Dr. Waitzkin plays an animated video of an HIV molecule entering a white blood cell. The video’s quality is that of an old VHS tape, which prompts me to think of the 90s, when I lived in San Francisco, when contracting the virus would have made more sense, not like now, when seroconversion is preventable. I am now the age when the young call you old and the old call you middle-aged. I am out of sync with time.

I sit on a cold leather chair in the corner of her office, and I am aware of how inappropriate my jeans and sneakers are for such a moment, as if I am a child being scolded by a parent, even though Dr. Waitzkin has been nothing but friendly.

She watches my face as I watch the video. On the screen a green spaceship-like blob breaks through the crust of a CD4 cell, shedding its protective layer to reveal two strands of viral RNA. The voice-over tells me that viral enzymes rifle through the body’s existing nucleotides, looking for whatever they can use to replicate themselves.

Intellectually I understand that this animation describes a process currently transforming my body, but I look down at my hands and see only my hands. I wonder how long it would take for me to die unmedicated.

When I was a small child, my Aunt Linda, who lived on Long Island, told me that her friend had died of a new disease called AIDS. She said he was a homosexual and that the disease affected people like him.

Aunt Linda has been on my mind since I saw her three weeks ago while I was waiting for the C train at Spring Street. It was late and I was coming home from a friend’s apartment. The station was nearly empty, and I could hear water dripping but could not see it. A man holding a painting of three cows stood ten feet to my left. He asked me for a cigarette. That’s when I saw her, an old woman coming down the stairs. She carried a garbage bag full of clothes over one shoulder and a black leather handbag over the other. I had no doubt it was her.

“Linda. It’s me.”

She lowered her sunglasses, and I noticed her pink nails. Her lips were the same color. As a child I found her insistence on matching lip and nail color the epitome of elegance.

“Hi, bear.”

That’s what she always called me. She lowered her glasses and walked toward the open doors of the crowded downtown train that had just arrived. A crowd of passengers parted to make space for her. The doors closed before I could pursue her.

Two decades earlier, I wore a borrowed suit to Aunt Linda’s funeral. I was the third person to throw a handful of soil on the coffin.

Dr. Waitzkin hands me a prescription for three drugs along with a brochure. I notice my hands shaking.

“These drugs prevent the virus from replicating inside of you,” she says. “Over time your viral load will get smaller and smaller until we can no longer detect it. Our goal is to make you undetectable.”

“Undetectable,” I repeat back. Right. A goal.

She puts her hand on my shoulder, a breach of the friendly professionalism that has defined our interaction thus far. “We now have the medication to enable you to live a long and healthy life. This is no longer a death sentence.”

I have heard this phrase in the context of HIV for years. No longer a death sentence. It is supposed to make me feel better, but it ignores the fact that it is still some kind of sentence, life imprisonment perhaps.

When I open the door to leave, I wonder about the residue my hand leaves on the brass doorknob.

~

Outside the winter sun drops behind the buildings on 12th Street. I see my breath as I wrap a scarf around my neck. A woman pushes a stroller toward Broadway. Three NYU students step into a Starbucks. I look down at the prescription in my hand and mouth the word undetectable.

I do not want to go to my empty apartment uptown. I want to go to a bar, maybe pick someone up for an evening tryst. But now my body is a threat. I must learn to treat it as such.

The old buildings in this neighborhood remind me of death. This one, for example, was built in 1868, according to a plaque next to its entrance. Not a man who aided in its original construction is alive today.

A jogger passes too close and startles me. I jump out of the way and feel several drops of liquid land on my shoulder, splatter across my neck. Window washers, about ten stories up. I crane my neck to look at them and suddenly fear that a window pane will come plunging down, bisecting my body from head to toe, like being unzipped.

I begin to feel dizzy and duck into the nearest door. I find myself in a diner, a small one that I have never noticed. There’s a bar on one side of the restaurant, with ten leather-topped chrome stools bolted to the ground. Two old men sit three stools apart at the bar reading newspapers and drinking coffee. The other side of the restaurant has five small wooden booths in a line, each separated by a pane of clear glass. Christmas music plays softly.

I take a seat at the booth nearest to the entrance. That’s when I notice him. I see him first in the mirror on the wall behind the bar. We are separated by one empty booth. I look at him directly through the two panes of glass between us. He peers at a laminated menu. He wears a charcoal blazer with dark jeans. On his table sits a shopping bag from a nearby department store. Somehow he has not aged.

I last saw him over twenty years ago. In that time, the memory of him evolved from an aching wound to a scar that I seldom notice. But now, seeing him in this diner, the pain of his sudden disappearance feels brand new again.

Without thinking too much about it, I stand and walk toward him. Not until I am right next to the table does he look up from the menu.

“Travis?”

He smiles blankly, surprised to hear his name coming from my mouth. He is still handsome, teeth straight and white.

“You don’t remember me.”

“Give me a hint,” he says.

I notice a ring on his finger. “San Francisco. 1996,” I say.

He lowers the menu and examines my face.

“I had an apartment on Duboce,” I say. “You would bring over flowers from the shop where you worked.”

“Miller,” he says, finally remembering. “What a wonderful surprise.”

“Why are you here?”

“My wife,” he says. “She wanted to go shopping.”

The word wife seems to come from a foreign language. I have a vision of him from twenty years ago standing in my doorway as a palm sways in the wind behind him, then his clothes strewn across the bedroom floor, lilies on the kitchen table.

“You disappeared,” I say. “I thought you were sick.”

“You were always thinking so much,” he says. “That’s what I loved about you.”

“You came all the way here to go shopping?”

Travis’s eyes scan over my shoulder to the front door. “You should go, Miller. My wife will be here soon.” The smile fades from Travis’s lips.

I want to tell him that I thought he was dead. I want to tell him that I hoped he was dead, that the alternative would have been worse. But I have a sense that he cannot hear what I have to say. Instead I extend my hand toward him. If I will not be heard then I at least deserve to touch, one last time, the face of the man who was my first love.

“Please don’t do that,” he says before my fingers can reach him.

I return to my table and order coffee from the waiter. Periodically I glance at Travis through the glass and see him watching the entrance, waiting for his wife.

A college girl and her parents enter the diner and sit at the empty booth between us. They block my view of Travis. They have the tired expressions of a family that has spent the day walking around the city. Perhaps they are picking their daughter up from school for the holidays. Perhaps they are from the Midwest and seeing their daughter’s life in the city for the first time.

The waiter delivers my coffee, and I shift in my seat to try and get another look at Travis. Paper crunches in the back pocket of my jeans. It’s the prescription and brochure from Dr. Waitzkin. I place them on the table in front of me.

~

I met Travis at the Stud in 1996. I had just moved to the city. I had never kissed a man.

Travis sidled up to me at the bar. He told me I was the best-looking boy he’d seen all night. He smelled like sweat and cigarettes. I remember the feeling of his sturdy torso against my arm. I didn’t even get a chance to buy a drink before we were heading back to his place arm-in-arm.

It was the first year that AIDS was no longer the leading cause of death among American men 25 to 44 years old. Ostensibly this was cause for celebration, but walking down Castro Street it felt like there was no one left to die. Men in their thirties hobbled along with canes for support.

Travis lived a few blocks from the Stud. That first night, I fell asleep in his arms. I woke up in the middle of the night to his kisses on my back. He wanted me again. He guided himself inside me without a condom.

For the next four months, Travis and I spent nearly every night together. I felt safe with him while the rest of the world felt dangerous. I wanted to be in his presence as much as possible. Stopping by the flower shop to kiss him and say hello became an afternoon routine. In my eyes, he was the most beautiful man in all of San Francisco.

~

The college girl and her parents eat French toast and blueberry pie. I see Travis in the mirror, still alone at his booth.

The brochure on the table summons my attention. You’ve tested positive for HIV. What is important to know? You have been infected. You must consider yourself a carrier.

Halfway down the page I see that word again. Undetectable.

What about your past and present partners? Your infection happened two weeks to five years or more before your positive test. You have been able to pass the virus during all that time. Therefore, any of your partners may have been exposed. Anyone using the same needle after you has also been exposed. These people may have become infected. They are your “contacts.”

The college girl and her parents finish eating and, reinvigorated by the meal, begin a lively conversation full of laughter.

I recall my next-door neighbor in San Francisco, a muscular man in his 40s who flirted with me whenever he saw me. One day I noticed him on his stoop after weeks of not seeing him. His body had wasted away so much that I didn’t recognize him at first. His face resembled a dried-up apple core. “I’ve been fasting,” he said when he noticed me staring. He disappeared shortly thereafter.

It was around that time that Travis and I had our last encounter. I was in my apartment drinking coffee with a friend when Travis entered. He was on his way to work but took the long way to pass by my place. He was smoking a cigarette and had dark bags under his eyes. He kissed me on the cheek and said he was late. In my memory there is a small lesion on his face, but I’m not sure if I added that detail retroactively. Either way, he walked away and never returned.

There were rumors that he moved back to Arizona. I was convinced that he had gone somewhere to die, like all the other gay men who disappeared at that time. It took me months to work up the courage to get tested. When the results came back negative, I invented a story that I had some kind of immunity.

~

The college girl and her parents pay their bill and stand to leave. It is only then that I realize the booth where Travis once sat is now empty, and his body is not visible in the mirror. I rush to the bathroom and find it empty. He is gone.

I leave the diner and join the stream of people entering the subway. Their bodies are warm beneath their winter jackets. No one speaks to me, no one even acknowledges my presence. It occurs to me that I could go the rest of my life without saying a word to another person.

Back at my apartment I write down the names of nine men. I must call each of them. One of them gave me the virus. I read the names aloud, as if I had written a poem, picturing each man as I say his name. One is talking to a lover about a future vacation, another is reaching for a box of cereal at the grocery store, another is getting a haircut. I do not know what I will say. I pick up my phone and call the first man on the list.