As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.”The second was a chance meeting the other night with a man suffering from an obsessive fear of contamination. God knows what my final thoughts would have been had I made my leap.
The Grim Reaper walked abroad in the world of late 80’s public service advertising accompanied by images of tombs and terrifying sepulchral voices threatening a new plague. This was doubtless entirely laudable if it changed sexual behaviour and saved lives; on the other hand, I am convinced that little thought had been given to the devastating effect the campaign might have on cowardly hypochondriacs. And indeed it had an extremely negative impact on those of us of a more than slightly hysterical disposition; those who merely need to glance at a home medical book to become convinced that we suffer from beriberi, swamp fever, fallen arches and leprosy.
In that fevered hothouse atmosphere, it was all very well adjuring us not to die of ignorance, but I was living in Bangkok and hard facts were very hard to come by. What’s more the total funk the melodramatic advertising had inspired made it extremely difficult to calmly look at any factual materials I was able to acquire. I did manage to read a bit of And the Band Played On but all I was able to absorb was that blue sarcomas were somehow involved and that one could expect night sweats. The heavy book dropped from my trembling damp hands. I too suffered from night sweats.
As a matter of fact, most of us who couldn’t afford the exorbitant price of air conditioning perspired a lot at night; sweat soaked bedding was only to be expected given the high humidity and the fact that the temperature almost never fell below 100° Fahrenheit; but it took some time and several Valium for me to persuade myself that this might just possibly be the cause. It took a while longer and a few more tranquillizers before I could rid myself of the idea that the night sweats induced by heat might be masking the truly sinister AIDS-induced night sweats. I might, of course, have reflected that as I was not an intravenous drugs user and was far from promiscuous I had little to fear. But, calm reflection was not something the tropics or the advertising encouraged.
Bangkok was, after all, ‘sin city’; and we were clearly at the very epicentre of the plague. The claims that HIV transmission was only possible through the intimate exchange of bodily fluids were obviously well-intentioned lies put about to avoid general panic. I could see through this. The thing was doubtless already airborne and I insisted on my right to panic.
Then there was my friend, David, who unfortunately was even more of a wimp than me. I told him about the blue sarcomas and the night sweats; he regaled me with petrifying stories of swollen glands and hideously furred tongues. Pretty soon we would be sticking our tongues out at each other and prodding ourselves under the armpits almost every minute of the day. The result being, of course, that our underarms were severely bruised and frighteningly some of these bruises could well have been described as ‘swollen’. Then were his daily visits to my office at the university in which he would somewhat embarrassingly strip of his shirt and point a quivering finger at a small, barely perceptible freckle: “Could that possibly be a sarcoma?” Not surprisingly, the night sweats continued.
David and I would torment each other at night with constant agonizing phone calls. “I am sweating, Mark” came a plaintive voice. “Well, it is the hot season, David. Besides, I am very worried about this horrid swelling just above my belt.” “It is called a stomach, Mark”, he would reply. Often I had to resist the urge to take a taxi across town so that he could inspect my suspiciously furred tongue.
We became a kind of secret society of two locked into a mutually reinforcing cycle of self torment. We even had our own covert signals and codes. If we met up at parties, we would look across at each other’s haunted eyes and mouth things like ‘painful swelling’ or surreptitiously gesture at the glands at the back of our ears with looks of barely restrained horror. This went on for months.
The climax came on a study trip to Lampang in Northern Thailand. After a hot and distinctly uncomfortable day surveying temples with the archaeology department, I retired to my hotel room and took off my shirt. It was then that I glanced across into the mirror and confronted my worst fears: my entire upper body was a sinister dark blue. I was doomed.
David & I had often discussed what to do in such an eventuality. There could obviously be no hesitation. With some effort I forced open the window, felt a blast of hot air against my face and looked down at the grimy alley seven storeys below. The fall should definitely do the trick and there was no one about. Nor was there any real need for a suicide note: the ghastly blue markings across my chest would offer mute testimony to why I had taken my life. I prepared to throw myself out and started to drink the contents of the drinks cabinet. If I were to hurl myself into oblivion I was dammed if I would do it sober.
The drinks cabinet nearly exhausted, I happened to notice that labels on some of the miniature bottles of gin, whiskey & vodka had taken on exactly the same hue as my chest. “Hum”, I thought, “it is obviously extremely contagious”. It had even spread to the handle of the fridge. Rather more strangely I found that the ‘sarcomas’ on my chest could be erased with vigorous rubbing. Even without the benefit of any medical knowledge and despite the effect of the drinks, this struck me as distinctly odd. It was then that my eyes were drawn to the real source of the contagion: my brand new denim Thai Farmer’s shirt which was still moist and dripping blue dye from the day’s exertions.
I still wasn’t convinced that I was all clear. The malevolently intelligent sarcoma might be using the dye as a camouflage. Such was the power of paranoid reasoning that it took several visits to the excellent Bangkok Christian Hospital to reassure me that I was not infected. And even then I couldn’t look at the Grim Reaper posters without a shiver, although there was one respect in which they were spot on: ignorance can kill.
