By the summer of 1985, AIDS had been spreading in the United States for several years, but most of the country still treated it as someone else’s problem—a disease confined to gay men, drug users, a handful of cities. That changed fast. In August, TIME ran a cover story, “AIDS: The Growing Threat,” reporting that cases were doubling roughly every ten months and that the disease was no longer staying inside the populations it had first been associated with—heterosexual adults, children, and people receiving blood transfusions were getting sick too, and no cure was anywhere in sight.
Jack borrows that issue from the Embassy library weeks after it arrived, showing up there a few times before he finally finds one still on the shelf, tattered and coffee-stained by the time he gets it.
But even before that devastating coverage, AIDS was already claiming casualties among the stars. In July, a press release from the Pasteur Institute in Paris confirmed what had been rumored for weeks: Rock Hudson had AIDS and was dying. Jack read the article over breakfast in Munich, in a copy of The Times picked up off a hotel newsstand.