"...all matter is merely energy condensed to a vibration; we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves."
~ Bill Hicks
"...a system has not just one history, but every possible history."
~ Richard Feynman
As minutes after her death became hours, days, months, then years, the empty place she left inside him filled up with everyday life. Eventually, their relationship in his mind's eye resembled a faded, near-forgotten snapshot, secreted between musty book pages.
Nick for a time believed he had finally outlived her illness and her passing. In fact, he would have once insisted he had really been leaving her since the moment he knew he could never save her: only a few weeks after he first saw Casey Ross.
He had hardly noticed her then, looking a little drowsy but warm and alive in her eyes. With her blue-striped cotton summer dress and flat-soled, brown lace-up shoes, overall she was unremarkable.
Still he could not help stealing glances at her, sitting at a desk with her legs crossed near the worn chalkboard of Ames Hall, Room 231, Dr. Calvin Fisher's summer session creative writing. Just twenty-two, Nick may as well have been sleepwalking until that moment.
He moved as most young men do, from one disconnected sense impression to another, until flunking out of State landed him in that class. At just the right time, shortly after meeting her, he caught just the right look in Casey's eyes and sent back his own, changing everything forever.
Three years older than him, a New Jersey native and a Princeton graduate, Casey worked for a business development office on campus. With her State-affiliated job, she audited classes. Soon after making her laugh with his in-class banter, he shared pizza and beer with Casey at her apartment one night. The two were accompanied by Evan, a mutual friend.
Nick knew but did not care that Casey had been sleeping with Evan; when the pizza and beer were finished, Evan left. Casey and Nick talked until early morning, exchanging more of those just-right looks. One night of simple chemistry discovered through conversation was enough for Nick to realize his love.
On a sunny early Saturday afternoon behind Irish lace curtains in her spic and span bedroom, Nick and Casey clumsily made love. The act was halting and quick—which Nick attributed mostly to his lack of experience. But he felt another, bigger cause for their awkwardness. Something about the way she would take him in her mouth but refused to let him put his mouth on her, "there." How—even though he hadn't worn one the first of two times they did it that day—she insisted she put a condom on him herself, oh-so-delicately, whispering to him afterward to pull out and wash himself.
Even being practically a stranger to her and a sexual novice, he felt her ways were more than a little prudish. He didn't press her to explain. As summer turned to fall and the light faded, when he told her see you later before leaving her apartment to work as a third-shift stock clerk each night, he could feel a dark lie in her dry kiss.
Late one day before he left to walk the mile or so to work, their talk of his plan to return to State fell silent and numb. In the dead space between them, trembling, wide-eyed, Casey suddenly pleaded with him to sit in the threadbare, overstuffed armchair he had always thought so comfortable. Then she confessed, telling Nick how her former boyfriend at Princeton was bisexual, and now he was dead.
She told him, too, how her boyfriend had contracted the most unspeakable disease of the twentieth century, bent over a toilet in a truck stop stall; how she and her sweet, shy Stan—a boy she might have married—made love and she had been infected with his unspeakable disease. Unspeakable then, in the mid-1980s, because Anthony Fauci and the other doctors chasing the "gay plague" had just begun narrowing their search for cause to a savage, efficient neo-virus.
In the time of George Michael, Def Leppard, and INXS, neither Casey nor Nick knew all that much about HIV. Nick only knew his sex with Casey had not been "safe," in 1980s American parlance; as if sex could ever be safe, emotionally, physically or in terms of consequences.
More than being terrified in the knowledge that he had been exposed to HIV, Nick felt crushing grief. Was he suddenly afraid for his health and life? Yes. But he felt so much more. As the light faded on that late-summer night, Nick cried because he knew he loved Casey even more than when he had fallen for her, just weeks before.
With the hopeless surrender and then seeming clarity evident in those facing imminent death, he understood. At that instant and forever after, Nick knew he and Casey never had a chance.
