go, and do not collect anything at all worth mentioning.
Anat walked me back to my room, and let me lay down. She said
she would be in her office if I needed anything. Before she left, I
asked her not to tell anyone about my condition. The rules dictated
that I would have to leave the kibbutz, and she would explain to
everyone after I was gone, but I wanted her to wait until then. I had
no idea how to deal with people who would come up to me and say,
“I heard you’re going to die…Sorry.”
And, oh God, what about Greta? We never used any sort of
protection. Had poor Greta been infected by me? She wouldn’t know
from her test, though, because we slept together weeks after the test
was taken, but she would find out after Anat spills the beans. Oh,
God, Greta, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry if I killed you. I wish I could take
it all back. And what about Charly? Oh, my God, Charly. I began to
shake in terror. I could never live with the knowledge that I had given
Charly the virus. Shit, I wasn’t going to live anyway. I began to cry.
Wait, Jake. Get a hold of yourself, I thought. You had a test before
you went on this trip and you were found to be HIV negative. There’s
no way you could have infected Charly. You must have contracted the
virus sometime between that test and the second test. I tried to figure
out what tramp I might have slept with between the first test a month
before I left and the second test a month ago, but I couldn’t
remember any. I tried to remember what all those brochures they
gave us in college said. You can’t get AIDS from kissing or toilet seats.
I’d never taken intravenous drugs, and I hadn’t had any sort of blood
transfusions. The only thing I’ve done since then is have normal,
heterosexual sex with Charly, and there was no way that she had…
I bolted upright on the bed. Charly! Oh, no. Oh no. Oh God no.
Not Charly. Not my Charly. But how? She…not from that guy in
Ethiopia. That motherfucking bastard. That goddamn
motherfuckingbastard! Not only did he take my girl, he took my
whole fucking immune system. He gave her his infection with his evil
needle, and then she turned around and gave it to me with a bow on
it. I thought of myself stupidly sitting on our terrace in Greece feeling
miserable because Charly had cheated on me with another guy. How
would I have felt then if I had known that Charly had not only broken
my heart but inadvertently spilled arsenic on the fragments? It was
romantic for Romeo and Juliet to take poison together, but at least
Romeo had a say in it, and Juliet’s other boyfriend sure wasn’t
BIG AMERICAN BREAKFAST
58
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