The pill wouldn’t kick in for a while, but he had to drive — he had to get out of here. No, no, wait! He couldn’t go until he knew EMTs were coming. He started the car. The volume of the radio startled him. Had they really been blasting it that loud on the way here? He turned it down. It was that Lady Gaga song from the year before, “Born This Way,” the one that sounded like the old Madonna song. Paranoid from the drugs and making too many connections, he freaked out: it was a sign from Ricky, who’d been obsessed with Madonna!
He steadied himself to drive around the corner, where he parked. He blasted the A/C; he was soaked in sweat. He thrust his right hand into his pants and slowly masturbated to give himself something to focus on, to keep himself from going crazy. He dreaded that at any minute someone might walk or jog by with a dog, spot him behind his black sunglasses, but nobody did; he finally glanced at the car clock and realized it was 6:30 A.M. On Wednesday? Thursday? As soon as he’d flown in to Palm Springs over a week ago, as soon as he’d settled into the tiny studio apartment he rented each winter for nearly nothing from an old New York friend who’d long ago moved west but spent the winter in Puerto Rico, as soon as he’d made a meth connection and the glass pipe and torch had come out, he’d lost track of time. After that, it was just the laptop, the porn, the random visitors with their intermittent glances through the blinds at the sun-baked pool in the courtyard, from which they thought they heard laughter but which appeared deserted. Were people playing tricks on them? Hector and his visitors wondered, as the light and dark rotated rapidly outside like in a time-lapse video.
Now, in the car, he thought he was hearing sirens. No, wait, he was hearing sirens. He was relieved and terrified, because he often thought he was hearing sirens, getting closer, always waiting for the sirens to crest outside his apartment, stop, the silence, then the inevitable raid he’d been waiting for for years now that never happened, remarkably. (Why not? He had half wanted it to happen, to be delivered finally from his paranoia.) Unmistakably, now, these sirens were approaching. He heard them surge and stop around the corner. Gripping the wheel, he U-turned in the street, saw the ambulances pulling up in front of the building, and drove on. He felt his first wave of something approaching a notch less than psychosis. They might get in trouble with the law — how many drugs had he left in the apartment? — but at least nobody would die.
He drove aimlessly, so anxiously he was driving at a ridiculous crawl. His eyes felt like they were prying their way out of their sockets behind his sunglasses and he kept thinking he was seeing things — children, animals — in his periphery. He was in some truly nondescript part of L.A., all ugly, boxy, sand-hued 1960s apartment buildings, tired old palm trees in front of them, as the sun climbed higher and the same wearying California azure suffused the sky. What to do? Could he possibly get back to Palm Springs?
Then the thought sprang up on him again, hard, for the first time since that moment the boy had said the name aloud — Ysabel Mendes! — and he said aloud, “Oh my God,” and had to pull over again. He just sat there. Why had the boy said it? He started making horrible connections: the boy was living in the Christodora because Ava’s daughter had adopted him. Ava and Issy. Had he ever heard — had he heard, back in 1994, 1995, that Issy had had a baby before she died? Heard that from Ava or somebody in the world of AIDS? He couldn’t remember. By that point, he’d almost completely broken away from the original street activists and was usually either in D.C., in meetings with his elite colleagues and pharma and the feds, or off at big circuit parties, expensive raves for gay jet-setters, fucking everyone he could to forget about Ricky. He was ashamed to admit that when Ava had given him the date for Issy’s memorial service, he found the thought of attending too painful, so he’d not canceled his meetings in D.C. He’d sent flowers instead.
The boy looked like Issy, he could see it now. The nose — not as flat as Issy’s, but flat. And the fucking wild hair! But the boy’s skin was lighter. The boy’s eyes and his build. Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no, no. Hector began to cry. No, no, no, please God, no. He found and swallowed half of another Klonopin, started the car, drove onto a wider, multilane road. He drove past a massive, modern yellow-brick building. Then he saw there was a big crucifix on it and, at the ungodly hour of 6:52 A.M., some women were walking into it. He parked his car across the street and walked toward the church. CATHEDRAL OF OUR LADY OF THE ANGELS, said the sign. Hector felt he had nothing to lose at this point. He went inside the church, which was the size of a stadium. He passed a woman on the way in and expected her to grimace, because he knew he stank, but she smiled. In a second, he could see why. A mass was getting under way, with some engaged attendees, but they were clustered what seemed a quarter mile beyond, in the first ten rows.
The rest of the endless sea of pews was dotted with homeless people, some of them with mountains of baggage at their side. Hector sat in one of the last rows. In his youth, in the many churches he’d been inside in San Juan and New York with his mother, grandmother, aunts, and cousins, the only church that approached this one’s size was St. Pat’s in New York, which he and the other activists had stormed on a Sunday years before to protest the archdiocese’s AIDS policies, its opposition to condoms, and its hatred of gays.
“I hope it’s fucking okay that I’m here today,” he said aloud, as though waiting for approval. Nobody so much as turned toward him, which irritated him slightly. Were they deliberately ignoring him? He could feel the Klonopin kicking in — his eyes didn’t feel quite so much like they were straining to crawl out of their sockets. He laughed softly. “Fuck you, Ricky,” he said — he thought he said it aloud, at any rate; he wasn’t sure, just as he wasn’t sure if the legions of characters on the tapestries hanging overhead were moving, watching him, talking about him.
“The thing with you, Ricky,” he continued to himself, mumbling parts aloud, “you just didn’t want to live. That’s why I say fuck you, as harsh as that sounds. Because you didn’t even care that there were two people involved, not just you. You put me through that for, unh, what would that have been, from about 1989 when I first knew until ’92. You wouldn’t get tested, you wouldn’t go on meds until they forced you on meds in the hospital and it was too late, and you fucking — what about all my other work? I had to give up all that fucking work, going to Washington, because you wouldn’t take care of yourself, and then I had to watch you die, like I didn’t have better things to do that year.”
He must have really been talking out loud, at least at some point, because a guy with a leathery tanned face and a matted beard four pews ahead finally turned around and said, “Shut the fuck up, man.”
So he did, closing his eyes for a minute, one hand thrust in his pants. But at some point, the monologue began again: “You just weren’t very educated. And that your father, cutting you off. Well, that’s no reason to make me watch you die, you dumb fuck. You never had any interest in the data. Not at all. You were a dumb twink, basically.” Hector laughed. “A fucking hairstylist. I ended up with a fucking hairstylist.”
He started crying, tears engulfed with lust. “But I miss your beautiful face, Ricky. I miss it so much. Every day. And I miss your ass.”
“What the fuck, man?” The matted-beard guy four pews up had turned around again. “This is a fucking church.”
Hector didn’t even know why the guy was talking to him. He tried to look squarely at the guy through his tears. The guy looked like a filthy, sun-baked version of Charlton Heston. “I’m sorry,” he told the guy.