Like a Love Story

by Abdi Nazemian

  “Whatever,” I say, suddenly angry with her. Maybe she thought I’d appreciate being a part of her process or something, but it only makes me feel complicit. “And you know what, please stop making me a part of all your lies.”

  “Don’t judge me for my secrets because you have your own,” she says, flinging each word at me. “You’re not exactly the poster boy for truth.”

  “Amore, calmati,” Massimo whispers to her as he pulls her close to him.

  She doesn’t even speak Italian, but she smiles and whispers, “Si, amore.”

  We sit in silence. Her words were daggers inside me, and the cuts are only now starting to truly hurt. I know she’s right. My own life is one big lie I’ve shielded people from because I’ve been too afraid to hurt them. Maybe that’s why Tara lies too. Maybe she’s just afraid of hurting us. But then I remember all the screaming matches with our mom, that time she bleached her hair and destroyed the bathroom paint in the process, that time she had to have her stomach pumped, and when our mom caught her in her bedroom with a boy, or when Tara borrowed her favorite dress and burned the bottom of it. And now, love. Love. How can she love him? She’s known him two weeks! I’ve known Art for two months now. I’m overtaken by a desire to kiss him the way my sister kisses Massimo. I want to scream at my sister and tell her that it’s my turn now, my turn to make waves. If she tells our mom all this now, then I’ll need to spend the rest of the year fixing her mess, smoothing the cracks she creates in our family, playing the role of a good boy I know I am not and that I’m sick of being. Maybe this is really why I’m angry. Because I want what she has.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, standing up. “I have to go.”

  “Zabber, I’m sorry,” Tara says with genuine regret. “I’m so on edge. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. You know I support you no matter what.”

  “I know you do,” I say, hating myself for lashing out at her.

  “I just wish you supported me too,” she says pointedly.

  I’m reminded again that I want love, passion, life.

  “I do support you, but I also have to go,” I say. “I . . . I have somewhere to be.”

  What is Art doing right now? Is he already in the cathedral? Or is he getting ready for the big day, dressing himself up in fancy clothes?

  “With Judy?” Tara asks.

  I nod. I could tell Tara where I’m going, but I don’t have the energy for that right now. I just want to be near Art.

  “I thought you said you broke up,” Tara says, suspicious.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ll see you later.” I begin to walk away, but some melodramatic impulse makes me turn around and add, “I have my own life to live, you know.”

  I don’t know what has gotten into me. I don’t know who the boy is who just said that to his sister. But I like him. He sounded a little bit like Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan, defiant and edgy, a person no one messes with. This is the person I feel myself becoming as I walk the frigid streets of the city toward the cathedral. I don’t even walk, I strut. I treat the city like my runway. I will myself to turn all my nerves into confidence, to release all the butterflies in my stomach into the cold city air, so that there will be only one butterfly left. Me.

  As I get close to the cathedral, I can hear them. It sounds like thousands of people, and when I turn a corner, I realize that it is. Maybe five thousand. All kinds of people. Young and old, men and women, from every background. They swarm like bees, screaming and chanting and singing and holding signs like ACT UP Fights AIDS, Stop the Church, Keep Your Religion Out of My Body, and Thou Shalt Not Kill over a photo of the cardinal.

  Well-dressed newscasters are everywhere, with their hard hair and their hard smiles, trailed by cameramen, holding equipment, wires connecting back to trucks parked around the perimeter of the church. A man dressed like Jesus screams that he too wants to go to heaven. A group of women sing a song about their bodies belonging to them. A black drag queen in an evening gown and a large white hat raps on top of a box, rhyming homosexual with indefensible, and Catholic with Sapphic, and AIDS with renegades. This is nothing like the New York Stock Exchange. There were some spectators there, some media, but nowhere near this. I enter the crowd of people, and as soon as I do, I feel myself turning from butterfly into caterpillar again, longing for a cocoon. How will I find Art among all these people?

  I push my way past crowds, making eye contact with person after person, their energy and passion transmitting into me, giving me strength. I was too young to remember much of the Iranian Revolution, too young to have gone out into the streets with my dad, who was a part of it. But I remember him describing the energy to me, and I remember driving by a protest. It felt like this. Crowds, chants, anger, passion. I close my eyes and take it in. For a moment, I’m seven years old again. My country is in the throes of chaos. My father is the chaos. My mother fears the chaos. My sister is becoming the chaos. I am in between, hoping for order, not realizing it will never come, at least not to this country. And soon enough my mother will choose to escape to a new life, while my father will be eaten alive by his own demons. I open my eyes again. I pray that the revolution for these people turns out better than my father’s did. That unlike him, they live, and that unlike him, they create a better world.

  “Hey,” a man says to me. “I know you.”

  I blink my eyes. Do I know him? And then I remember. It’s the man from the deli, the one in the fur coat, the one Art took a picture of. He’s wearing the same coat now, and holding a sign that reads Keep Calm and Rage On.

  “You’re Art’s friend, right?” he asks.

  I didn’t think he could get any thinner, but he has, in just two months. There is a lesion on his neck now, big and dark and purple.

  “Hi,” I finally say. “Yes, my name is Reza.”

  “Right,” he says. “Reza. Isn’t this magnificent? Listen to all these people. It’s the sound of centuries of repression being beaten into the ground. It’s the sound of change.”

  “Do you know where Art is?” I ask urgently.

  “I think he wanted to be in the church,” he says. “You know Art. He’s got to be at the center of the action. Come on.”

  He gifts his sign to another protester, then takes my hand to lead me inside. I freeze when I notice another lesion on his palm. I feel its texture on me. I remind myself this isn’t how you get infected, and I grip his hand so tight that the lesion disappears in our united palms. There’s no purple anymore. Just my brown hand gripped into his black one.

  “You know I’ve wanted to scream at churches since long before this disease,” he says. “This is like a lifelong dream come true.”

  “What did you want to scream?” I ask as we get closer and closer to the church.

  “Just a great big fuck-you for messing with my brain as a kid, for making me feel shame, for making my momma think she shouldn’t love me for who I am.” He takes a breath. “Of course, I wasn’t Catholic, but it’s all the same to me. I don’t care if you’re Baptist, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish, or one of those adorable little Scientologists. If you use God to tell people created by God that they’re sinners for who they love, then I give you a great big middle finger and I invite you to sit on it.” He raises his free hand up into the sky and points his middle finger at the cathedral and screams a loud guttural scream, years of emotion coming out of his tired lungs. I notice a gold ring on his ring finger when he does this, and I remember the man who was with him at the deli, the man who isn’t with him now. I hope he’s just lost in the crowd.

  We reach the entrance to the cathedral and step inside. Worshippers have gathered, seated quietly in pews, ignoring the sounds of protest outside. The cardinal enters, the mass begins. It all feels mundane and normal until a group of men and women walk to the center aisle and lie down in it, quietly. They just lie there, their arms over their hearts, like corpses, the visual symbolism of what they are doing obvious and powerful. It’s a die-in.

&n
bsp; Then I finally see him. Sitting in a pew. Taking photos of the men and women lying down in the nave.

  Art. A winter hat on his head.

  Art. His fingernails painted black, his camera covering his face.

  Art. Taking a photograph of Judy’s uncle, who is one of the men lying down like a corpse, pretending to be dead.

  I imagine Art dead, and the thought fills me with dread, but instead of making me want to run away in fear, it just makes me want to make the most out of every second he and I have on this earth together.

  The gaze of Art’s camera restlessly darts from one end of the room to another until his lens points right at me.

  “Reza?” he seems to whisper like a question, though maybe I imagine this.

  I freeze. Art cocks his head, indicating I should join him, and I do. I quietly sit next to him.

  “Hi,” I whisper.

  “Hey,” he whispers back. “What are you doing here?”

  “I don’t know.” I clasp my hands tight on my lap, look up to the ceiling, to the nave, and then to Art, and then to the faces of worshippers and back to him. His lip is still swollen from the fight at school, a hint of a bruise on his cheek. I want to kiss it, to heal it.

  “Is Judy with you?” he asks.

  I shake my head. “I came by myself. I was at breakfast with my sister, and I was walking home, and I . . . walked here instead.”

  Art nods. His eyes search mine.

  “Does Judy know you’re here?” he asks deliberately, like each word is its own question.

  I don’t answer. I feel too guilty about what I did to Judy. And what if Art’s love for Judy overrides any feelings he ever felt for me? What if he hates me when he finds out I hurt her?

  The mass continues, the cardinal speaks of God and duty and morality. The people in the pews nod and listen, listen and nod. They will not let their Sunday homily be disturbed by this protest. They go on with their rituals as if nothing unusual is happening, as if right now I did not just make one of the most important decisions of my life.

  Art takes pictures. One click after another. And then he tries to change the film in his camera, but his hands are too frozen, and he struggles. He cups his hands in front of his mouth and blows into them.

  “Here, let me try,” I say, taking the film and the camera from his lap before realizing I have no idea how to work his fancy camera. “What do I do?”

  “Just help warm up my hands,” he says with a sly smile. “It’ll be easier.”

  He moves his cupped hands toward me, and we both blow into them. Our cold cheeks press against each other, creating immediate heat. Our breath seems to merge into one gust of steam. I don’t feel cold at all anymore. I feel my temperature rising with each breath. After a few breaths, he pulls his hands away, grabs his camera, and changes the film. But his gaze is on me as he does it. It’s amazing how he doesn’t even have to look at the camera as he changes the film. It’s second nature to him. I want him to love me like that. Like it’s our nature.

  I suddenly wish that I was religious. That, like my grandparents, I prayed five times a day. Because I have something to pray for now, something to believe in. I have faith in myself, in love. I would kneel more than five times a day to pledge my faith to whatever this is I’m feeling.

  “YOU’RE KILLING US!” a man in the pews screams, standing up.

  The church stirs. The activists lying down do not move.

  The worshippers do not move.

  Art stands up to photograph the screaming man. He pulls his hat off, revealing his hair has been dyed in streaks of pink.

  “YOU’RE KILLING US. YOU’RE KILLING US,” the man repeats. “STOP KILLING US.”

  Others join him. They scream about the church’s policies on condoms, abortion, and needle exchange. They say the church is causing teenagers to get sick, women to get sick, men to die in shame. The chaos that existed outside the cathedral invades it now, swarming in, the floodgates open. People run, people push, and I hear Art’s camera clicking and clicking, capturing it all from the pew, while at the front the cardinal hangs his head. They are like opposing forces, the cardinal and Art, standing at opposite ends of this space, at war.

  “Art, get out of here,” Judy’s uncle says. He’s standing up now. “Get out, go home before they make arrests.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Art screams back.

  Judy’s uncle sees me. “Reza?” He speaks my name as a question too, just like Art did, but I don’t feel like a question anymore. I feel like an answer now.

  Art keeps taking pictures as the protest gets more heated. When the police swarm in, he looks up at me, takes my hand, and says, “Come on, let’s go.” His hand in mine, I can feel both of our heartbeats in our fingertips.

  “Isn’t this incredible?” he asks. “Don’t you feel alive?”

  “Art, go home now,” Judy’s uncle yells. “The police are everywhere.”

  Art leads me out the main entrance. When we taste the fresh air, he turns around and yells out at the church, “GO TO HELL!”

  We try to get out of the chaos, but a video camera is pointed in our faces. A newscaster stands by the camera with a microphone. Art, unprovoked, grabs the microphone and speaks into the camera with ferocity. With his free hand, he tries to pull me close to him, but I squirm away.

  “My name is Bartholomew Emerson Grant the Sixth,” he says, pronouncing each syllable carefully. This is the first time I have ever heard him use his full name, and I know exactly why he does it. He wants to be sure that all the powerful people who recognize this name listen. He will use anything he has at his disposal to make change. “And I am here protesting the Catholic Church’s policies, which are a direct attack on the lives of gay men and women, and all women. Cardinal O’Connor wants us dead. He wants us exterminated, and we won’t go quietly. Fags and dykes are here to stay. We are holy and we deserve the same rights as everyone else.” Art catches his breath, looks at the crowds around him. “We are on the right side of history,” he says. “And we are going to survive to write that history. Wait and see.”

  The newscaster takes the microphone back and sticks it in my face. “And who are you and why are you here?” she asks.

  The camera and the microphone feel like they are attacking me, shining a spotlight on my fears and cowardice. I had the courage to come here, but I am not Art. I am not ready to be seen on television, and more important, to be seen on television by my mother. I hide my face in my hands and turn away from the newscaster.

  I am somewhere else now. I exist only inside my own anxiety, imagining what my mother will say if she finds out who I am. But the violence around me pulls me back to this moment. Protesters lie down in the road. Police arrest people. The chaos becomes louder, uglier, with screams of Get down, and Pigs, and Where’s your badge? The arrested do not resist. When the police get them, they go limp, like corpses.

  Luckily, the newscaster has moved on, but I am still frozen in fear. I want Art to protect me, but he has his camera in front of his face. He documents the arrests until he sees Judy’s uncle is one of the men being arrested.

  “Stephen!” he yells, and runs toward him, and I run after Art.

  Art yells at the police to let Stephen go. “He’s sick. Just let him go.”

  I watch as Art puts a hand on one of the officers, attempting to pull him off Stephen. “Art, don’t,” I beg. “Stop.”

  I rush toward Art. And that’s when I feel it. Something pulls us apart. Policemen. Two of them. One of them yanks Art away and handcuffs him. The other pushes me to the ground. My cheek hits the cold pavement hard. My heart beats so fast that I might have stopped breathing. All I see are our bodies, so many bodies on the ground like corpses. And the voices feel so distant. Stephen’s voice. Art’s. The police.

  These are children, officers.

  Get down and stay down.

  They’re just kids! They were trying to help me.

  I’m seventeen. You make a habit of harassin
g seventeen-year-olds?

  Shut up.

  Reza. Reza, come back. Where are you taking him? Reza? Let him go!

  Art, don’t resist. Don’t fight.

  REZA!

  I am standing again. The police have yanked me back up as fast as they took me down. I have no control over my body anymore. No control over my emotions. I feel fear but also excitement. Maybe even relief. Is my life over, or is it finally beginning?

  “Reza!” Art yells as he is pulled away by one of the cops.

  “Art!” I scream. “I came here for you.”

  “It’ll be okay, Reza,” he says. “They always release protesters. Don’t resist. That’s the most important thing, okay?”

  I hold Art’s gaze as long as I can, my eyes fixed on his. I wish I could read his expression.

  When he’s out of view, I close my eyes. I go limp, letting the police lead me. But the irony is, I have never felt more in control. This is not the Iranian Revolution. I’m not a kid who is afraid of his father, desperate to please his mother, living in the shadow of his sister. That is not me anymore.

  I’m seventeen, and yes, I still have fear in me, but I have strength too.

  I am the chaos now.

  Art

  I replay his words in my mind. I hear them ringing in my head as the police take me to the station. “Art, I came here for you.” They echo inside me as I am released. “Art, I came here for you.” Those words inhabit me. They fill a void in me I never knew existed until I heard them. What did he mean? Did he come to the protest because he was inspired by me? Or did he come because . . . I don’t even let myself think it. I can’t set myself up for disappointment.

  The words still reverberate in my head when I leave the police station and go back into the winter freeze, where Stephen waits for me, leaning against a newspaper stand. “Hey,” he says.

  “Well, that was an adventure,” I say with a smile, still giddy from Reza sitting next to me in that church, from the feeling of his hot breath in my hands.