“I’ll come see you this week, okay?”
“No,” she said quickly. “I’m not really up to it just now. I’ll let you know, okay?”
“Okay,” Hector said. “Thanks for calling, Issy.”
He hung up. Even in his haze, he felt that bad feeling he’d felt with Issy the past six months. It would never be the same again after what had happened. This, he thought on some murky, inchoate level, was what happened as people — a network of people — faced the end, as they realized their collective dreams weren’t coming true, that they were running faster but falling behind, that they were losing coherence and morale. They connected in rash, inappropriate ways, because, most of the time, they were unable to connect at all. The survival instinct was to isolate.
He managed to climb over all his Ricky memorabilia on the bed and stumble to the bathroom, piss, then crawl back to bed. He fell back asleep, but the phone rang again. What time was it? Midnight, one? He didn’t care. Was he hungry? Vaguely.
“Hector, it’s Chris.” Chris Condello, the movement’s bedheaded wonder boy, Hector’s partner in data wonkery. Hector had barely been to a movement meeting in six months, but he had to say Chris, despite his baseline brattiness, had been a good friend during Ricky’s sickness, visiting him at St. V’s and calling Hector regularly. He’d been at the memorial service earlier that day.
“You doing okay, Hec?”
“I was sleeping.”
“I’m in your neighborhood. You mind if I drop by?”
“What time is it?”
“It’s a quarter to one. I was at Uncle Charlie’s.”
“Are you drunk?”
“Drunk and on coke. You mind if I stop by? I wanna talk to you about something.”
“Sure, stop by,” Hector said. What did he care?
In five minutes, he buzzed Chris into the building and stood at his open door, scratching at his briefs, while he listened to Chris clatter up the three flights of stairs in his Dr. Martens. Chris came at him, drunk, high, and leering, his jet-black hair sticking up in about three different directions.
“Hot, greeting me in your Calvins like that,” Chris said.
“I’m glad you think it’s hot.”
Chris put his arms around Hector, burying his vodka-reeking face into his neck. “You doing okay after today, Hector?”
“I knocked myself out with Valium. You got a bump for me?”
Chris pulled out his wallet and extracted a little baggie of white powder, popped it open, dipped his house key into it, and held a fat bump to Hector’s left nostril, then another one to his right. Hector sucked up both greedily and reveled in the chemical shock to his senses. Chris did two bumps of his own, then put the baggie down on the table. They looked at each other, bug-eyed, swallowing back the coke in their throats, then started making out.
Chris pulled away. “You know how badly I’ve always wanted you to fuck me raw?” he asked.
“Oh, so you are positive,” Hector said. “That’s what you’re finally telling me?” He pulled his dick out of his briefs and pushed Chris down to his knees by his shoulder.
“Of course I am. Aren’t you?”
“No.”
Chris looked up at him. “Seriously, you’re not? I thought—”
“I’m not. You know it’s tough for tops to get.”
Chris considered this for about as long as his coked-out state would allow. “Great, so you can still fuck me raw then.” He put his mouth over Hector’s dick, but Hector pushed it away.
“Let me ask you something,” Hector said. “Is this why you’re always such a dick at meetings? You feel like you can be a cunt to people there who show up for help because you’re in the same boat?”
Chris laughed, taken aback. “I’m just there to get things done. I’m not you, okay? They know I’m in the same boat.”
“I don’t think they all do. How come you never told me?”
“Hector! Of course I told you. I told you when you told me about Ricky.”
“No, you didn’t. You never told me.”
Chris looked up at him and rolled his eyes, impatient. “I think I probably told you, Hector, but if I didn’t, I’m sorry. I just assumed you knew.”
How comically abject Chris looked right now, on his knees, saliva around his mouth, looking up at him, pleading and flustered. Hardly the Chris Condello that people venerated, that the New York Times profiled so breathlessly. “Just suck my dick, you jerk,” Hector said, treating Chris how he wanted to be treated. He shoved his dick back in Chris’s mouth.
Chris pulled it out for a second. “Then you’ll fuck me raw?”
Hector shoved it back in. “We’ll see.”
Over the next forty minutes, they did a lot of coke. Eventually, Chris was naked on Hector’s bed, on his stomach with his head mashed in a pillow and his legs spread wide, moaning away. Hector smeared lube on Chris’s butt and his own dick, but he couldn’t stay hard enough to put it in. In fact, the sight of Chris’s butt, fatter and less pretty than Ricky’s had been, and covered all over with a dark-brown fuzz, just depressed Hector, even through the coke high.
“I can’t do this,” he said, crawling off Chris and squeezing himself into a fetal position, a pillow smashed to his face.
“Just take your time,” Chris said.
“No, you don’t get it, I’m freaking out.” He lunged off the bed and returned with the bottle of Valium, chewing one to hasten its effects.
Chris looked at him, bug-eyed. “What, you’re gonna bring down your high?”
“If you wanna go get high with somebody else and have them fuck you raw, then go!”
Chris looked him, jaw wide open, and laughed. “Okay, fine,” he said. “Give me a Valium, too.”
“Just fucking go! I don’t feel like fucking you, okay?”
“Hey,” Chris said slowly. He put up both hands gently, placatingly. “Give me a Valium, too. I’ll come down with you.” Chris reached for the bottle.
Hector yanked it away. “I’m not wasting my Valium on you.”
Chris rolled his eyes. “I’ll get you more.” He reached for the bottle. Instead, Hector pulled out one pill and handed it to him. Chris put it in his mouth, walked naked into the bathroom, where Hector could see him wiping the lube off his butt with toilet paper, then walked to the kitchen, then back into the bedroom with two glasses of water.
“Drink,” he commanded. Hector drank the water.
“Now, come here.” Chris pulled him back onto the bed, lay him down, pulled the sheet over them, and put his arms around him. “No fucking, okay? Just snuggling. Two friends snuggling.”
Hector put his hand over Chris’s arm running across his chest. He was trembling, his heart cannonballing out of his chest from the coke. He lay there, looking straight ahead, terrorized, until the slow, blissful Valium ooze started to leak in. Once it did, he realized that, no longer panicked, he was still coke-horny, an erection growing. He turned around in bed on his side, did the same thing to Chris and fucked him silently, his mouth mashed into the back of Chris’s neck the whole time. He came inside Chris, just what pushy little Chris had wanted, then he stayed inside him and started crying again.
When he finally had settled down, when he was wondering absently how to get rid of Chris but falling asleep at the same time, Chris said, “So now that you’ve made your deposit, can I propose something?”
Hector mumbled his assent.
“Rich and Maira and I want you to leave the movement with us and start a new treatment group. So we can do really close work with the feds and not be held back by all the crazies and the rules of order and the side issues.”
Amid his semi-stupor, Hector was irked. He’d barely been to a meeting the past six months, watching Ricky die. He’d told himself he’d checked out, that he’d done his part, that maybe when this whole thing was over he was going to move back to Puerto Rico and do some kind of public-health work there. He couldn’t take any more of the movement’s bitterness and the bitchiness and the immovable slab of grief and sadness that lay beneath it all, the profound disappointment over the breakthroughs that hadn’t happen and the finger-pointing that the disappointments provoked.