The Great Believers

by Rebecca Makkai

  Terrence had some of the vague early symptoms, some weight loss, but nothing serious yet, not enough to go on disability. He’d taken the test after Nico got sick—whether out of solidarity or just to know, Yale wasn’t sure. It wasn’t as if there were some magic pill. Yale and Charlie had, just on principle, been among the first to get tested that spring. Charlie’s paper had been advocating for testing, education, safe sex, and Charlie felt he had to put his money where his mouth was. But on top of that, Yale had just wanted to get it over with. Not knowing, he figured, was bad for his health in and of itself. The clinics weren’t giving the test yet, but Dr. Vincent was. Yale and Charlie opened a bottle of champagne when they got the good results. It was a somber toast; they didn’t even finish the bottle.

  Julian was back at Yale’s ear, saying, “Get yourself a refill before the slide show starts.”

  “There’s a slide show?”

  “It’s Richard.”

  At the bar Yale found Fiona talking to someone he didn’t know, a straight-looking guy with a jaw. Twisting her blonde curls around her finger. She was drinking too fast, because that was an empty glass in her hand. And she’d gotten it since she gave Yale her half-drink, and Fiona weighed maybe a hundred pounds. He touched her arm. He said, “You remember to eat?”

  Fiona laughed, looked at the guy, laughed again. She said, “Yale.” And she kissed his cheek, a firm kiss that probably left lipstick. To the guy she said, “I have two hundred big brothers.” She might fall over any second. “But as you can see, he’s the preppiest. And look at Yale’s hands. Look at them.”

  Yale examined his palm; there was nothing wrong with it.

  “No,” she said, “The back! Don’t they look like paws? They’re furry!” She ran her finger through the dark hairs clustered thickly on the pinky side of his hand. She whispered loudly to the man: “It’s on his feet too!” Then, to Yale, “Hey, did you talk to my aunt?”

  Yale scanned the room. There were only a few women here, none much over thirty.

  He said, “At the vigil?”

  “No, she can’t drive. But you must have talked, because I told her. I told her, like, months ago. And she said she had.”

  He said, “Your aunt?”

  “No, my father’s aunt. She loved Nico. Yale, you have to know that. She loved him.”

  Yale said to the guy, “Get her some food,” and the guy nodded. Fiona patted Yale’s chest and turned away, as if he were the one whose logic couldn’t be followed.

  He got his refill, almost straight rum, and looked for Charlie. Was that his bearded chin, his blue tie? But the curtain of people closed again, and Yale wasn’t tall enough to see over a crowd. And now Richard dimmed the lights and pulled up a projector screen, and Yale couldn’t see anything but the shoulders and backs boxing him in.

  Richard Campo, if he had any job at all, was a photographer. Yale had no idea where Richard’s money came from, but it let him buy a lot of nice cameras and gave him time to roam the city shooting candid photos in addition to the occasional wedding. Not long after Yale moved to Chicago, he was sunbathing on the Belmont Rocks with Charlie and Charlie’s friends, though this was before Yale and Charlie were an item. It was heaven, even if Yale had forgotten a towel, even if he always burned. Guys making out in broad daylight! A gay space hidden from the city but wide open to the vast expanse of Lake Michigan. One of Charlie’s friends, a man with wavy, prematurely silver hair and a lime-green Speedo, had sat there clicking away on his Nikon, changing film, clicking again at all of them. Yale asked, “Who’s the perv?” and Charlie said, “He might be a genius.” That was Richard. Of course Charlie saw genius in everyone, prodded them till he discovered their passions and then encouraged those, but Richard really was talented. Yale and Richard were never close—he’d never set foot in the guy’s house till today—but Yale had grown used to him. Richard was always on the periphery, watching and shooting. A good fifteen years older than everyone else in their circle: paternal, doting, eager to buy a round. He’d bankrolled Charlie’s newspaper in the early days. And what had started as a strange quirk had become, in the past few months, something essential. Yale would hear the camera’s click and think, “He got that, at least.” Meaning: Whatever happens—in three years, in twenty—that moment will remain.

  Someone messed with the record player, and as the first slide displayed (Nico and Terrence toasting last year at Fiona’s twentieth birthday) the music started: the acoustic intro to “America,” the version from Simon and Garfunkel’s Central Park concert. Nico’s favorite song, one he saw as a defiant anthem, not just a ditty about a road trip. The night Reagan won reelection last year, Nico, furious, played it on the jukebox at Little Jim’s again and again until the whole bar was drunkenly singing about being lost and counting cars and looking for America. Just as everyone was singing now.

  Yale couldn’t bear to join, and although he wouldn’t be the only one crying, he didn’t think he could stay here. He backed out of the crowd and took a few steps up Richard’s stairs, watching the heads from above. Everyone stared at the slides, riveted. Except that someone else was leaving too. Teddy Naples was at Richard’s heavy front door, slipping his suit jacket back on, turning the knob slowly. Usually Teddy was a little ball of kinetic energy, bouncing on his toes, keeping time with his fingers to music no one else could hear. But right now he moved like a ghost. Maybe he had the right idea. If he weren’t trapped on this side of the crowd, Yale might have done the same. Not left, but stepped outside for fresh air.

  The slides: Nico in running shorts, a number pinned to his chest. Nico and Terrence leaning against a tree, both giving the finger. Nico in profile with his orange scarf and black coat, a cigarette between his lips. Suddenly, there was Yale himself, tucked in the crook of Charlie’s arm, Nico on the other side: the year-end party last December for Charlie’s paper. Nico had been the graphic designer for Out Loud Chicago, and he had a regular comic strip there, and he’d just started designing theater sets too. Self-taught, entirely. This was supposed to have been the prologue of his life. A new slide: Nico laughing at Julian and Teddy, the Halloween they had dressed as Sonny and Cher. Nico opening a present. Nico holding a bowl of chocolate ice cream. Nico up close, teeth shining. The last time Yale saw Nico, he’d been unconscious, with foam—some kind of awful white foam—oozing suddenly from his mouth and nostrils. Terrence had screamed into the hallway for the nurses, had run into a cleaning cart and hurt his knee, and the fucking nurses were more concerned about whether or not Terrence had shed blood than about what was happening to Nico. And here on the slide was Nico’s full, beautiful face, and it was too much. Yale dashed up the rest of the stairs.

  He worried the bedrooms would be full of guys who’d been taking poppers, but the first one, at least, was empty. He closed the door and sat on the bed. It was dark out now, the sparse streetlights of Belden just barely illuminating the walls and floor. Richard must have redone at least this one room after the mysterious wife moved out. Two black leather chairs flanked the wide bed. There was a small shelf of art books. Yale put his glass on the floor and lay back to stare at the ceiling and do the slow-breathing trick Charlie had taught him.

  All fall, he’d been memorizing the list of the gallery’s regular donors. Tuning out the downstairs noise, he did what he often did at home when he couldn’t sleep: He named donors starting with A, then ones starting with B. A fair number overlapped with the Art Institute donors he’d worked with for the past three years, but there were hundreds of new names—Northwestern alumni, North Shore types—that he needed to recognize on the spot.

  Recently he’d found the lists disconcerting—had felt a dull gray uneasiness around them. He remembered being eight and asking his father who else in the neighborhood was Jewish (“Are the Rothmans Jewish? Are the Andersens?”) and his father rubbing his chin, saying, “Let’s not do that, buddy. Historically, bad things happen when we make list
s of Jews.” It wasn’t till years later that Yale realized this was a hang-up unique to his father, to his brand of self-hatred. But Yale had been young and impressionable, and maybe that’s why the reciting of names chafed.

  Or no, maybe it was this: Lately he’d had two parallel mental lists going—the donor list and the sick list. The people who might donate art or money, and the friends who might get sick; the big donors, the ones whose names you’d never forget, and the friends he’d already lost. But they weren’t close friends, the lost ones, until tonight. They’d been acquaintances, friends of friends like Nico’s old roommate Jonathan, a couple of gallery owners, one bartender, the bookstore guy. There were, what, six? Six people he knew of, people he’d say hi to at a bar, people whose middle names he couldn’t tell you, and maybe not even their last names. He’d been to three memorials. But now, a new list: one close friend.

  Yale and Charlie had gone to an informational meeting last year with a speaker from San Francisco. He’d said, “I know guys who’ve lost no one. Groups that haven’t been touched. But I also know people who’ve lost twenty friends. Entire apartment buildings devastated.” And Yale, stupidly, desperately, had thought maybe he’d fall into that first category. It didn’t help that, through Charlie, he knew practically everyone in Boystown. It didn’t help that his friends were all overachievers—and that they seemed to be overachieving in this terrible new way as well.

  It was Yale’s saving grace, and Charlie’s, that they’d met when they had, fallen in love so quickly. They’d been together since February of ’81 and—to the bemusement of nearly everyone—exclusive since fall of the same year. Nineteen eighty-one wasn’t too soon to get infected, not by a long shot, but then this wasn’t San Francisco, it wasn’t New York. Things, thank God, moved slower here.

  How had Yale forgotten he hated rum? It always made him moody, dehydrated, hot. His stomach a mess.

  He found a closet-size bathroom off this room and sat on the cool toilet, head between his knees.

  On his list of people who might get sick, who weren’t careful enough, who might even already be sick: Well, Julian, for sure. Richard. Asher Glass. Teddy—for Christ’s sake, Teddy Naples, who claimed that once he managed to avoid checking out of the Man’s World bathhouse for fifty-two hours, just napped (through the sounds of sex and pumping music) in the private rooms various older men had rented for their liaisons, subsisting on Snickers bars from the vending machine.

  Teddy opposed the test, worried names could get matched with test results and used by the government, used like those lists of Jews. At least this was what he said. Maybe he was just terrified, like everyone. Teddy was earning his PhD in philosophy at Loyola, and he tended to come up with elaborate philosophical covers for terribly average feelings. Teddy and Julian would occasionally have a “thing” on, but mostly Teddy just floated between Kierkegaard and bars and clubs. Yale always suspected that Teddy had at least seven distinct groups of friends and didn’t rank this one very highly. Witness his leaving the party. Maybe the slides were too much for him, as they’d been for Yale; maybe he’d stepped out to walk around the block, but Yale doubted it. Teddy had other places to be, better parties to attend.

  And then there was the list of acquaintances already sick, hiding the lesions on their arms but not their faces, coughing horribly, growing thin, waiting to get worse—or lying in the hospital, or flown home to die near their parents, to be written up in their local papers as having died of pneumonia. Just a few right now, but there was room on that list. Far too much room.

  When Yale finally moved again, it was to cup water from the sink, splash it over his face. He looked frightful in the mirror: rings under his eyes, skin gone pale olive. His heart felt funny, but then his heart always felt funny.

  The slide show must be over, and if he could look down on the crowd he’d be able to spot Charlie. They could make their escape. They could get a cab, even, and he could lean on the window. When they got home, Charlie would rub his neck, insist on making him tea. He’d feel fine.

  He opened the door to the hall and heard a collective silence, as if they were all holding their breath, listening to someone make a speech. Only he couldn’t quite hear the speech. He looked down, but there was no one in the living room. They’d moved somewhere.

  He came downstairs slowly, not wanting to be startled. A sudden noise would make him vomit.

  But down in the living room was just the whir of the record, spinning past the last song, the needle arm retired to the side. Beer bottles and Cuba libre glasses, still half full, covered the tables and couch arms. The trays of canapés had been left on the dining table. Yale thought of a raid, some kind of police raid, but this was a private residence, and they were all adults, and nothing much illegal had happened. Probably someone had some pot, but come on.

  How long had he been upstairs? Maybe twenty minutes. Maybe thirty. He wondered if he could’ve fallen asleep on the bed, if it was 2 a.m. now. But no, not unless his watch had stopped. It was only 5:45.

  He was being ridiculous, and they were out in the backyard. Places like this had backyards. He walked through the empty kitchen, through a book-lined den. There was the door, but it was dead-bolted. He cupped his hand to the glass: a striped canopy, a heap of dead leaves, the moon. No people.

  Yale turned and started shouting: “Hello! Richard! Guys! Hello!”

  He went to the front door—also, bizarrely, dead-bolted—and fumbled till it opened. There was no one on the dark street.

  The foggy, ridiculous idea came to him that the world had ended, that some apocalypse had swept through and forgotten only him. He laughed at himself, but at the same time: He saw no bobbing heads in neighbors’ windows. There were lights in the houses opposite, but then the lights were on here too. At the end of the block, the traffic signal turned from green to yellow to red. He heard the vague rush of cars far away, but that could have been wind, couldn’t it? Or even the lake. Yale hoped for a siren, a horn, a dog, an airplane across the night sky. Nothing.

  He went back inside and closed the door. He yelled again: “You guys!” And he felt now that a trick was being played, that they might jump out and laugh. But this was a memorial, wasn’t it? It wasn’t the tenth grade. People weren’t always looking for ways to hurt him.

  He found his own reflection in Richard’s TV. He was still here, still visible.

  On the back of a chair was a blue windbreaker he recognized as Asher Glass’s. The pockets were empty.

  He should leave. But where would he even go?

  Cigarette butts filled the ashtrays. None were half smoked, none smashed out in haste. Copies of some of Nico’s comics had been laid out on the end tables, the bar, but now they were scattered—probably more a product of the party than its end—and Yale plucked one off the floor. A drag queen named Martina Luther Kink. A silly punch line about having a dream.

  He walked through every room on the ground floor, opening every door—pantry, coat closet, vacuum closet—until he was greeted with a wall of cold air and descending cement steps. He found the light switch and made his way down. Laundry machines, boxes, two rusty bikes.

  He climbed back up and then all the way to the third floor—a study, a little weight room, some storage—and then down to the second again and opened everything. Ornate mahogany bureaus, canopy beds. A master bedroom, all white and green. If this had been the wife’s work, it wasn’t so bad. A Diane Arbus print on the wall, the one of the boy with the hand grenade.

  A telephone sat next to Richard’s bed, and Yale grabbed it with relief. He listened to the tone—reassuring—and slowly dialed his own number. No answer.

  He needed to hear a voice, any human voice, and so he got the dial tone back and called Information.

  “Name and city please,” the woman said.

  “Hello?” He wanted to make sure she wasn’t a recording.

  “This is Info
rmation. Do you know the name of the person you wish to call?”

  “Yes, it’s—Marcus. Nico Marcus, on North Clark in Chicago.” He spelled the names.

  “I have an N. Marcus on North Clark. Would you like me to connect you?”

  “No—no thank you.”

  “Stay on the line for the number.”

  Yale hung up.

  He circled the house one more time and went, finally, to the front door. He called to no one: “I’m leaving! I’m going!”

  And stepped out into the dark.

  2015

  When they started across the Atlantic, the guy in the window seat jerked awake. He’d been asleep since O’Hare, and Fiona had tried to distract herself by lusting after him. The inflight magazine had been open on her lap for an hour, and all she’d done was tightly roll the corner of the crossword page again and again. The guy had the body of a rock climber, and the clothes and hair and beard (messy, all three, the hair chin-length and curly, the shorts stained with blue ink) to match. He’d slept with his forehead against the seat in front, and when he sat up and looked around, dazed, Fiona realized she hadn’t seen his face earlier. She’d invented a face for him, so that this one—while handsome and weathered—seemed wrong. She’d already known from the muscles of his bare legs, the meat of his arms, that he was too young for her. Early thirties.

  He pulled his backpack from under his feet and went through the contents. He had the window seat, Fiona the aisle. He felt his pockets, felt the seat around him. He went through the backpack again, removing things: rolled-up socks, plastic bag with toothpaste and Scope, a small journal. He turned to Fiona and said, “Hey, I buy a drink?” She wasn’t sure she’d heard right. He might have been offering to buy her a cocktail, but this was an urgent question, not a flirtatious one.

  She said, “I’m sorry?”