DECEMBER 30, 1996/JANUARY 6, 1997 VOL. 148 NO. 29

	1 0f 3

People who have lived for a while with AIDS, or with any other life-threatening illness, will tell you what it does to their hearing. They put it in different ways, but what it comes down to is that the most ordinary conversation can cut like a knife. To begin with, the present tense has a whole new pitch. When you don't know how long you have, the simple words "I am" are enough to remind you of the unbearable lightness of being. With the past tense the problem is that you catch yourself saying, "I was..." and feel the tip of the wing of the angel of death. But the trickiest form of speech by far is the future. One of the first things lost to real illness isn't alertness or vigor. It's the simple pleasure of saying, in full confidence, "I will be."

When he tested positive for the AIDS virus, in 1984, Caleb Schwartz was 28. What that means is that for most of his adult life he has expected to die prematurely. A while ago, when he was looking for a new apartment in Manhattan, he would only consider elevator buildings. He was in good health at the time, but he had to keep in mind the day--in two years? in five?--when he would be too weak to climb stairs.

Year after year, Schwartz looked handsome and sturdy. All the while, his T cells ticked downward. In 1992, when they dipped below 500--the normal level is around 1,000--Schwartz's doctor put him on AZT, one of the few drugs then available that attack the virus directly. Both understood that it would fail after a while. Later Schwartz added 3TC, another antiviral. AIDS took a first cuff at him anyway. He began experiencing memory loss and having difficulty concentrating. Every few weeks, something that felt like the flu would send him to bed for days. In the summer of 1995 he took a disability leave from his New York law firm. A few months later he had his first AIDS-related hospitalization, for meningitis, a brain inflammation that gave him headaches so lacerating that even sunlight caused him pain.

By that time his T cells had dropped to 201. This is the stage at which AIDS starts to behave like an abusive mate. It simmers alongside you in bed. It sits quietly at your table. And from time to time it goes berserk, pushes you into a corner and makes a fist. "I was starting," says Schwartz, "to accept the possibility of something catastrophic."

What he got was something else. In March, his doctor put him on a third drug, Crixivan, one of the new protease inhibitors. Up to this point, Schwartz's story had been like most in the epidemic, none of them very encouraging. But 1996 reinvented the genre and put at its center the AIDS patient who bounces back on the three-drug cocktail. Over the past year--like a character plucked from a drama and dropped into what, exactly?-- Schwartz moved from one story to the other. His T cells are back above 500. His viral load, meaning the presence of the HIV virus in his blood, has dropped to--the magic words--undetectable levels.

After years of coming to terms with the prospect of death, Schwartz is mulling over the prospect of life. For his own peace of mind, he's being very, very careful. The drugs may not work forever. Or the side effects may worsen. Sometimes you still hear HIV-positive people refer to themselves as carriers. But the virus is only one of the things they carry. Along with it comes a weight of isolation, fears for the future and deep accumulations of rage, humiliation and grief. After all of that, naive hope is one indignity they are in no hurry to accept. So Schwartz is not about to start throwing around the future tense. "Everything is still phrased in the conditional for me," he says. "It's just that the conditions are more positive."

In the history of the epidemic, there has never been a moment as intricate as this one. AIDS once again, as in the first years after it appeared, presents a predicament so new that no one is sure how to talk about it. When we say protease inhibitors work, what do we mean? Whom do they work for, how well and for how long? The only thing we know with certainty is that the conventions of language and sentiment that fit an earlier moment of AIDS, meaning all the years when death was at the end of every struggle, are unsuited to this one, when nothing is a foregone conclusion. Something powerful is happening. The new prospects for effective treatment insist that despair is an outmoded psychological reflex. Yet among people who live with AIDS, optimism is a suspicious character. Too many bright hopes of the past didn't pan out. So this is a moment in which, for anyone with feeling and judgment, feeling and judgment are unsettled.

	1 0f 3