Reluctant Lazarus

Brought to the brink of death left him clinging confusedly to life

People started showing symptoms and dying from conditions related to AIDS by 1981, with HIV not identified until 1983. The earliest drugs like AZT didn’t arrive until four years after that, and provided only temporary benefits with extreme side effects, decimating communities and terrifying the country.

That made contracting HIV a likely death sentence until about a decade later, when dramatic, life-saving results from highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) — a combination of at least three antiretroviral drugs — transformed HIV from a near-certain death sentence into a manageable chronic condition.

I wrote this 1996–7, when people with HIV who had resigned themselves to dying in short order were given a sudden, unexpected, and disorienting second chance. Their prognosis was initially uncertain, but they were given hope — paradoxically creating its own confusion, anxiety, and feelings of free fall after a fait accompli.

I knew “Lazarus” personally, and marveled at his resilience in the face of death, and his consternation that his best-laid plans for a Camus-like “Happy Death” were thwarted. At the time, everyone was talking about the miraculous HIV treatments, and nobody seemed to care about Laz. I strived to give him a voice.

Brought to the brink of death through the vicissitudes of virility and virus, Laz could finally free himself to love life. Returned to rigor and responsibility through inhibitors, Laz now feels fickle about the unexpected oscillations of fate.

Resigning himself to eternal silence, the statistical ranks of so many others fallen before the plague, Laz had the best summer of his life last year, anticipating his imminent dying by fall.

Released from the burdens of coin, schedule and all obligation, he partied hearty, entertained friends, read voraciously, sat on his balcony off Elaine Place, and passively followed the hours through impressionist variation of light and shadow, day and night.

Having finally overcome the fear of his own demise, having interpreted End as arbitrary and involuntary as Beginning, he celebrated denouement with the joyful frivolity of a retiring actor — an often uneven and rocky career attaining equilibrium through idle retrospective, and the intoxicated merriment of closing night party with a generally favorable review.

But as days shortened, nights lengthened, leaves faded and fell beneath the feet of city dwellers hushed and huddled in anticipation of the cold, Laz the rustic and resigned spirit gradually found himself compelled to contemplate not the frigidity and certainty of the grave, but the fear and indeterminacy of imminent winter: the drugs were working.

His counts had stabilized, were rising. “Six months” had turned to “a year” had turned to “two years” had turned to “who knows?”

Lazarus, having worked so hard and struggled so long to discover the Zen-like bliss of a dead man walking, found himself gasping through the brittle air of a living man dying. Catapulted from that side to this side, once condemned to death, Laz is now burdened with life.

“Knowing that I could do nothing,” relates Laz, “I finally figured out how to do everything. Finding meaning in death, now I’m depressed by the meaninglessness of life. Decisions are easy when you’ve got no choice. Again able to do whatever I want, I just don’t know what to do…”

Struggling for over a decade across the wake of decimation, the entire community is slowly rebounding with the long-overdue availability of medicines often able to extend life. Expensive, highly toxic and all-too frequently ineffective, the newest wave of pharmaceuticals has nonetheless brought many back from the brink.

While these drugs can prolong life, they are clearly not a cure. The result is not salvation, but limbo. And in that uncertain Neverneverland, some have become reckless, some overcompensate with an ideology of assimilation, while others, like our Laz here, simply don’t know what to do with themselves.

“We’ve been told for so long what we can’t do, how we shouldn’t behave, only the dead have direction, the living, lost. Disability, contemplation, idleness and a questioning of all value. Since few concerned themselves with our demise, we have trouble mustering enthusiasm for rebirth. And when so much energy goes into resignation, what happens when everything turns to obligation?”

Nowadays, Laz is thinking about going back to work. Much like any casualty of war, he’s a bit shell-shocked, has trouble adjusting to the everyday. After all, when you’re brought to the edge of existence, the banality of delivering pizzas or even programming a computer seem oddly superfluous.

Few creatures experience a more sweeping sense of déjà vu than ghosts.

Listen…