Early Warning

He thought that Philip deserved someone like Yves. Philip was thirty-six now, tenured, published, often asked questions about incomprehensible subjects like semiotics and post-structuralism, which he answered with musical good nature. Metacriticism was much more glamorous than etymology, of course. Yves had reservations about Lacan and Saussure and approached Baudelaire with a more generalized perspective, situating him in his historical moment and cultural milieu, writing articles about the various ways in which Baudelaire and his contemporaries had infused this and that. Yves was twenty-nine, but well on his way from Rennes to Paris or Columbia. Henry was like an uncle to them (maybe a great-uncle to Yves), but they put up with him, and moderated the speed of their chatter in French so that Henry could understand most of what they said. The other thing Yves did was live in a large house between Rennes and Fougères. If you wanted medieval, you could hardly ask for anything more wonderful than the former frontier between Bretagne and France — with castles every few leagues — and then on down to Aquitaine, with its fortified hill towns, and below that, of course, Navarre, Ariège, Languedoc. His colleagues vacationed with their families on a continuum between Ottawa and Minneapolis; Henry flew off to Manhattan and Toulouse.

But he felt apocalyptic anyway, and it wasn’t only the heat and the contemplation of Pope Innocent III. One thing Philip and Yves had talked about as they drove around was what was happening to friends of theirs, strange lesions in their mouths, weird infections, night sweats, swollen glands. Henry had eavesdropped, only asking a question every so often. He knew, though, that as he talked about Pope Innocent III, who had sicced Simon de Montfort on the Cathars (who held unorthodox Gnostic and Manichean beliefs, didn’t give oaths, engage in marriage or reproduction, or eat meat), they were both wondering about curses, about such mysterious and medieval illnesses as the bloody flux, St. Anthony’s fire, St. Vitus’ dance, the ague, leprosy, the black death. Narbonne, Carcassonne, and Foix put them in the mood — God’s curse, bodies piled upon bodies, the sense of one citizen recoiling from another only to flee into the wilds and be eaten by wolves. Henry was sure that Philip’s and Yves’s residences had seemed as welcoming upon their return as his little duplex had to him.

Now, though, in the midst of all this heat and ennui, there was a name. Not the curse of God, but “acquired immunodeficiency syndrome,” every word easily sourced, three from Latin, one from Greek, a stiff, dry phrase, not medieval at all, but right up to date. Henry was falsely soothed by this phrase, somehow. It didn’t seem possible, now that he knew it, that he could go into the bathroom to brush his teeth, as he had a day or so after getting home from France, look in the mirror, see a blue lesion on his gum right above his incisors, and nearly jump out of his skin, practically dying of a heart attack before touching the bump and realizing it was a bit of a popcorn husk that he had carelessly missed when brushing his teeth the night before. He felt now that he could somehow review his own immune system, and establish in his own mind whether it was functioning up to capacity: Coughs? Two yesterday, three the day before. Sneezes? Only when confined in the same room with the air conditioner. Skin? No sores, no blemishes. Aches and pains? Nothing mysterious — a filling that needed to be replaced and an occasional migraine (thank God for the telltale flashes and halos). Bowel movements? Regular and consistent in every way.

Henry was not ready to give thanks for his lifelong abstemiousness — even in the last couple of years of comparative excess, he had mostly observed and analyzed rather than partaken, but wasn’t his whole life about going to France in June rather than August, dressing neatly rather than beautifully, loving wisely and never too well? Speaking of Baudelaire, the first sight of a fleur du mal would have sent Henry quietly out of the room, not once tempted to take a whiff.