Derrick sold a story of Tom’s to the Paris Review. On the strength of that, he got Tom a book deal. Oprah did a special, “Voices from the Whirlwind,” about writers lost to AIDS, with Tom the centerpiece. Pablo and I thought this was a bad idea, knew her producers would do research, which they did—which, to our great shock and mild concern, actually led somewhere: an Oklahoma foster home, where nuns told vague stories and pointed to where TOM MINNIQ was graffiti’d onto a wall.
My job was easy. So many boxes and folders and notebooks of beautiful work had been abandoned upon their author’s exit. My rules were few, and simple. Only truly orphaned work could become Tom’s—with all the attention he was getting, we couldn’t take the chance of someone stumbling upon a story attributed to Tom and remembering it as something a dead lover once read to him in bed. Only work that had no earthly champion, no competent executor or agent or chutzpah-wielding mother to fight for it. And I would never change a word or comma of it.
The most marvelous thing of all? When Tom came in, the tide of despair went out. Now I only imagined strolling out to the center of the George Washington Bridge and leaping off once a week or so, instead of dozens of times a day.
Tom was a polyglot, gleeful master of memoir and essay, poem and fable and smut and polemic. Tom had as many prose styles as the river had fish. Derrick and I stitched together his book, My Shattered Darlings: An AIDS Memoir, from dozens of disjointed and distinctive voices, the pieces so incongruous and alien to each other that it somehow came together into a harmonic whole. It opened on a brief glimpse of five men fucking in the Rambles of Central Park, the prose vulgar and plebian, then segued immediately into an E.M.-Forster-worthy memorial service that few could read without weeping. Space opera set on a rocket ship where Earth’s last survivor mourns his dead; 50s noir where a private detective helps a concentration camp survivor stalk Nazi killers through New York City sewers. A narrative even emerged, from this chaotic choir: a coherent narrator who was the sum total of all these dying writers, making his way through a devastated world, trying and failing and trying again to find a reason to keep going. A critic, one of our own, wrote in the Atlantic that it was “a museum of a holocaust, somehow capturing the swirl of voices—some angry, some elegant, all beautiful—that are being silenced one by one while the men with the power to do something about it do nothing.” Speaking in so many voices, it could speak to almost everyone.
It sold insanely well.
“Of course he isn’t dead,” I heard someone say, two tables over at the Chelsea Diner one Sunday brunch. “I talked to him the week before he did it. He said this country made him so sick, he was seriously contemplating faking his own death and fleeing to Canada or something.”
“Or staying right here in New York City and living like a ghost.”
I did not know these men. I had never seen them before. I smiled, watching the creamer cloud my coffee, thinking of Tom spreading through men’s minds.
Like a virus, I thought, and frowned.
Late that night, my phone rang. “Hello?” I said, quietly, for I had been lying awake, and when the phone rang I knew it was what I had been waiting for. No one said a word. In the background, I heard what might been wind, running water. I hung up the phone, and lay back into an immediate, blissful, healing sleep.
I sent Derrick stories and poems and songs and rants, and he found a home for all of it. Everyone wanted a piece of Tom. Derrick used some kind of business magic to make the messy problem of money go away, squirreling it through a maze of foundations and other IRS-befuddling tools his expensive accountants advised. As much as possible, we donated it anonymously to the loved ones left behind by the writers whose words became Tom’s. Pablo set up a photo exhibit at one of New York’s largest galleries, which for years had turned up its nose at requests for benefit shows and retrospectives of lost artists.
The show broke records. Crowds of the left-behind came. Tom smiled and leered and glowered and flirted and cruised from dozens of images, blown up to be bigger than any of these men had been in life. Our boys, our men, our dead lived once more. They looked down on us with pity, and with love.
I watched the faces in the crowd. I wondered how often it happened that someone suspected, or intuited, on a subliminal level, that in gazing up at a photo they believed depicted a stranger they were actually looking into the eyes of someone they had loved and lost.
Outside, a young man wept. I sat down beside him and offered a handkerchief, which he did not want, and a cigarette, which he did.
“Everything okay?” I asked. A Harlem kid, straight and sporty.
“It is,” he said. “It actually is. My brother—my older brother? He died. And it’s been bad. Like, worse than when my dad kicked him out. And for some reason, tonight, I felt like he didn’t die for nothing. I don’t know why. It’s just how I felt.”
“I’ve felt that too, lately,” I said, and he looked at my eyes, and saw no mockery, and nodded.
That’s what Tom Minniq is. An angel. I whispered this last word out loud, allowing myself to use it for the first time.
Two weeks later, my doorbell rang.
“Jakob, sweetie, hi,” Derrick said when I opened, ushering himself in. “I’m sorry to drop in on you unannounced—” and with an artful hand wave he implied without giving you a chance to clean up the place “—but I’m just a little, well, annoyed with you and I had to come right over.”
I turned down the television. On the news someone kept using the phrase “gay terrorists.”
“We all agreed how this was going to work, Jakob. We all have our part to play. If you’re going to cut me out and start sending stuff directly to producers, you’ll make it a lot more difficult for this elaborate fiction to be maintained.”
He followed me into the kitchen, and I put on a pot of water.
“Derrick, I’m sorry, but I didn’t do any such thing.”
“If you wanted to get a screenplay produced in Tom’s name, you should have called me. Granted, it’s not my area of primary expertise, but I know people who—”
“Derrick! I’ve never sent anything to anyone but you. Ever.”
“Really, Jakob?” He handed me a copy of Variety, pointing to a page in the middle.
“I can’t read this gibberish,” I said, after trying several times and finding the movie-speak as comprehensible as a cross between shorthand and Swahili.
“Orion Pictures announced they’ve bought a screenplay, by Tom Minniq, for seven figures.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “You know I don’t have the connections or skill to negotiate that kind of sale.”
“If not you, then who?”
Tom did it, was what I wanted to say. What I said instead was “Pablo?”
Derrick shook his head. “Pablo’s falling apart. He called me the other night, sobbing, saying he was scared. When I asked him why, he practically had a nervous breakdown trying to explain it. I can’t see him doing something like this.”
The tea kettle whistled. I let it. “Have you … noticed things, Derrick?”
“Things?”
“Weird stories. Rumors. People saying they saw him. Saying they spoke with him.”
“Of course,” he said. “I think that’s part of the point, isn’t it? He’s real to us. That’s what we wanted. Someone who would take on a life of his own.”
“But what if … ” And I simply couldn’t say it. What if he really does have a life of his own? What if we made him real?
“Someone’s taking it too far, now,” he said, evidently accepting now that I had nothing to do with it. “That’s all. We’ll get to the bottom of it.”
A car waited outside, shining expensively. “That yours?”
“Yes, yes,” he said, smiling, his marvelous brain having moved on to other, happier things. His wealth, perhaps. Not that I begrudged him it. He’d taken less than the standard agent’s 10% on all Tom’s profits; ensured the rest went to Tom’s families. But still—8% of tens of
millions was not chump change. I thought about asking him for some. He’d have said yes, of course. I needed it. But something inside me panicked, at the thought of taking money from Tom.
I learned why, not long after. Midnight; leaving the club; moving through a Chelsea drizzle, my head and thighs still throbbing from the music and the men and the way I moved with them. I had work in the morning, and I hadn’t written anything in weeks, and the world was still a vile cesspool of hate and suffering, but the music had been good and my body fairly hummed with happiness. A payphone rang from down the block, getting louder as I got closer, stopping as soon as I took one step past it. I chuckled at the weirdness of the timing, but kept walking, weaving through a clot of boys coming up the stairs from the C train, charmingly rambunctious things whose nights were just beginning while mine was winding down, and the weight of that realization slowed my step, so that when I passed another ringing payphone I stuck out my arm and answered it purely for the sake of getting my mind off my own mortality.
“Hi, Jakob?” A man’s voice, bright and healthy.
“Yes … ”
“It’s Tom,” the man said.
“Tom.” I said, and knew this was no joke. “Tom Minniq?”
“That’s me.”
I looked across the street to where one boy groped another up against a wall. Water dripped in the background of wherever Tom was. “What can I do for you, Tom?”
“What you’ve been doing. Help spread the word. The gospel according to Tom Minniq. I’m just getting started, and I’d hate to have to stop because someone decided to spill the beans.”
“Hadn’t dreamed of it,” I said.
“No, of course not. You haven’t. But Pablo has. Pablo’s not well, Jakob. You need to do something about that.”
“Do … something?”
“Go see him. Talk to him. Cheer him up. I don’t know—you’re a smart boy. Figure something out. Because if you don’t, I will.”
“Tom, wait. I need to ask you—”
A click, then the dial tone. Mocking poor helpless mortal me with its all-knowing, ever-listening song.
Tom’s last sentence had chilled me, but it only proved my theory. Tom was an angel. But no winged pale thing in white playing a harp on a cloud: Tom was an Old Testament angel, willing to slay an Assyrian army or rain hellfire and brimstone down on your city if you didn’t do what was asked of you.
The next morning, I called Pablo. No answer. Later, I’d hear he had been in Central Booking with thirty of his closest angriest friends, locked up for some stunt protest in Grand Central. But there and then, listening to the phone ring, imagining him dead in a bathtub or walking out towards the middle of the George Washington Bridge, murdered by Tom Minniq or choosing his own severance package, I felt the tide come back in. That same surging wash of loneliness, of life’s utter meaninglessness and the universe’s profound indifference to our hurt.
I stared at the story in my hands. “Sam,” it was called, by a boy named Leo who I remember arriving in our scene. How marvelous it had been, hearing him read to us, those enigmatic little scraps. When he got sick, he kept it secret; before dying, he demanded there be no memorial.
I stared at the phone, trying to pretend I hadn’t already made my decision.
“Sam” was about a street hook-up, the details so spare and matter-of-fact that I could feel the fear and excitement of it, the man who brought him home to a strange apartment, who stripped down to reveal tattoos and endowment of astonishing scope. Watching him shave after. AIDS was nowhere; AIDS was everywhere. Bits of Leo had found their way into My Shattered Darlings, but reading him now, I felt like these rich enigmatic fragments deserved their own chapbook. They all deserved their own books.
I told myself I’d make it my business to track Pablo down and deliver Tom’s warning. I swore I’d keep calling. Maybe visit his house. But every time I reached for the phone, I’d feel that same lunar tug of misery, and pull my hand back, and soon I stopped trying, and then it was too late.
God, it all felt so easy on the page. Sex, life, fearlessness. AIDS and death and aging and my own receding hairline vanished. Is it any wonder I didn’t want to stop reading? Leo was alive as long as I read. I could hear his thoughts. I could cling a little longer to the lie that love and literature would let us live forever.
2. MONSTER PABLO
My throat hurt from screaming. Fifty of us packed the lobby of the governor’s New York City office. He’d blocked a bill that would help house the HIV-positive homeless. Occupying his lobby had been one of the tamer options—myself, I’d wanted to burn his fucking house down—but it didn’t feel tame now. It felt marvelous.
But still: I was terrified. Two things terrified me. Two men. The first was watching me from across the crowded lobby. Shaggy red hair licked like flames at the air around him. Eyes, somehow brown and blue at once and aimed at me, stirred terrifying wants. I looked at him and my finger tapped at an absent camera shutter, aching to snap his picture. But that was as impossible as sex. I had forbidden myself to ever take another photograph.
Andy did portraits, homeless people dying, faces expressionless over hunger-jutting cheekbones and under grime and KS splotches. “Why expressionless?” I asked, at the gallery, free cheap wine and outrage thickening my pulse, “why not furious at what hate did to them?” Andy couldn’t answer me. Andy was already dead.
Redhead chanted with the rest of the crowd, still watching me. “Hey, Mario/ What do you say?/ How many kids did you kill today?” Slowly, smiling, the first man I was frightened of made his way towards me.
The second man who frightened me was me.
Minh did empty spaces, vacated hospital rooms and clothes bagged for the Salvation Army; late morning beds abandoned by their occupants and unmade, sex stains still visible, sending shivers of loss and absence sharp as paper cuts across the viewer’s heart. His own absence was the white border around every shot; the final heartbreaking detail in every composition.
“Hey,” Redhead said, arriving at my side. “You chant loud.” His smile was somewhere between admiration and desire.
“Thanks,” I said.
“I’m Tripp.”
“Pablo,” I mumbled.
The frenzy was on me. Anger stoked my lust, which fed my anger. I wanted to fuck this man. And I wanted to fucking kill someone. And both wants were so strong and scary that as soon as it was tactful, I abandoned the protest and fled southwest.
Everything was tainted, toxic. Even eye contact felt potentially fatal. Walking home, into twilight, I heard him. Somewhere behind me; walking with stomping confidence that mocked my own fearful hurry. Not the redhead, I knew, without turning around.
That first day, leaving the coffee kvetch, I felt something. A glimmer of terror that started in my groin. It passed quick, but later, walking home from Derrick’s, I felt something else. A presence, and an unfriendly one. Something following me. Something that wanted to break me open and spread my guts in the sun. Different, somehow, from the everyday hate in the air. Mere hate strengthened me, fed the righteous rage to fight back. This hate sapped me. Made me smaller. I wouldn’t let myself look back. I forgot about it until I felt the same feeling two weeks later, fleeing the redhead and the protest.
I found out that night who—what—was following me. I couldn’t sleep, my mind scrambling monkeylike from grief to rage to fear and back. I went to my window, like I often did, to look out at the city, and not smoke cigarettes, anymore. Except this time, when I went to my window, someone was there. Crouched on the fire escape of the building behind, staring across the courtyard at me. Just a dark shape, but I could tell he was staring at me. I could feel it. I don’t know how. The same way I knew enough to feel physically afraid of him, even though our buildings were so far apart he could never have reached me. A burning red ember kindled as the shape sucked on a cigarette.
That’s Tom, I whispered, sweat freezing into frost along my shoulders. That’s Tom Minniq.
In the morning, there was a cigarette butt squashed into the marble ledge below my window.
Maurice did a series called After/Before, deathbed photos of skeleton boys and girls on the left and on the right a picture of that person in their prime, radiantly healthy on a long-ago beach or rooftop. When he couldn’t find a gallery home for it, he printed them up as posters and went out at night to wheat-paste them onto subway doors and store windows, windshields and sidewalks, every morning a fresh harvest of dead men and women smiling tolerantly at their own death-masks and the walking corpses who shuddered as they walked by. Maurice talked about self-immolating in Times Square, but by then he was too weak to strike a match.
In the afternoon, an explosion shook midtown. Tiny ripples shirred the surface of my coffee, at the cubicle where I did data entry for Kaiser Permanente and plotted violent revenges I lacked the courage to carry out.
Word spread fast. The governor’s office: vaporized. Two floors of a fifty-story skyscraper gutted. No one killed; a call came in with ample time to evacuate. In the morning the New York Post wondered QUEER COINCIDENCE? above a photo of the protest, me in focus and screaming and my redhead friend looking lustily at my back, and then, under us: Governor’s office bombed hours after AIDS protest. “The radical homosexual agenda has finally revealed its true face,” crowed a Methodist minister in the article, “unleashing violence on anyone who dares to stand up to them.”
Tom, I thought, and shivered, finally seeing the magnitude of my mistake. All the anger I carried inside of me: I had given it flesh.
Cops questioned us. Tails were assigned. But I couldn’t stop. I chained myself across Fifth Avenue, blocking traffic in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral when Cardinal O’Connor came for eucharisting. Snuck into the offices of a recalcitrant pharmaceutical company at night to splatter fake blood. In the morning, when the news told of catastrophic fires set simultaneously at offices of that same corporation in seven different cities, I was disturbed without being surprised.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 4 Page 21