There is no getting used to death, even in the midst of the AIDS epidemic. Renata has seen friends and family die, but when her closest friend, Mark, suddenly dies of complications, she is sent into a mental tailspin. And the one thing that might have brought her strange comfort—her ability to see ghosts—fails repeatedly in Natalie Adler’s heartbreaking novel, Waiting on a Friend. Day after day, night after night, Renata waits to see Mark and Mark doesn’t show up.
Mark and Renata found each other by chance as they were both dropping out of colleague. Two queer kids, they finally found someone who didn’t think it was wrong to be attracted to the same sex and gender. They moved to New York, made friends, and dallied with lovers until HIV and AIDS started to cut a swath through their community. We never meet Mark; we only get to know him through Renata’s memories. When we meet Renata, shortly before Mark’s funeral, she is consumed with anger at Mark’s boyfriend, who didn’t call her the night Mark when to the hospital and never came out. Underneath that anger is also a strong desire to make everything stop for a while. Renata doesn’t want to worry about friends who might want to move into the apartment she shared with Mark. How can everyone just keep on living their lives when Mark is gone?
Waiting on a Friend moves back and forth through time as Renata slowly learns to face the mistakes she made with Mark, her girlfriend, and the friends who rely on her. This rich emotional foundation supports the supernatural elements of the story. After Mark’s death, Renata finds a flyer advertising Manhattan Remediation’s services. They offer, for a moderate fee, to rid apartments of hauntings. While Renata isn’t haunted by Mark, she is haunted by a friend who died a bad death of AIDS complications. She might be used to ghosts, but the wailing, screaming, destructive ghost of François is too much to bear while she mourns Mark. A moment of weakness and a phone call whisk François away from Renata’s apartment.
It was easy to see that Renata’s sudden quest to take down Manhattan Remediation as a distraction from dealing with her own grief for Mark, but I admired the fierceness she was able to summon when she found an injustice to fight back against. Until the early 1990s, there was little that could be done to treat HIV and AIDS. All Renata and the LGBTQ community could do was watch their friends and family suffer horrific illnesses and social discrimination until they died, far too young. But a fight against a business that not only profited off of mass grief and helped usher in gentrification? That Renata can fight.
Waiting on a Friend is an interesting exploration of a plague that, more metaphorically than it does Renata, haunts us all. What would this world be like if we hadn’t lost so many millions of people to HIV and AIDS? How can we move on when their ghosts remind us of shared love, friendship, solidarity, art, laughter, and so much more? By watching Renata move through her grief, perhaps we too might be able to find ways to remember and carry our ghosts with us without losing ourselves.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.