke to Beth after that. Our relationship had become something else, something muddy and sexual.

That's the story I never told you about the scar on my face, the one you were so obsessed with when we first met. I have never understood why you were interested in my sickly, gangly body and M-shaped hairline. And yet you never wanted to fuck me, or even kiss me. I dream of your index finger probing my arm, pressing into my chicken pox craters and making circles with the hair. I've explained to you every mark, every imperfection of my body, and yet you wouldn't let me touch you. Not once. I always felt jealous of those men who'd grope past me at the club to put their hands up your shirt and pinch you. You'd smile coyly and pull away from them. How do you know you're gay if you don't sleep with other men? We laughed at them. But what if I had done that? I feel as though I have so little time left anyway, why didn't I? No sex: your single proviso for entering into boyfriendship with you. The words still resonate in my head.

I like sex. Sex is reliable, a security, a certainty -- there are no two ways about sex (no pun intended): we are fucking, we are not fucking. But when it comes to you, I feel small and unwanted. Your power was to disarm me, turning all anger and sadness inward, towards yourself; not want to solve it, but save it and savour it. You never had any use for blame or forgiveness or guilt. I didn't want that. I wanted you to feel guilty, like you owed me something, some affection, some term of endearment. That is, until you curled up on our bed, brooding. When I finally had you feeling guilty, I couldn't stand it. I pulled away and took with me the reason for remorse. I was disarmed. I could never be what you want.

On my way to the bus station, I saw two women fighting on the platform of Charlevoix metro. One kept screaming You bitch! And the other, with a line of blood on her neck, was retorting Laisses-moi tranquille! They were pulling at each other's hair, screeching, slapping each other's ears -- only understanding one another with these passionate actions. Aggression, attack -- these are things everyone understands. It was one of life's little tests. I just sat there, and let the doors open and shut mechanically. What would you have done? Stopped them? Translate the screaming? The anger? I'm acting now, I think. I may be running away, but at least I'm acting.

There is an unsettledness in Montreal that I can no longer stand. The city's foundations are old and unstable. And it is an instability felt everywhere -- in the cafés, in the streets, in the picket lines. There is always some random citizen who says something out of place, yet ironically appropriate. People unveil their fears in public, acknowledge them. It is their fear of instability, a reminder of randomness. Some like to be reminded of it -- like you. You thrive off the freedom. But the city takes its toll on people like me. I need a point of reference. After I moved there, my initial defences gave way to pure masochism -- throwing myself into what scares me the most. The French, they cut their losses with passion -- religion at first, and then Sovereignty. The English learn how to be barbed, to fight off the madness by just slightly becoming a part of it. The rest of us shout obscenities to passers-by and don't come in out of the snow. Or run. Run towards something solid. Montreal does not pretend that there is balance -- and relishes in the void. That is why I am here. Toronto pretends. Toronto is safe.

God. Listen to me. This letter sounds like my play, mememe. I'm supposed to be writing about important things, but I can't seem to get over myself. Everything I write seems to be half mash-note and half manifesto. It's like there is a conversation in my head between me and the voice of every self-righteous person I've ever known. I never know who to listen to, but I always feel as though I'm wrong. Am I wasting your time? I assure you there's a purpose to this letter and I will write until I find it. You know, I was always jealous of your ability to express yourself in an instant -- blotting your thoughts onto paper. I'm not as practised as you. Your raw thoughts are far more eloquent than mine. I'm learning a lot from how you think.

There is a pain in my side; throbbing, swelling, like a thousand tiny fishhooks are imbedded in my kidneys and are pulling outward. What I hate about my sickness is that it's not even one of those cool, valiant diseases that have their own telethon, like AIDS or cancer. I also hate its name, unpronounceable and obscure: IGA nephropathy. It's not terminal enough for Jerry Lewis, that flamboyant bastard. What I think I hate most about my disease is the ambiguity of the whole thing, the I don't know, the I'm not sure. Doctors are stupid, I hate them all. The tests are more detrimental than the disease itself. The attacks are random. I can't see them coming. I'm powerless to stop it.

Have you seen that commercial for the Ice Storm '98 mail-order video? That's the slogan: We were powerless to stop it! But you weren't powerless. The electricity was out, no heat, no drinkable water. Under your command, we wrapped ourselves up like children at winter recess and walked around the Plateau with your rusty shovel to dig cars and people out of the snow. I fell in love with Montreal that day -- its languages and its beauty, its trees dipped in glass in the silence of the silver ice storm. That one woman leaped from her driver's seat with a cigarette pinched between her fingers and hugged us both in the middle of Marianne Street. She kissed us on both cheeks. God bless you queer boys!

I fell in love with you then, too. Your kindness, your love of people. I thought maybe you could take away, at least in part, some of the randomness of the world. And in a way you did. But in the quiet of a night-time Spadina Avenue, in the moist cringeworthy air of this mouldy hotel room, straddling its window ledge, I'm more scared of it than ever before. You are still somewhere (probably thinking I've completely lost it) and my kidney is still throbbing; every breath is a test, every word is a gamble. You're completely unable to make a decision, you tell me. You call me passive, you call me crazy -- maybe I am crazy, just sitting here passing the time. So here's something decisive for you: I can't stand the waiting anymore, the threat of a bad outcome. The randomness of the world is far more apparent when you're sick. What if I died right now? What if I had an attack and fell from this window? What if I jumped? What if I just took off to another city? What if I ran? The what if factor. I've tried before to make it work for me, but alone I can't seem to find any way to turn the table on the scattered, oblivious way destiny takes over our lives. And right now, in this window, looking at Linda on one side and down Spadina Avenue on the other, I feel inspired to do so.

So here's the gamble I propose: come with me. Let's take off. Let's go somewhere else, run with me is all I ask. Let's widen the gap between me and my disease, between us and the icy sidewalks, and school and work and friends and family and the rest of the boring necessities of life. Let's gobble up the black space in front of us and listen to mix tapes and smoke out the windows. Let's speed towards Mardi Gras on Bourbon Street, through greasy spoons with horrible food, past speed traps and weather-beaten, wooden New England homes. Let's make cousin marrying and hurricane jokes. Where the fuck did they go? Or maybe we should head east, through homey, winter-loving towns named after saints and speak French and pick up hitch-hikers with thick streaks of Quebecois-black eyebrows encasing their French and native and Irish eyes. We can argue with them about beer and poutine and Sovereignty. Then we can get coffee in a café named after some Acadian hero and drive along the shores and talk to the fishermen and laugh and get as laid-back as them, look at their nets and pottery and pewter before sliding down the cobblestone streets of St. John, towards the harbour. We can buy American cigarettes and smoke them on the ferry and swim in the ocean and have fights with the mucky red sand, then watch the tide come in and pull together under an afghan as the night chill gathers around us. This is so not like them. Maybe we could go west, and pass through small Ontario logging towns and eat bad fish and chips out of newspapers in the front seat of our car. We can count the number of pick-up trucks and take bets on the population of the next town. We can park for the night and buy a bottle of gin and drink it with our feet hanging off the ledge of a lock, then run through the forest, chasing each other, screaming into the night and then pass-out together in the backseat, wrapped in a blanket, draining the car battery by playing David Bowie on the stereo and not caring.

What if we just disappeared?