“So I would say just go on and talk among yourselves for the moment,” the functionary said.
The small, crowded room settled back into murmuring chatter. Hector crossed glances with JoAnn; she smiled and came over.
“So you get to be the queen’s plus one,” he joked.
She gestured at her pantsuit. “I’m sure I’m not up to her standards of glamour.”
“Like Kessler is? Come on, neither of you are exactly Rock Hudson circa 1960.”
“True, that,” JoAnn demurred, glancing down at the floor. Briefly, Hector considered the inner life of a single, childless FDA deputy commissioner. He pictured her reading briefs while microwaving a frozen dinner and pouring a too-large glass of wine at the kitchen counter of a Bethesda condo after getting home from work at ten P.M.
She looked back up, eyed him. “You guys should feel really proud,” she said, sotto voce. “Really, really proud.”
Hector shrugged; now it was his turn to feel awkward.
“You called us out when you needed to,” she added. “Every step of the way. On AZT plus ddC. On the d4T data.”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “Don’t talk about it like it’s the past tense, you know.” He tried to keep humor in his voice. “It’s not over.”
“I’m not saying that.” Her voice was still low, careful. “I’m just saying—” She paused. “You guys know this one is special.”
She briefly put him at a loss for words. “Yes, it’s special,” he finally averred.
But she caught something in his eyes. “What?” she asked him. “Hector.” And here she surprised him by reaching for his hand. “You have to acknowledge this. I know it’s been really, really ugly at times. But this is definitive.”
“I know.” He jumped on her words, startled by the speed in his own voice. “I’m just saying now’s not the time to relax.”
“No,” JoAnn insisted. “Now is the time to relax a minute. We can un-relax when we get back to New York and D.C. But you should relax a little now and enjoy this.” She craned her neck, hearing the clack of heels in the hallway outside. She peered out the door and ducked back in, grabbed Hector’s arm. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, it’s her,” she muttered, gesturing for the whole room to push back along the far wall, near the table with the champagne.
“Are you relaxed right now?” Hector asked her, grinning.
“I’m freaking out a little!” She clutched his arm, pulling them back in baby steps toward the wall.
The amfAR functionary turned to the entire room and pantomimed a giant Shush! as though he were quieting an orchestra. Then he ducked out of the room, returning seconds later with two other officials and her. The queen. Who’d just stood before three thousand people and the international press and denounced Canada’s prime minister for abandoning a national AIDS program. She struck Hector as a giant ebony nimbus of hair and eyebrows set atop a Lilliputian frame. He was fixated on her eyes. He couldn’t believe he was in the same small, crowded room with those eyes. He applauded with the rest of the room, exchanging giddy glances with Chris and Maira.
“Well, hello!” she trilled over the applause. “Hello and thank you and congratulations.” The functionary shouldered his way from the back through the crowd with a flute of sparkling water for her, which she reached out and accepted without acknowledging him. She scanned the back reaches of the crowd. “Where is my new FDA friend?”
Hector nudged JoAnn. “Go!” he whispered. “She’s summoning you.”
JoAnn made her way to the front of the room and, her face the color of a pomegranate seed, stood shifting alongside the queen, who looked her up and down with cinematic precision, then, after a perfect beat, said, “You look very fetching in a pantsuit, Dr. Kessler.”
The room erupted in laughter. It was a perfect diss to Kessler, who for one reason or other hadn’t been able to accompany the queen on the plaudits she wished to bestow upon a small, select group of activists and researchers.
“Now, I don’t mean to make this long day even longer for you,” continued the queen, whose diction — luxuriously articulated, almost slurry, full of delicious, refined cadences and hints of various medications — rolled over Hector’s ears like a thick nectar. “But I asked for the chance to meet some of the individuals I’ve not yet met through amfAR who’ve been so instrumental”—indeed, she played that word like an instrument, cresting elegantly toward the syllable ment before tumbling back down—“in. .”
She trailed off, as though at a loss for how to finish. “In. .” She looked at the faces before her, raised a heavily jeweled hand as though to say, Help me.
Panic flashed across JoAnn’s face. “Well,” she said, “in helping bring about the amazing data that we’re seeing here in Vancouver. And celebrating.”
The queen’s hand fell, relieved. “Exactly. I couldn’t have said that better myself.” Pause. “And I didn’t.” Again, she made the room explode in laughter.
“Ahh,” she continued, smiling, her head bobbing slightly as she grasped for new thoughts. “What I know is that many of you here in this room today — and I mean not just the federal people and the drug companies, but the young people from New York, from the Drug—” She paused, then sounded frustrated with herself. “Well, you know, the Drug group—”
“From the Drug Movement Coalition,” JoAnn supplied.
“That’s who I meant,” the queen said. “The Drug Movement Coalition. I mean”—her voice rose emotionally—“I mean these five or six people — where are you, anyway? Step out.”
Hector, Chris, and Maira weakly raised their hands, accepted applause from the room. Chris, Hector noticed, had gone a shade whiter.
“These people kept the rest of you on your toes the entire way, and they were not even in Washington!” Her eyes were wide with wonder, admiration. “These people were not even doctors yet they were the ones telling us, ‘No, no, stop! Stop testing the drugs one by one; you’re killing their power. You have to put the drugs together for them to work. It’s as simple as that.’”
The room was uncomfortably silent. This was the problem with the queen, many said, as beloved as she was. Sometimes the queen spoke beyond the limits of her knowledge and got the science a little bit off. Certainly, here, she was overreaching, Hector knew — everyone knew. Their group hadn’t been the first to know or to insist that new drugs had to be tested in combination rather than one at a time; they’d just played a huge role promoting that information to other activists and to patients, then proposing to the feds a trial that allowed for different combinations without being too burdened with qualifying criteria, so that as many patients as possible could participate. And they’d also demanded more safety data on certain drugs before they were released. (In that regard, they were only half successful.)
But the queen was right about one thing: patients’ virus levels hadn’t plunged and T cells hadn’t skyrocketed until the new drugs — including the protease drugs, those slightly villainous-sounding names that had dominated the past half year, like ritonavir, saquinavir, nevirapine — were administered together. Hector felt his heart rate rise and the blood pound in his temples when he thought how, for eight years—eight whole years, how stupid they all had been! — they’d been giving people one perfectly good drug at a time, letting the virus develop resistance to it, killing a perfectly good drug option for the future. So many people now were already failing in their new regimens because they were taking drugs they’d already spoiled for themselves. Who’d still be alive by the end of the year? It was all the more bitter for those who were failing, having to watch others flourish. He thought about the years—1987, ’88, ’89, ’90, ’91, ’92—when he watched so many friends make themselves sick on AZT and ddI, and all they were doing was spoiling their chances for the future! In retrospect, he grudgingly tipped his hat to Ricky, who — granted, like many — knew in his gut that AZT was toxic and not worth taking alone. Those who’d waited were benefiting now. The ones who’d made it this far, that is. Ricky not among them.