Even the Wicked

His office in Caritas, an AIDS hospice no more than a five-minute walk from Byron Leopold's apartment, was as I remembered it, except that the rack of pipes was gone. Carl looked the same, too.

His face might have been a little more drawn, his hair and mustache showing more gray, but the years might have done all that themselves, unassisted by the virus.

"Viatical transactions," he said. "It's an interesting phrase."

"I don't know what it means."

"I looked up the word in the dictionary once. It means travel-related. A viaticum is a stipend given to a traveler."

I asked him to spell it and said, "That's just one letter away from the name of the firm. They call themselves Viaticom."

He nodded. "Sounds a little less like Dog Latin and a good deal more high-tech. More appealing for the investors."

"Investors?"

"Viatical transactions are a new vehicle for investment, and firms like your Viaticom are part of a new industry. If you thumb through gay publications like The Advocate and New York Native you'll find their ads, and I suppose they advertise as well in financial publications."

"What are they selling?"

"They don't actually sell anything," he said.

"They act as middlemen in the transaction."

"What kind of transaction?"

He sat back in his chair, folded his hands. "Say you've been diagnosed," he said. "And the disease has reached the point where you can no longer work, so your income has stopped. And even with insurance your medical expenses keep eating away at your savings. Your only asset is an insurance policy that's going to pay somebody a hundred thousand dollars as soon as you're dead. And you're gay, so you don't have a wife or kids who need the money, and your lover died a year ago, and the money's going to go to your aunt in Spokane, and she's a nice old thing but you're more concerned with being able to pay the light bill and buy the cat some of the smoked oysters she's crazy about than enriching Aunt Gretchen's golden years."

"So you cash in the policy."

He shook his head. "The insurance companies are bastards," he said. "Some of them won't give you a dime more than the cash surrender value, which is nothing compared to the policy's face amount. Others nowadays will pay more to redeem a policy when it's undeniably evident that the insured doesn't have long to live, but even then it's a rotten deal.

You get a much more generous offer from companies like Viaticom."

I asked him how it worked. A facilitator of viatical transactions, he explained, would bring together two interested parties, an AIDS patient whose illness had progressed medically to the point where a maximum survival time could be estimated with some degree of precision, and an investor who wanted a better return on his money than he could get from banks or government bonds, and about the same degree of security.

Typically, the investor would be sure of an annual return of around twenty to twenty-five percent on his money. It was like a zero-coupon bond in that all the money came at the end, when the insured party died and the insurance carrier paid off. Unlike a bond, of course, the term wasn't fixed. The AIDS

sufferer could live longer than predicted, which would lessen the per annum return somewhat. Or, on the other hand, he could pop off before the ink was dry on the agreement, thus providing the investor with a much faster payoff on his investment.

And there was always the investor's nightmare. "The lure of the cure," Carl drawled. "Imagine betting the kids' college funds on the lifespan of some poor set designer, and then one day medical science tells you

your kids'll have their doctorates long before he's done crying over his Judy Garland records." He rolled his eyes. "Except it won't happen that way, even if we get that long-awaited medical miracle. You might develop a vaccine to prevent future cases, you might come up with a magic bullet to knock out or arrest the virus, but how are you going to breathe life into a completely devastated immune system? Oh, doctors keep gradually extending the survival time, and that's all factored into the equation. But those of us who are accepted as parties to viatical transactions are past the point of no return. The kids can go to college after all. The investment's safe."

"Some investment," I said.

"Strikes you as ghoulish, doesn't it?"

"I just can't imagine writing out a check and then sitting back and waiting for some stranger to die so I can collect."

"I know what you mean. There have been articles written about this, you know, and not just in the gay press."

"I must have missed them. The man I spoke with did say something about negative publicity."