Fade from Red

by Andrea B.

When you are infected with an incurable, transferable disease, your future turns to red. From the gray haze of the unknown to the definite destiny of the scarlet sores.

A red line of text cuts across the black columns of the blood test results, which are marked as Final. Permanent. Unchanged from the date on the top left of the test until now, more than one year later. And until ten, twenty years more, when your youth will give way to middle and old age. When even then, in the column labeled Flags, two red flags will still be raised unwavering: A, the scarlet letter, for abnormal. H, for high. For herpes.

So you see red.

It is the color that rushes up to the face in anger, embarrassment. Like platelets hastening under the dermis to an infection, where the peaceful blue of the blood beneath the skin mutates into crimson. And perhaps in keeping with human anatomy—the bloody warning of the color red—society seems to have agreed upon its meaning: The flare of an emergency. The triangular exclamation of danger. The fire alarm. The “Stop” octagon. The “Do Not Enter” sign.

Isolated, announces the lab finding in red capitals beside the HSV Type 2 Culture, after the gynecologist’s sharp instrument scraped at your inflamed skin for the vaginal tissue sample. A diagnostic technique, of course. Clinical terminology. But also, perhaps, a social prophecy. The disease’s symptoms more societal than physiological.

“I understand if it’s an automatic deal breaker,” you tell men at first on first dates, as if you are required to replace the orange rinds and green olive garnishments in both your drinks with tiny, tooth-picked red flags. To halt any romance, prevent any pain, save any wasted time before the inevitable rejection. Before the silence that so often ensues.

You stay silent later on your bar stool when your best friend tells you, apropos of nothing, that her partner fretted over the effect on his social status among the elite bankers and lawyers of your city if she stayed friends with someone like you. Someone with this dirty, unmentionable disease.

“She looked clean,” a colleague leaning over your desk at the firm where you work repeats as the punch line to his favorite joke about the man protesting, entering a clinic for STDs. “This is like getting bad STD results,” another coworker complains as he lifts from his inbox invoices in a red envelope. And the blush rising to your cheeks behind your computer screen is concealed, you hope, by your layer of pale makeup as you reply. “That’s a little drastic,” you laugh, imitating the playful participation of someone uninfected, unaffected. “Well,” he clarifies, “you know, not one of the permanent ones.”

You do know, though. And yet the permanence of your anger, of your state, still startles you when you agree to a New Year’s Eve meeting a year after you last saw the man who gave you this endless infection. His only gift in return for the endless love you gave him. You are shaking in your high heels over the bridge to the restaurant. And then over the dinner table, you are jabbing your finger into his hardened face and lunging over your untouched plate and spitting into his half-finished pasta and contorting your mouth and face into tomato-red. “You have to let go of this hate,” he says. “It’s unbecoming.”

“You did this to me,” you hiss. “And you’ve done nothing to fix it.” And then, for this incurable condition, you suggest substitute, approximate cures: Texts of well wishes, apologies that he could send you across the ocean from the distant city where he moved when he left you. Flowers, red roses he could order for your work desk. Checks he could write for the appointments your gynecologist has insisted that you schedule to discuss this diagnosis with a psychologist.

Across from you on the brown sofa, the psychologist lets you wail and rail and blame your lost lover for your long, hopeless future within the limits of one hour, in the middle of the day, in the middle of each week. Until in the silence afterward, your ears ring. And your eyes shine bloodshot red in the bathroom mirror as you try to reapply your makeup. Your mask to cover the last minutes, the last months of your shame.

But you should not feel shame, according to the online postings that you scroll in the elevator down after your rants. And you should not assign blame, according to the dictates of a sex therapist whose account—all calm and brown and muted and maroon, without any flash of red—you have found and followed in your frantic online searches for herpes, for help. You should instead help disassemble the STI stigma that has been manufactured by a conservative, sex-squeamish society.

That stigma burned reddest hot, according to some activists, on the red-framed cover of Time magazine, emblazoned on August 2, 1982, just one month before your birth, with a giant, fiery H. “Today’s Scarlet Letter,” the tagline proclaims. And following, in a bloody, slasher-film font, drips the whole frightening word: Herpes. Punishment for promiscuity, the cover story’s authors designate the disease. And then, they whisper horror stories of physical and social pain: Sex lives ended. Relationships destroyed. Shame and anger inflamed, the same way yours still rages, decades later, today.

Yet now, no space exists on the Internet for your own personal horror story, your own private hell. Forget the sharp insistence of the virus, red in tooth and claw, breaking initially into the skin, breaking feebly back out, chasing intimidated, ignorant men away. And ignore the scientific studies that have discovered ravaged cells maintain, even once healed, special molecular openings inviting in HIV, with its devastating DNA. No, “Stop describing people with herpes as ‘sufferers,’” one activist instructs on her website in all capitals. “I am not ‘suffering.’”

But perhaps her shouts are necessary, you contemplate, to overpower all the persistent fear. And only then you notice that even Time journalist John Leo tempers his scaremongering cover piece with some concessions: “Herpes is hardly the worst disease in the world,” he admits. “The virus can be subdued without drugs, by . . . positive thinking.” By somehow changing the color of that red positive on your lab results. Somehow soothing your swollen stress. Somehow reframing your unbounded anger.

You open the frame of an online viral video, which more than half a million people have reviewed, perhaps when they, like you, first became an unwilling one of the more than half a billion people with genital HSV, and you marvel at that activist. A young woman in black pants and a blue jacket with militant brass buttons, she stands alone in the center of a huge black stage, and she smiles and laughs and mentions casually that she has, beneath that black fabric, herpes type 1. The same virus that arises on the lips or genitals of two of every three people in the world. A common condition.

“I make this diagnosis several times a week,” your gynecologist tells you as you rub your red nose. “Herpes is no big deal,” your primary care physician says, with a wave of his white coat sleeve. “Life goes on.”

So if the future endures, if no harm has been done, then you have no one to blame. Not even yourself. And you have nowhere to direct your red anger, or even the green olive branch of any pardon or peace. Only acceptance is left.

But what color is acceptance?

Maybe it waits in the blank white space between the second and third dates as you delay your disclosure. Expand your revelations: First, the sunny yellow of your laughter, the gray matters of your mind. Then the golden moments of your accomplishments, the orange flame of your passions, the sky blue of your dreams. A full kaleidoscope of blending hues. Like white light, with all color wavelengths in almost equal parts. Of which red is only one.

Red retreats, a distant color choice, in an image recently revealed in Science magazine, after some new technique enabled scientists to trace the intricate structure that encapsulates the double-stranded DNA of HSV-2, the virus that ordinarily blends into your nerves’ gray cells. But with a burst of color, each selected to represent a different element, the scientists depict the multi-faceted shape like some kind of angular fabric gemstone, quilted with round sections of blue and purple and aqua green, sprinkled with symmetrical gold stars. “Herpes Is Kind of Beautiful, On the Molecular Level,” a Smithsonian Magazine headline responds to the image. Where red is relegated to only scattered dots.

“It hasn’t really affected me much physically,” you write, counting only one, two red flickers of faint pain in the past year as you text men now, only after three, four meetings face to face. And without the insistence of your crimson lipstick and tongue, the written revelation in the simple black font leaves a blank white space beneath. Which unfurls like a white flag, requesting consideration, negotiation. Offering explanation.

Let me know if you have any questions, the experts tell you to tell potential partners, or point them to the Centers for Disease Control, with its online symptom list: lesions, ulcers, vesicles. Yet beyond the pathology, your knowledge blanks out white. You do not even know the origin of this semi-living organism. Whether it leapt from birds or primates or swine to humans like recent novel viruses. But this one is ancient, researchers decreed recently in Molecular Biology and Evolution. 1.6 million years ago, HSV-2 transferred from chimpanzees to a now extinct Homo species preceding modern humans, Homo sapiens. It has been with us always. And strangely, you start to admire the virus for its persistence. Its long-term relationship.

Ideally, your marriage with this microscopic partner should not preclude other, better relationships, according to activists and experts and an extensively researched recent Slate article on the history of the stigma of herpes. “[I]t should be least among your fears when you have sex,” the piece concludes. And after you read those final words, when you reach the white space at the end of the web page, you burst into tears.

“If only everyone thought so,” you say aloud to the white walls of your empty apartment, to the empty bed. Where no one in the last year has risked stripping off the protective layer of your clothes to your skin, to skin-on-skin. “I’m sexy,” you begin insisting each morning to the app that pops up on your phone, enticing you to gratitude and affirmations. “I’m sexual,” you modify. Yet modest gray sweatpants and full-length pale robes still swaddle your body, your face pale without any makeup, as you pass by your apartment mirrors without a glance. And as you close your eyes alone beneath the weight of a white blanket every night.

“I’m going to be alone forever.” That twisted affirmation used to rewind in your mind in the darkness of the past. But with the presence of the permanent infection, with the virus somehow rewiring the circuits of your mind, the chant ceases suddenly. And then, the white silence of relief. Because forever is now, is here, you realize. You are alone. So you can release your fear of isolation, of disease, of some far-off, frightening future. And you can know that it is livable, because you are living it.

Life expands then to a full palette of colorful topics as you settle into the plush brown sofa across from your psychologist. And as she lets you work through a conflict at work, or a challenge between family members, or a disconnected date with a man who shared your disease but not your same values or dreams, you sometimes do not even need to reach for the white tissues on the table on front of you. And sometimes, you do not even remember to mention herpes.

You whisper the word now to your best friend in bars, where once you used to fling out the topic at the top of your voice, the top of your mind. The top—the total—part of you. But it ranks lower now, so you lower the decibels. Bespeaking not its shame, but its bland, white insignificance.

“He doesn’t matter anymore,” your father insists—has long insisted—of the man who gave you the disease. “But his virus is literally inside me,” you used to reply, livid, leaning across the lunch table every Sunday. “I can never forget him.” Yet you start to check less and less for text messages from him that never obscure the bright white background of your phone screen. And you stop glancing up expectant from your phone as you approach your apartment door, where no delivery of white lilies from him ever awaits. And then in the emptiness, his memory starts to slowly fade to white.

In a white pot, a plant arrives on Valentine’s Day, marked by your mother because she knows no lover will be sending a dozen long-stemmed red roses. Instead, a single scarlet heart, raised with shiny paint, decorates one side of the ceramic pot. But as you set it on your kitchen counter top, you twist the heavy vessel of your mother’s love until you can only see the other side. And there, etched in eternal circles, are endless rows of white hearts.

Your heartbeat races later as you lie back on the white sheets of the aesthetician’s table, as you wait for a white-hot laser to permanently burn the hair follicles from within your vaginal skin. “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” you say. “No one may ever see me naked again,” you repeat to your psychologist and best friend and laser technician. But as she begins the beauty treatment for the part of your body you have for too long deemed ugly, undeserving, diseased, she repeats the other women’s same replies: “You’re doing this for yourself.” You are erasing the dark tangles of the past. Soothing the scarlet razor scrapes, even if you cannot cure the scarlet sores. And as you feel the beams radiate deep into your skin, your body—and your future—is filled with bright, white light.

Andrea B.’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Eastern Iowa Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and other publications.