own line, I found myself watching out of curiosity.
It was after One Life to Live but before Oprah, the time of day when most of the guys napped. I myself was not feeling so well. The sores in my mouth made it difficult to speak; I had to keep using the toilet. The skin around my eyes, stained by Kaposi's sarcoma, had swollen to the point where I could barely see. Then suddenly, Shay's fishing line whizzed into the narrow space beneath my cell door. 'Want some?' he asked.
When we fish, it's to get something. We trade magazines; we barter food; we pay for drugs. But Shay didn't want anything, except to give.
Wired to the end of his line was a piece of Bazooka bubble gum.
It's contraband. Gum can be used as putty to build all sorts of things, and to tamper with locks. God only knew where Shay had come across this bounty-and, even more astounding, why he wouldn't just hoard it.
I swallowed, and my throat nearly split along a fault line. 'No thanks,'
I rasped.
I sat up on my bunk and peeled the sheet off the plastic mattress. One of the seams had been carefully doctored by me. The thread, laced like a football, could be loosened enough for me to rummage around inside the foam padding. I jammed my forefinger inside, scooping out my stash.
There were the 3TC pills-Epivir-and the Sustiva. Retrovir. Lomotil for my diarrhea. All the medications that, for weeks, Alma had watched me place on my tongue and apparently swallow-when in fact they were tucked up high in the purse of my cheek.
I had not yet made up my mind whether I would use these to kill myself... or if I'd just continue to save them instead of ingest them: a slower but still sure suicide.
It's funny how when you are dying, you still fight for the upper hand.
You want to pick the terms; you want to choose the date. You'll tell yourself anything you have to, to pretend that you're still the one in control.
'Joey,' Shay said. 'Want some?' He cast again, his line arcing over the catwalk.
'For real?' Joey asked. Most of us just pretended Joey wasn't around; it was safer for him. No one went out of their way to acknowledge him, much less offer him something as precious as a piece of gum.
'I want some,' Calloway demanded. He must have seen the bounty going by, since his cell was between Shay's and Joey's.
'Me, too,' Crash said.
Shay waited for Joey to take the gum, and then pulled his line gently closer, until it was within reach of Calloway. 'There's plenty.'
'How many pieces you got?' Crash asked.
'Just the one.'
Now, you've seen a piece of Bazooka gum. Maybe you can split it with a friend. But to divvy up one single piece among seven greedy men?
Shay's fishing line whipped to the left, past my cell en route to Crash's.
'Take some and pass it on,' Shay said.
'Maybe I want the whole thing.'
'Maybe you do.'
'Fuck,' Crash said. 'I'm taking it all.'
'If that's what you need,' Shay replied.
I stood up, unsteady, and crouched down as Shay's fishing line reached
Pogie's cell. 'Have some,' Shay offered.
'But Crash took the whole piece-'
'Have some.'
I could hear paper being unwrapped, the fullness of Pogie speaking around the bounty softening in his mouth. 'I ain't had chewing gum since
2001.'
By now, I could smell it. The pinkness, the sugar. I began to salivate.
'Oh, man,' Texas breathed, and then everyone chewed in silence, except for me.
Shay's fishing line swung between my own feet. 'Try it,' he urged.
I reached for the packet on the end of the line. Since six other men had already done the same, I expected to see only a fragment remaining, a smidgen of gum, if anything at all-yet, to my surprise, the piece of Bazooka was intact. I ripped the gum in half and put a piece into my mouth.
The rest I wrapped up, and then I tugged on Shay's line. I watched it zip away, back to his own cell.
At first I could barely stand it-the sweetness against the sores in my mouth, the sharp edges of the gum before it softened. It brought tears to my eyes to so badly want something that I knew would cause great pain. I held up my hand, ready to spit the gum out, when the most remarkable thing happened: my mouth, my throat, they stopped aching, as if there were an anesthetic in the gum, as if I were no longer an AIDS patient but an ordinary man who'd picked up this treat at the gas station counter after filling his tank in preparation for driving far, far away. My jaw moved, rhythmic. I sat down on the floor of my cell, crying as I chewed-not because it hurt, but because it didn't.
We were silent for so long that CO Whitaker came in to see what we were up to; and what he found, of course, was not what he had expected.
Seven men, imagining childhoods that we all wished we'd had. Seven men, blowing bubbles as bright as the moon.
For the first time in nearly six months, I slept through the night. I woke up rested and relaxed, without any of the stomach knotting that usually con78 sumed me for the first two hours of every day. I walked to the basin, squeezed toothpaste onto the stubby brush they gave us, and glanced up at the wavy sheet of metal that passed for a mirror.
Something was different.
The sores, the Kaposi's sarcoma that had spotted my cheeks and inflamed my eyelids for a year now, were gone. My skin was clear as a river.
I leaned forward for a better look. I opened up my mouth, tugged my lower lip, searching in vain for the blisters and cankers that had kept me from eating.
'Lucius,' I heard, a voice spilling from the vent over my head. 'Good morning.'
I glanced up. 'It is, Shay. God, yes, it is.'
In the end, I didn't have to call for a medical consult. Officer Whitaker was shocked enough at my improved appearance to call Alma himself. I was taken into the attorney-client cell so that she could draw my blood, and an hour later, she came back to my own cell to tell me what I already knew.
'Your CD4+ is 1250,' Alma said. 'And your viral load's undetectable.'
'That's good, right?'
'It's normal. It's what someone who doesn't have AIDS would look like if we drew his blood.' She shook her head. 'Looks to me like your drug regimen's kicked in in a big way-'
'Alma,' I said, and I glanced behind her at Officer Whitaker before peeling the sheet off my mattress and ripping open my hiding place for pills. I brought them to her, spilled several dozen into her hand. 'I haven't been taking my meds for months.'
Color rose in her cheeks. 'Then this isn't possible.'
'It's not probable,' I corrected. 'Anything's possible.'
She stuffed the pills into her pocket. 'I'm sure there's a medical explanation-'
'It's Shay.'
'Inmate Bourne?'
'He did this,' I said, well aware of how insane it sounded, and yet desperate to make her understand. 'I saw him bring a dead bird back to life.
And take one piece of gum and turn it into enough for all of us. He made wine come out of our faucets the first
