Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 4

by Helen Marshall

  This is out of hand, I thought. There must be limits, even to rage.

  But Tom is a machine. Something we switched on, somehow. And I can pull the plug.

  I called a New York Times reporter, a queer dilettante hovering on the fringes of the movement, who we tolerated because we needed coverage, although, generally, his coverage was weak at best. We even protested his apartment one time, part of a “Walk of Shame” tour of the homes of reporters whose coverage of the crisis lacked luster. Still, he came to meetings, hailed us by name when he saw us at our events, clung to us like the lonely kid on the playground who puts up with abusive friends because it’s better than none.

  “What do you know about Tom Minniq?” I asked him. The clatter of the newsroom was almost comical behind him: another world, one I had glimpsed in movies but never imagined might be real.

  “Haven’t read him. Supposedly a big deal. My mom bought his book, can you believe that?” He typed speedily, merrily, as he talked.

  “I believe anything,” I said, and caught sight of myself in the mirror. Was I losing weight? Was it fear? Was it something worse? “But you know how shrouded in mystery his whole life is?”

  “Of course. Word is, 60 Minutes is doing a thing, interviewing his former—”

  “60 Minutes doesn’t have what I’m offering you,” I said.

  His typing stopped. “What are you offering me?”

  “Meet me in the plaza outside the Times Tower in an hour.” I turned my head away from my reflection. Whatever was making me lose weight wasn’t worse than fear. Nothing was worse than fear.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m under deadline on another story. Give me a tease. So I know you’re not bullshitting me.”

  “I can put you in touch with his parents.”

  “See you in an hour.”

  I sprinted north. I had to move fast. I’d back out if I stopped to think about it. If I stopped, I’d worry about the scandal my revelation would cause, how the true story of Tom’s origin would hurt Derrick, how it would pop the giant bubble of goodwill that Tom’s work had built for our movement. I was close enough to the plaza to hear the plummeting shriek when it happened.

  I heard the yelling, the cries for help, the wails of terror. I knew, as I joined the crowd knotting up into a tight circle, what I would find. My reporter, split wide open from the force of impact against the plaza stone.

  “Someone’s up there!” a woman screamed, pointing to the fifteenth-floor terrace. A man stood (grinning?) and then was gone. I looked down and saw blood fringing the hem of her pants.

  At home, from fear, I wept beneath blankets on the floor of my closet.

  SCRIBE DIVE!—TARGETED REPORTER POSSIBLE SUICIDE, said the Post, and ran a picture from our protest outside his apartment building. How had they gotten it? I didn’t even remember any cameras that day.

  “Gay terrorists” became a buzzword. Politicians who had previously called for the concentration-camping of everyone with AIDS now felt emboldened to demand the internment of gays in general. And while some of the bigger gay groups claimed our escalating bolshevism would alienate straights we needed on our side, our own numbers swelled fast enough to drown out those more decorous voices.

  Tom was in our blood. While Tom might have kicked off the “terrorism,” plenty of others took part. Senators were kidnapped, ministers murdered. The hot new thing among the dying was to demand cremation, and ask that the ashes be inserted into heavy porcelain balls, and after the memorial the mourners would march to a target of the dead man’s choosing—the Mayor’s mansion, the summer home of the head of the New York Stock Exchange—and shatter every window with them.

  Gay men self-immolated at opening night at the Met, and at the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting. The blaze claimed the entire tree.

  Subway conversation suddenly became a lot more exciting. Impassioned debate became de rigeur. Buskers and bankers alike boasted incredibly articulate analyses, but also swallowed conspiracy theories like vitamins.

  The CIA made the virus to exterminate blacks and gays.

  The KGB made the virus as a Cold War weapon to cripple our economy.

  Every time I hear Jesse Helms’ voice I fantasize about slinging a balloon full of AIDS blood right in his face.

  I never stopped wanting to take pictures, or have sex. It wasn’t just beautiful men that triggered me. A packed protest; a good brunch … every day, a dozen sights made my heart fill up with longing, with love for this fallen, foul world. And those moments made Tom angry. When Tom got angry, buildings burned, civil servants died, graffiti ripened on dozens of the doors of our enemies’ homes, Tom’s words in reds and blacks:

  The heat of us

  Will burn you down

  At coffee kvetches, Jakob had been forever saying We could have changed the world. I’d roll my eyes each time, but the sentiment stuck with me. Following hot on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement and the Gay Liberation Front, Stonewall and the Black Panthers, a disease that hit queers and African-Americans the hardest felt too … precise. Too perfectly calibrated. AIDS was a tactical nuke aimed right at the revolutionary heart of America’s oppressed, and nukes don’t just happen. I didn’t believe the FBI or Glaxo Wellcome cooked it up in a lab, but I did think that the evil at work in the status quo was rooted in something deeper, primal, chthonic, something that worked through people when it could—the Inquisition, slavery—and erupted into raw virulent horror when it had to (the Black Death, the Great Northern Famine of the Qing Dynasty).

  And if that was true, maybe there was an opposing force. Not purely good or benevolent, necessarily, just like the demonic power I imagined gave birth to AIDS was not purely evil. They were simply two different forces, two kinds of energy eternally interlocked. And maybe that second power had tapped into us, somehow, Jakob and Derrick and I, and fed on our emotions, used us to access the raw-grief tidal wave that AIDS had unleashed, and fashioned it into Tom. And that made me more scared, not less. A power that big didn’t care who got hurt while it tried to get its way. Just ask Joan of Arc. Or Jesus.

  At night, we broke into boarded-up buildings. We popped locks and moved people in, leveraged rogue employees of the power company and the waterworks to bring the building back to life. Through it all I could feel Tom’s eyes on me, hear his footsteps half a block back. I would have to move fast, to keep him from catching up. I would have to work harder.

  We started out housing homeless people with AIDS, but soon that came to seem grossly unjust. Homeless people without AIDS were victims of our vicious system too. The same hate that let people bleed to death blocks from a hospital because they were gay let other people freeze to death on subway grates for being poor. After a while, abandoned buildings proved inadequate, the housing stock damaged and deteriorated. We moved a single mom with four kids out of the shelter and into a midtown suite that belonged to Queen Elizabeth II, which the monarch had occupied for precisely nine days in the past forty years. Queer concierges booked hoboes into hotel rooms for free, charging their room service meals to corporate accounts that they knew went unexamined. Real estate agent comrades helped us find empty apartments in otherwise occupied buildings, many of them second or third homes for corporate CEOs and faraway celebrities. When we put out the call for round-the-clock eviction defense, we were shocked by the size of the response. Tens of thousands of the straights we were supposedly alienating came to surround the buildings and stop any cops or landlords from stepping foot inside.

  Tom was the spark, but we were the fire. And we were burning out of control. And I was terrified. Every protest put me in a place where it would be so easy to slip. To do something fatal. To bash a cop’s head in, or find some beautiful boy to fuck up against a wall.

  Pablo was a fashion photographer. He shot everyone. Every magazine; every cover. His style was edgy, editorial, high-contrast and grainy, urban, often black and white, think Weegee-meets-Avedon. He was also a bit of a dog. He loved his man bu
t some force of willful evil or childish selfishness would not let him resist the smiles and winks of boys on subway platforms and photo shoots. He refused to get tested, even when Allen withered before his eyes. Only afterwards, at the graveside, did he vow to change his ways. By then, it was more about self-punishment than self-improvement.

  Pablo was a monster. That’s why he would die, and why he would die alone.

  Reagan canceled a trip to New York City, citing security concerns. Sources said he didn’t fancy getting splattered with fake—or real—blood. Embarrassed, the city started cracking down on activism even harder. People in poor neighborhoods were targeted for random stops and searches, Gestapo-style. At night I dreamed of blood and sperm, sex and murder, the monsters coming for me from the Outer Dark.

  The Piers. Sick malnourished arms reaching out over the Hudson; vestigial organs of the City’s vanished industrial glory. Once the pride of shipping magnates, long since abandoned to the homeless and the homosexuals. I entered an old warehouse with every window broken. Wind whistled erotically through high, bare eaves. I told myself I was there to hand out flyers. I knew I was lying.

  Darkness. A smell of urine so old, it had ceased to be unpleasant. There was something almost sacred in the smell, pure as linen vestments. Incense in the church of desperation. Someone grunted with the accelerated rhythm of approaching orgasm. I looked back once, to the skyline’s haughty crown of lights, and then strolled deeper into the gloom. Past pairings and groupings, and lone watchers with eyes even hungrier than mine.

  “Hello, Pablo,” said a sex-nightmare voice, as I arrived at the back of the warehouse. I heard the slop and slosh of the Hudson River underneath me.

  “Hi, Tom,” I said. I had known this conversation would come, but conversation was the wrong word. Sentence. My sentence was being carried out.

  “You made me,” he said, and his voice was so manly and mellow that goosebumps of desire emblazoned my forearms, even as I looked about on the floor for a potential weapon. “Why would you try to unmake me?”

  “Because you’re out of control. Because you’re hurting people.”

  “Isn’t that what you wanted? Isn’t that what you were thinking, when you summoned me? I heard what was in your heart. Someone to do what the rest of us are too scared to do. No man can do it. We need a monster.” Here, speaking my thoughts, his voice was mine.

  “But you’ve gone too far,” I said.

  “Have I? I don’t think I’ve gone far enough. I don’t think you’ve gone far enough.”

  “I left paperwork,” I stammer-said. “I wrote it all down—the truth about who you are. I left it with someone. If—”

  Tom laughed. Laughing, his voice was not sexy. It was the sound a jackal might make, in the night. “That’s a lie. I told you—I can hear what’s in your heart, Pablo. It’s where I came from.”

  He came closer. I could see the outlines of him now, in the gloom, broad shoulders and bushy eyebrows, his tight jeans and the way he filled them out. The composite features of hundreds of men. And in a shaft of rogue amber light from an arc-sodium light miraculously left unbroken at the edge of the pier, I saw the singular curve of his lips. No generic substitutions there: in every Tom-photo I conjured up through darkroom necromancy, I always used the same pair of lips. Allen’s lips.

  “It’s not me you fear,” Tom said, those lips inches from my ear. “It’s yourself. You fear your emotions will lead you into a terrible mistake.”

  “Yes.” A whisper; a squeak.

  “You crave violence and destruction, yet you fear those things.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” He stood behind me, put his hands on my hips. I could feel his heat. It surprised me.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I do.”

  Tom scooped one arm around my belly, wrapped the other around my neck. My eyes shut in irresistible ecstasy. His hips ground against me. I could feel him then, the whole of him, the thing behind or inside of Tom. We had not created this creature over brunch. He was something so much bigger, older, more malevolent. We merely gave him a name, and a body.

  “Come with me,” he said. “I’ll give you what you want. What you fear.”

  “Yes,” I said, looking out through a ceiling hole at the purple night sky.

  “It will hurt,” Tom whispered, turning me around, aiming me at the city, where some unthinkable task waited for me.

  “I know,” I said, and I did, because for a split second I was sixteen again, when men were marvelous creatures and not monsters, panting in a hayloft as one of my father’s farmhands spun me around and tugged my trousers down, whispering It will hurt, and I nodded my head in an ecstasy of need, because of course it will hurt, because the things we need most always do.

  3. MAN DERRICK

  Drinks were drunk. Jokes were told. The meeting stretched for hours, more a cordial business luncheon than a contract signing, although there was that, too. By the time I staggered out, four scotches added a slight wobble to my walk.

  They weren’t the Big Pharma villains I had been hoping for. Several of them were gay, and I smiled to see that our erstwhile enemies had recognized the importance of making nice with the faggots, and hired fit young lawyers for that purpose. Potted palm trees dotted the fifty-seventh floor, below a soaring gorgeous glass ceiling built out of our blood.

  Two million dollars, for the use of Tom Minniq’s most iconic poem in a massive ad campaign. Subway posters and slick primetime commercials and everything in between. Pablo would murder me for this, I thought, as the elevator descended. But Pablo was long dead; anyway it wasn’t Pablo I was trying to provoke.

  And wasn’t this a moment worth celebrating? Wasn’t this the dawn of a new age, the one Pablo and Jakob and I had in mind when we dreamed Tom Minniq up? The cocktail. Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy. HAART. A blend of entry inhibitors, nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, and a plethora of other inhibitors. The thing that would turn AIDS into a long-term, manageable, symptomless disease. The thing that would save all the men and women doomed by love to die.

  My head cleared slightly, stepping out into the street. October cold whisked the warmth and ego-stoking away. I had lingered too long. I would never make it to Carnegie Hall in time for the start. Cab or subway? I stood there in a panic of indecision. Graffiti on a nearby door caught my eye, made my mind up, bright scarlet against rusted grey: BURN IT DOWN.

  DOWN. The subway, it seemed to say, somehow, because I had gotten good at reading street art subtext. We all had, we survivors, we with the dubious distinction of passing untouched through a plague.

  Pablo. The thought of his death sent an almost-erotic thrill through me, the horror and absurdity of it. Irresistible agony, wondering just what the hell had happened. Found drained of blood in the lobby of the very same pharma-corp building where I’d just signed away Tom Minniq’s soul. How I found, on my door, that morning, a scrawl in blood: an iron, complete with electrical cord.

  Oh Pablo, I thought, even before his body was found—for only someone who knew me very, very well would know to draw the symbol of my greatest hurt. Of course I didn’t remember telling him about it, but we did spend a lot of time together, much of it in the company of alcohol. Maybe, drunk, I had the courage to face the story I most feared and most needed to tell.

  Rich Putnam, junior year of high school, softball star and the love of my life for six exquisite secret weeks. The decades-gone stink of him, in the bed of his bedraggled pick-up. His exultant vigor and utter fearlessness when it came to sex; his rage and cowardice in every other moment. Culminating in the incident with the iron, the day I told him I loved him, when his anger over what he felt for me exploded, leaving the iron-shaped scar my left thigh still carries.

  But in the weeks that followed Pablo’s death, what started out as isolated stories—the strangest thing happened; someone scribbled on my door in blood—began to coalesce into a terrifying pattern. The door of every gay man in New Yor
k City, it seemed, had been marked. Never mind that there’s not enough blood in ten Pablos to do that, or time in ten weeks; never mind that not even the FBI has a master list of the address of every homo, and many of the marked weren’t even out. Months had passed by the time we realized what had happened. Doors were washed clean, no way to know the truth. Many of us suspected others were lying, jumping on a bizarre bandwagon by claiming a blood-smear they had not earned, and others were definitely lying when they claimed not to have found anything.

  I walked faster, heading for the subway platform.

  “Eerily Biblical,” Jakob had said, at the funeral, “The blood on the door? Wouldn’t have pegged Pablo for a religious man.” But Jakob, god bless his Judaism, could not have comprehended what religion was for Pablo. Even my own Episcopalianism was a pale shadow of Pablo’s terrifying Catholicism, the Bible a big book of blood and monsters and sins not even sacrifice could cleanse. And I suspected Pablo’s last act of activism was not meant to terrorize the guilty but to unify the oppressed, to prod us into an uprising against the Angel of Death.

  That was when I began to wonder. What if they were right, Jakob and Pablo—what if Tom Minniq was real, a beast burped out of hell or the collective unconscious by our actions? Because whenever you talked to someone whose door had been blood-smeared, and asked what sign or symbol or word had been left for them, there was always a pause—a shifting, inside; a figuring out what to say instead—and then an answer that never felt completely honest. Not that I was honest myself. I never told anyone about the iron. Tom knew what was in our hearts, knew who was gay and who was not, and knew the symbol of our greatest shame. And used it, to kindle our anger into flames.

  But why had he visited Jakob and Pablo, but never me?

  So: I resolved to confront this monster, this angel. So far, he had refused to reveal himself to me; I would provoke him into it. I would sell him off.

  The subway took a long time coming. I was furious with myself, for letting the hour get away from me. This was our night. It was my night.