son III. He signs all his memos FY, which could be for his initials. Steve thinks it stands for Fiscal Year. I think it’s short for Fuck You, which reflects Franklin’s attitude toward the staff. The ED keeps him on because he’s good with numbers and has saved the agency several times. Still, we’re weighing the cost.”
“I don’t know.” I was wavering, feeling my resolution sinking out from under me. “I don’t think I’m in the right mental space to give you what you need.”
“Maybe this is what you need,” said Steve. “You know, something to take your mind off . . . whatever you need to take your mind off of.” I suspect Charles had also told him why I returned to the States. Then he glanced at his watch. “I’ve got to get back to my meeting.” He stood and we shook hands. “Please, think about it. We really do need you.”
Once he left, I said to Sandy, “His enthusiasm is infectious.”
She eyed me. “Yeah, well, be careful. That’s not all that’s infectious about him.”
“Oh.” I felt an immediate sinking in my stomach. Why am I still surprised?
“By the way, that’s not breaching confidentiality. Steve’s very open about his status. About half the guys who work here are positive, though only a few have symptoms yet. And then, too, Steve already has a partner.”
“Oh, I’m not interested in a relationship,” I said. “And besides, he’s really not my type— you know, good-looking, charming, intelligent.” And I realized that’s exactly how I’d describe Gray. No, I wasn’t interested in a relationship. Not then. Perhaps not ever again.
Sandy looked at her watch. “It’s almost noon. Hungry?”
“Not really.”
“Good. You’ll be a cheap lunch date. It’s my treat.”
“Thanks, but— ”
“No, really, I want to talk to you some more. I’m going to wine ’n dine you until I convince you why you need to join us.”
Out of courtesy I agreed to lunch, and in a manner befitting a nonprofit agency, Sandy wined and dined me at the nearby Subway sandwich shop.
Chapter Two
The Bogong High Plains
[Northern Victoria, Australia, March 1991]
The Bogong High Plains held some mystical affinity for Gray. They evoked in him a deep sense of the holy he found nowhere else. It was on these plains he felt his own spiritual connection to the earth. It was here he entered the Dreamtime.
The two of us sat next to the campfire, he staring into the flames as I read my book. He’d always enjoyed campfires. The flickering, dancing, waving lights beckoned him, producing mild trance states where his imagination and memories wandered hand in hand. Although he’d become a barrister like his father and grandfather, at heart, Gray was a romantic.
“To the aboriginal peoples, these plains were sacred.”
The statement came out of nowhere, apropos of nothing but his flame-lit reveries.
I looked up from my book. “To the aboriginal peoples, the entire earth was sacred,” I reminded him. “They dwelled in a sacred universe.”
“Yes, I know but . . . some places are special,” he insisted.
“What, like they’re sacred-er?”
“Some places remind us that everything is sacred.”
This affinity related to an experience he’d had as a young boy. Each summer he and his brothers accompanied their father camping on this vast plateau in northern Victoria. His father said it was how he got away, “far from the madding crowd.”
“Your mother didn’t go along?” I’d asked.
“Mother was the madding crowd. Besides, she detested camping. Considered anything beyond Melbourne’s city limits the Outback and not fit for human habitation.”
Gray and I would go up there several times a year, staying at a favorite secluded camping spot from which we hiked and backpacked in spring and early summer, and skied cross-country in winter. I didn’t share his attraction to the high plains. To me, they were bleak, barren and unwelcoming, a vast empty landscape. Fifty percent heath and scrub brush, twenty-five percent grasslands, scraggly trees here and there, the rest rocky outcroppings, I found them scruffy and desolate. I’ve always preferred mountains— admittedly, not abundant in Australia— and put our difference in landscape preferences down to my growing up in the Pacific Northwest with the Cascade peaks always in view. Gray thought it had more to do with our sun signs.
“You’re Capricorn,” he’d say. “Earth sign. The goat. So, yeah, you’re drawn to mountains. I’m Aquarius.”
“What’s Aquarius drawn to? Scrub brush?”
“Air sign”— and he’d raise his hands and eyes overhead— “Sky. Infinitude. The eternal.”
He’d been brought up in the Anglican Church, so he was not particularly religious. The high church tradition offered pomp and pageantry and exquisite liturgical music, but as to the human hunger for mystery and the mystical, Gray turned to what he called his “aboriginal roots,” the land.
He was staring again into the fire. “Maybe the indigenous people didn’t express it conceptually like we do, but they sensed it. I sense it.”
“Sense what?”
“These plains are haunted.”
By then, I’d heard the folklore that Cleve Cole’s restless spirit wandered this land. “You mean haunted as in ghosts?” I asked.
“I mean haunted as in holy.”
Every people, in every place, in every period of human history, have believed that certain locations— mountains and volcanoes, deserts, forests, springs and watering holes— were repositories of special energies, holding special powers. I remain a skeptic on the subject, intrigued, intellectually curious, but skeptical. Gray, however, was a believer. Though questioning, even cynical about so much else— politics, the law, his mother’s artificially youthful appearance— he was a believer in the sacredness of these plains.
“This is where I want my ashes spread,” he said on that occasion. “This is where I belong.”
He’d just been diagnosed that week with AIDS, and hearing his words unnerved me.
“We’ve got plenty of time to talk about that,” I said, and without commenting further, I returned to my book and he returned to his fire reveries. It turned out we had less time than we thought.
It was several weeks after arriving home that I began to have recurring dreams of the Bogong High Plains.
Friday, February 24, 1995
10:20 p.m.
Providence Hospital, Portland, Oregon
“I was hoping I might just sit with him. I realize he’s unconscious.”
The nurse is kind. “I’m afraid it’s not possible. He’s still in critical condition and being actively monitored. I’m sorry.”
She seems genuinely sorry, so I offer a smile. “Well, no harm in asking.”
She gives a warm smile in return. “No harm at all.”
I start to leave for the waiting room, then turn back. “It’s just that . . .” I’m struggling for words. “If he regains consciousness, even momentarily, it’s very important I speak with him. Very important, if only for a couple of minutes.” We have some unfinished business, I want to tell her. Business that needs to be finished before he . . .
“It’s