Stories From the Plague Years (22 page)

You listen to your heart. Your pulse slows as you peer across the street to one of your neighbours’ houses. Through the window of the other house, you see a flickering television screen that seems the size of a postage stamp from where you stand. Someone walks before the screen and stops. They turn and look at you, and with a start, you drop the curtain.

You turn and see Tony.

He is a deeper grey than the shadows of your bedroom. You see only yourself in the mirror behind Tony. He steps toward you and softly, lightly, grabs hold of your threadbare sweater.

“We needed you,” he says in an intonation you feel as well as hear, fluttering against your face and throat like moth wings.

Before you can think or speak or move, he steps around you to the curtains at your back. You turn as he walks. The curtains wave as he passes through them without parting them.

Banal talk radio fills the air, drafts displace the false summer, and you realize how alone you have been these last fifteen years.

“I’m okay.”

You tell yourself this as weeks go by, as you wait for your test results.

You have been tested before, and you had been okay then.

You had been nervous then, while you waited for your blood to be shipped to some lab in the Midwest, waiting for your anonymous number to return with news of whether you would live through the next decade.

“I’m okay.”

You say this out loud as you work your ridiculous job as the assistant administrator of a janitorial service, sending cleaning crews during the daylight hours to office buildings that have only a forty percent rate of occupancy. Graft runs this shitty small city, and kickbacks are plentiful as construction companies continue to build-up what is grandiosely called “the downtown district.”

You sit at your desk between making calls, as dust settles in unused rooms for which you are responsible, yet will never see. You wonder what the crews think as they enter these offices, to clean only the detritus these useless buildings shed.

“I’m okay.”

You work alone.

No one hears you mutter to yourself. Even the old and rickety building in which you work is mostly empty. It is lunch hour. No one walks the halls.

You think of when you got the results of your first test, how you were so nervous you vomited in the alley behind the Health Department. The health care official smiled and said, “You’re negative, you’re fine. Nothing to worry about.”

“
Nothing to worry about.
” She had no idea.

You thought of the number of men you’d been with, the men you’d been with who had died, or were now dying, or who had disappeared, slinking away to die in hometowns they had despised.

Since that day, you had practiced safe sex.

Except for that night with The Boy.

“I’m okay.”

And in daylight, the sounds come to you.

You are alone in your office, hearing the clank of chains, the jangle of keys.

Your heart stops in your breast.

You tell yourself it is a janitor, a huge ring of keys to empty rooms in his hand. You tell yourself this, and you almost believe it.

Until Bobby steps into the doorway of your office.

He looks as he did in the beginning throes of his sickness, when you last saw him and pretended you did not know him. As you and Tony and your cruising buddies walked past him as he worked the corner of 53rd and 2nd, already a ghost of himself, already sick, one of the walking dead, peddling the poisoned fruit of his cock, ass, and mouth.

You walked past him, part of a living wall of leather, denim, and muscle as you and your buddies searched the city for one of the few bath houses not yet closed by the Health Department. You had all felt so lucky. So invincible. So immortal. Blissfully ignorant that some of those who were part of the living wall of denim and leather you moved within carried death inside them . . . that their hearts were busy pumping sickness through their bodies that would kill them, cell by cell.

Bobby worked his corner, skinny as a cur. You saw him, and you knew each other. You saw him, and you saw the fear and the shame in his eyes that he had been recognized.

Your friends all looked at him. These were the early days of the plague, when one could still take comfort in the lie that only the biggest sluts and the stupidest cruisers got infected. That only junkies got infected. That some form of Calvinist election was what doomed people on the scene. That only those stupid enough to fuck the Angel of Death would be taken.

You, yourself, had fucked Bobby.

Just eight months before.

Someone, to this day, you do not know who, snorted as you and the wall you were part of passed Bobby, going down to the subway that would take you toward St. Marks place. Then Tony spoke loudly enough for Bobby to hear. . . .

“
Kid should be wearing a fucking executioner’s hood.
”

Now Bobby stands before you. Sick. Shivering. Desperate. Junkie-pale in his leather and chains.

“I needed you, man,” he says. He points to his sunken chest. “Even like
this
, I fucking needed you.”

You stand, yet say nothing. You have no words.

Bobby turns on his heel and looks at you as if you are shit he has just stepped in. He walks down the hall, chains jangling fainter and fainter. . . .

You walk to the door and see him at the end of the hall.

The Boy is waiting for him there. They lock arms and go down the rickety wooden stairway. As you enter the hall, the sounds of their foot-falls on the steps and of Bobby’s chains are gone.

You stumble back into your office and see the lights of your phone blinking, summoning you to send men to locked and empty rooms that will never be occupied.

You think of the rooms of The City now empty of the life you once led.

Weeks pass.

With the sounds and the visitations, the weeks pass.

Sick and dying men litter your home, incontinent in their denim and leather. Each night, at three, you see Tony die. He quivers in what looks like nightmare-laden sleep, quivers in a way that makes you think of a cat you saw die in the road when you were small.

“We needed you.”

The words become a chant.

Echoing through your mind, your world. You do not escape the words. At work, you cannot function. The sounds of chains in the hall become a cacophony. You take sick leave. You do not know, do not care, who has replaced you at your desk.

You walk through leaves that crunch underfoot, over soil hardened with frost, surrounded by the step of boots on concrete. You sit watching a silent television as buckles and keys clatter around you with the constancy of waves breaking on a beach.

“We needed you.”

The words become the fabric of night.

Lack of sleep makes you nearly mad. You think of killing The Boy. You think of tracking him down like some righteous movie hero and beating answers from him that will explain everything that is happening to you, that will provide you with a way to exorcise this torment. A few hours respite from the sounds restores enough balance for you to realize how absurd these thoughts are. No easy answers will come to you.

Yet you look for The Boy anyway, to find what answers you can.

In the grey of November daylight, when all this shitty town seems the color of smoke, you go to the park where you met The Boy. No one is there. It is too cold and windy. You find nothing but litter and whispering dead leaves. You go to a bar a few blocks away, a crappy little blue-collar place that specializes in serving the disowned faggot offspring of this dying industrial town.

A kid named Alan is at the bar, smoking expensive clove cigarettes. He is a watcher, not a cruiser. He has listened to you intently as you told him stories about The City back in the days when the idea of men fucking each other while wearing rubbers was the most absurd thing imaginable. Alan listened to you intently as you told him about the occasional bout of gonorrhea or syphilis you got when you were his age, and how a trip or two to the free clinic made these bouts less bothersome than a cold.

Alan is a sensitive kid, a poor-little-rich-boy romantic with big brown eyes like a deer. You do not like him. But you like how he listens to you very much. He broke up with his long-time lover in a series of annoyingly public incidents, and is now a barfly and a gossip, sitting here for days, watching other lives as he convinces himself of the tragic nature of his own.

You ask Alan about The Boy.

Alan thinks a moment, absently peeling the label off his bottle of beer with his thumb.

“Yeah. I know who you mean. He left town,” he says with a shrug.

“When?”

“Couple weeks ago.”

“What’s his name?”

Alan frowns, now looking intently at the work his thumb is doing.

“Frank, I think.”

Frank
. The name rings true. “Where’d he go?”

“Back to Cranston.”

“He’s from there?”

“Yeah.”

Alan, young enough to be your kid, does not know what this means. Alan, who had been five years old when you were seeing your friends crawl back to their hometowns to die, cannot see that Frank went back to Cranston as the first step to his grave. Alan is from this city. He has never gone away to another place, never been more than fifteen miles from where you sit right now. He does not know what it means when a fag returns to his hometown.

Now Alan looks at you.

“Why are you looking for him?”

He cocks his head slightly, fixing his big brown eyes on you, giving you what he must think passes for a meaningful look. He knows that you know he has been dumped. He thinks you are asking about someone you are stuck on. Now, in his stupid Pollyanna world view, two lonely people have the chance to not be lonely anymore.

In another life, you would have fucked the little brown-eyed dreamer and dumped him to teach him a lesson. For the sport of it.

You leave the bar, feeling his gaze on your back like fleas crawling on your skin.

In the grey daylight, you walk into a congregation of dead men. They have been waiting for you, expecting you after they have given you this respite. You realize they have left you alone long enough for you to discover what you have about The Boy. Now you must rejoin them, to take up your burden once again.

You stifle your sadness and your fear as they shuffle in a bank of fog-coloured bodies around you. They say nothing, but the sounds of their chains and keys is a layered chorus of heavy chimes around you. Tony is beside you, his mouth quivering, not trying to speak, not trying to whisper. His lips tremble out of some spastic disintegration of the nerves of his face.

Out of the corner of your eye, you see among the dead men a living face, keeping pace with you. You look to your left and see The Boy.

He smiles as you walk unthinking, within a bank of men made of fog. You know then that the young man named Frank was just a mask that this being has worn, just a mask that it wears now, for you. You know that you have seen him many times before, with many different faces. You have seen him walk away with your friends into shadowplaces, where he quietly slipped a drop of the shadows themselves into the streams of their blood. He is the darkness of the heavy ink you have used to blot out your friends’ names from your address book, the hopelessness that called your friends back to their broken homes. He has walked behind you for fifteen years. Now he walks beside you, as you once again walk beside Tony.

“Hey, man!”

You turn to see Alan, trotting to catch up with you. The dead around you stop and huddle behind you like an army waiting at your command. The thing that wears Frank’s face stands beside you, your lieutenant.

“What the fuck was that shit about?” he asks, now standing before you. “Giving me that fucking look and sticking me with paying for your beer? What’s
up
with you?”

Alan is performing the classic role of the “don’t-fuck-with-me” faggot. You have seen it many times before and performed it before much better, yourself. Though you had the bulk and the strength to back it up. Alan scowls at you. He is so young. So transparent. You know his type better than he knows himself.

He is doing this in the hope it will lead to a confession on your part about being hung up on Frank. That this bold and macho performance will lead to romance between you both. You hear dead voices murmur behind you, as you once heard voices murmur whenever a queen laid down a particularly vicious line of dish.

You look at Alan, and he steps back. There is a look in his eyes like that of an animal frozen before an oncoming car.

You feel the shadow that wears Frank’s face slip its arm around your shoulder.

Alan walks back another step.

“Sorry, man.”

He does not see them.

Of this, you are sure.

But he does feel them, as surely as he feels the bite of the November air around you.

He walks back to the bar as you walk within your own Purgatory.

With night, comes silence.

With night, you are no longer among the dead.

You no longer hear their words.

The silence fills everything.

You cannot sleep.

When the morning comes, you will know.

When the morning comes, the wait will be over.

In darkness, without the accusing company of phantoms, you have never felt more alone.