The Great Believers

by Rebecca Makkai

  * * *

  —

  At five o’clock, Fiona unwrapped her bandage to apply the ointment the doctor had given her. Her hand was hurting less. It was amazing how quickly you could forget physical pain, how soon you couldn’t even summon its echo.

  At eight, Jake called. Serge had given him the number. He wondered if she’d come out and grab a bite. She was tired, she said, and managed to hang up. She’d have to have a word with Serge.

  At nine forty-five, lying in bed, she started hearing sirens. Far too many, for far too long. At nine fifty, her phone started ringing. First Damian and then Jake—frantic, cryptic questions about where she was. Stay inside, they said. Then Richard was knocking on her door. She came out to the living room to watch the news. She stood in her nightgown, her feet cold. Serge paced the floor, swearing. Richard lay on the couch.

  Fiona made herself breathe.

  The attacks were far enough from here that she tried to imagine she was home, hearing about something on the far side of the world. There was no chance Claire had been out at what sounded like some kind of heavy metal concert; a person’s tastes couldn’t change that much. She might have been at that restaurant, or walking down that sidewalk, but the odds were small. The soccer stadium was up in Saint-Denis, where Claire lived; that worried her most. But Claire had a young child, and it was so late at night. Claire had her number, at least—but why hadn’t Fiona tackled her and made her write down her own? She didn’t have Kurt’s either. Running around the city to search for her was out of the question. She should go get a sweater, but she didn’t want to move.

  There was nothing to do but keep calm. Cecily was in the air, and hopefully they’d let her plane land. What were the odds that Claire would show up for work tomorrow morning? What were the odds that the city would be thrown into such chaos that Fiona would never find her again?

  She was surprised by her numbness, at least regarding the televised carnage, the bloodied, sobbing people on the streets. Was it because it wasn’t her city, or because the rituals of outrage and grief and fear felt so familiar now, so practiced? Or maybe it was the pain pills she’d popped after dinner for her hand.

  She was struck by the selfish thought that this was not fair to her. That she’d been in the middle of a different story, one that had nothing to do with this. She was a person who was finding her daughter, making things right with her daughter, and there was no room in that story for the idiocy of extreme religion, the violence of men she’d never met. Just as she’d been in the middle of a story about divorce when the towers fell in New York City, throwing everyone’s careful plans to shit. Just as she’d once been in a story about raising her own brother, growing up with her brother in the city on their own, making it in the world, when the virus and the indifference of greedy men had steamrolled through. She thought of Nora, whose art and love were interrupted by assassination and war. Stupid men and their stupid violence, tearing apart everything good that was ever built. Why couldn’t you ever just go after your life without tripping over some idiot’s dick?

  Richard’s show: No one knew if the preview could happen on Monday as planned. His publicist called, and his manager. “They need to calm down,” Richard said. “You’d think they’d have better things to worry about.”

  Serge said, “We’re screwed. The whole world is screwed.”

  He hadn’t stopped moving for the last hour and a half.

  “I don’t mean to sound callous,” Fiona said, “but we’ve been through this in the States. And it’s not—”

  “No,” Serge said, “whatever, a hundred dead people, I don’t care. That could have been a bus crash. What I care is, now they elect right wing across Europe. And then, yes: You, me, all of us, we’re screwed. Everyone acts from fear, the next year, two years. What happens, you think, to people like us?”

  Fiona felt herself sinking. She said, “Things might seem different in the morning.”

  Serge wheeled on her. “When people are afraid, we get the Christian Taliban. We get it here, you get it there, and we’re all in jail. We’re all in jail.”

  Richard had been so quiet for so long that Fiona kept wondering if he’d fallen asleep. He stretched his arms overhead and said, “Serge, that’s enough.”

  “I’m going out there.” Serge grabbed his helmet from the counter. “Hollande can fuck his curfew.”

  Fiona expected Richard to stop him, expected Serge to stop himself, but Serge was out the door. Richard’s phone rang again, but he ignored it.

  “I didn’t mean to offend him,” she said. “I’m not naive, you know that.”

  He said, “It’s always a matter, isn’t it, of waiting for the world to come unraveled? When things hold together, it’s always only temporary.”

  1986

  Roman had a scar on the meat of his left arm from his smallpox vaccine: an indented circle made of a thousand tiny dots. Yale could put his thumb there. He could put his tongue there.

  * * *

  —

  Roman would come over drunk. It seemed to take some alcohol to get him to show up without all the baggage of twenty-seven years of Mormonism. Roman would call at 8 p.m. on a Saturday and say he’d be over “in a while,” but he wouldn’t come till after midnight. And during that time, Yale would blast music, start drinking himself. Because he didn’t want to go out and miss Roman, but it was pathetic to sit there on the couch watching reruns and waiting.

  * * *

  —

  Roman had silver fillings in his molars, and he always needed to blow his nose after he came.

  * * *

  —

  Roman would show up like rain, once every couple of weeks, and he’d stay till four in the morning, leaving before the city woke up. Every time, as he put his shoes on, he’d say, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” And Yale would think, but not say, that they were both lost in the woods. Only Roman thought Yale knew the way out.

  * * *

  —

  Roman liked to do it spooning on their sides, his chest against Yale’s back. He’d drench both of them with sweat. He would groan, shaking, into Yale’s hair. The first few times he was too fast, too spastic. Then he relaxed, learned to slow down, started to seem like he actually enjoyed it and it wasn’t a thing to race through in shame. Now he’d even stick around and talk afterward.

  * * *

  —

  Roman said, “No offense, and it’s—I mean it’s a good thing, but your dick is like a fucking pepper grinder. I mean, I’ve never seen—like, I don’t really—” and Yale said, “Don’t worry. I’m not gonna try to fuck you.” Yale asked Roman if he’d thought about going to the Pride parade, which was ten days away. They were starting to sober up; it was three in the morning. “Just being counted matters,” Yale said, and heard how he sounded like Charlie. “Last year we had thirty-five thousand.”

  Roman rolled toward Yale and grinned, his eyes molelike without his glasses. “You’re saying size matters to you.”

  “I’m saying we want to top that.”

  Roman laughed, ran a finger up Yale’s groin.

  “It’d be good for you. There’s something about seeing some drag queen doing a pole dance in a flatbed right there in the street that makes it easier to go back to work the next day and not worry about being a little faggy.” Not that Yale went to work anymore. “And also—” but Roman sank his teeth into the top of Yale’s ear, moved his hand up his side. “Also, it’s educational.”

  “You’re educational.”

  * * *

  —

  Yale hadn’t heard from Roman since that night, and meanwhile he’d decided he might not even go to the parade himself. He bought a ticket for the Cubs-Mets game, which wouldn’t start till 3:30 but at least gave him a fairly solid excuse, one he used when Asher called the day before the parade and asked if Yale could lend a hand on the AIDS F
oundation of Chicago float. “Actually,” Asher said, “it’s not your hands we want. It’s your cute face. We’re wearing clothes, no Speedos involved. Unless you want to, of course. Who am I to stop you?” Yale would have done just about anything else for Asher, but he couldn’t be in a parade, couldn’t roll down the street past everyone he knew, couldn’t run into Charlie in the staging area.

  Ross—the redhead who’d been flirting with Yale in the Marina City gym for the past month—said if Yale wanted to hang out, some friends would be watching from a fire escape at Wellington and Clark, with mojitos. Yale didn’t want to lead Ross on, but the setup was appealing. When he first moved to the city he’d been in love with all the fire escapes, kept feeling Audrey Hepburn might appear there with her guitar, her hair wrapped in a towel, that she might sing him “Moon River” and grab his hand and pull him across town.

  He had a mental list of reasons not to go: He wanted to see Sandberg face off against Gooden. He didn’t want to stand there getting turned on by beautiful shirtless men just to come home and jerk off sadly in the bathroom. He didn’t feel like worrying about how he looked, scanning the crowd constantly for friends and former friends. He did not want to watch the Out Loud float go by. Plus, he worried every year that this would be the time someone would set off a bomb, open fire on the crowd. He’d watched on the news last night as a thousand KKK supporters filled a park in a black neighborhood on the southwest side. Yesterday it was racial slurs they were shouting, but they’d announced their plan to rally again in Lincoln Park before the parade, in the free-speech area. It couldn’t end well.

  * * *

  —

  Over the past four months he’d contacted every place he could think of, even the aquarium and the planetarium, small places in Michigan, remote university galleries where he had no contacts. His CV was strong, but no one seemed to be hiring for more than grant writing. He’d been replaced at the Brigg, had gone in for the last time in early April.

  Cecily still had her job. The gallery was in good shape. The lawsuit was off and Chuck Donovan had moved on to other ego battles. Yale called Bill once in a while to check in and learned that the restorations on the Modiglianis and the Hébuterne painting were going to take much longer than anyone had thought. Bill was beginning to doubt the show could go up next year. Yale himself had deleted the section of tape where Nora had talked about painting on Ranko’s behalf. “One small step,” he said to Roman, “in my journey to becoming Richard Nixon.”

  The Sharps had come to town for a week in April, and Yale had kept out of their way as best he could. He hid Roscoe over at Asher’s place, where Roscoe got noticeably fatter. Allen, just because he’d called Yale up that one time, felt personally responsible for Yale quitting, despite everything Yale had told them both. They doubled down on their insistence that he stay there. They’d be in Barcelona for the summer anyway.

  * * *

  —

  The morning of the parade, he tried calling Roman with the excuse of talking him into going. When Roman didn’t answer, he found himself unduly disappointed. Out of proportion with how much he actually cared about Roman, which was only somewhat. Roman was fun and maybe Roman was therapy, but Roman certainly wasn’t the only man in the world.

  Which was another reason to go to the parade himself.

  At eleven the phone rang, and Yale answered “Sharp residence” as always, although no one ever seemed to call for the Sharps.

  It was his father’s low, lazy grumble asking how everything was. The way an underpaid nurse might, poking her head into your room to make sure you didn’t need the bedpan changed.

  Yale said, “I’m fine. I’m great.”

  “I’m sitting here doing the crossword, myself.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll, ah, I’ll thank you if you can give me a six-letter word for ‘harpy.’ I was sitting here the longest time thinking it said ‘happy,’ but no, it’s ‘harpy.’”

  His father was the slowest talker in the world, a trait that drove Yale crazy in adolescence.

  “I got nothing.”

  “What are you up to these days?”

  There was no way to answer. Yale hadn’t told him about the breakup, just the move. He’d never even told him he’d left the Art Institute last summer; the AIC was something his father had actually heard of, something he took some mote of pride in, and although surely he’d heard of Northwestern as well, Yale had figured he’d leave well enough alone.

  He could have talked about the Cubs game, but instead he said, “I’m on my way to a parade.” Because now that his father’s voice was wrapping its way around his right ear, now that going to a ball game would have felt tainted by his father’s approval, it was true: He was going to the parade.

  “What kind of parade?”

  “A really gay one, Dad. A big gay parade.”

  Yale read in his father’s silence a kind of sarcasm. Listen to yourself, the silence said. Do you hear how ridiculous that sounds?

  Yale said, “So I kind of need to run.”

  He thought his father would hang up, glad for the dismissal, but instead he said, “Listen, have you been following the news on this disease?”

  Yale found himself stretching the phone cord to the window just so he could make incredulous eye contact with his own reflection.

  “No, Dad, I haven’t. What disease would that be?”

  “It’s—are you being ironic with me? I can never tell.”

  “You know, the parade is starting. I really have to go.”

  “Alright then.”

  * * *

  —

  By the time he got to Clark, the route was packed and the first few floats had gone by. He wound his way behind people, looking for someone he recognized. At Wellington he looked for Ross and his friends and their fire escape, but not too hard. After two blocks, he spotted Katsu Tatami across the street, and when a few people ran across behind the Anheuser-Busch float, he crossed too. He didn’t know the guys Katsu was standing with, but Katsu was always good for a hug, an enthusiastic greeting. He had to shout in Yale’s ear: “So far so good! You want my soda?” He thrust a McDonald’s cup at Yale, and a thought about germs flashed across Yale’s mind, but he willfully ignored it. He took a sip and then wished he hadn’t: warm, flat sugar water.

  A bunch of Harleys rolled past, followed by a lesbian dojo—women kicking and chopping their way down the street, dressed in white. Miss Gay Wisconsin; earnest middle-aged women with PFLAG signs; a huge brass bed pulled by a convertible and occupied by two men making out with tremendous gusto, their torsos bare above a thin white sheet.

  Yale asked Katsu how he was and Katsu said, “I’m becoming a legal expert.” He explain-shouted that he’d gotten new insurance two years ago. In January he was feeling terrible and finally got tested—and he had it, did Yale know? Yeah, son of a bitch, he hadn’t even told his mom—and his goddamned insurance was trying to claim that the virus was a preexisting condition so they wouldn’t have to cover it. “Even though I got the insurance before the fucking test came out! But they’re claiming I should’ve known because three years ago I was treated for thrush. One time. And that’s enough for them to turn me down.” He needed pentamidine treatments, and he’d need hospital care that wasn’t at fucking County, where he’d been a couple times, and was Yale aware what it smelled like in there? There was a reason it was free! So Asher was helping him apply for the Social Security he had to have before he could get Medicaid, because apparently that was how things worked in this stupid country. “And do you know what we have to prove? Okay, this is insane. We have to prove I’m disabled. Which I am now, because I could work maybe four days a week, but the fifth day I get the runs so bad I’m glued to the bathroom floor.” This was tenable for his part-time gig at Howard Brown but not for the administrative assistant work that used to pay the bills and supply the useless i
nsurance. “But the runs aren’t a disability category, you know? So Asher’s finding me this junior litigator, I guess? And here’s what he has to prove at this hearing. He has to show that I can’t do any unskilled sedentary labor in the national economy. Like, the entire nation. And the fucking examples they use! You want to hear the examples?”

  Yale was exhausted just listening to Katsu, but sure, he wanted to hear. A drag queen passed on stilts in an elaborate Statue of Liberty costume, all green sparkles and gauze.

  “I shit you not. Nut sorter. That’s not a euphemism, by the way. Bowling ball polisher. Also not a euphemism! Silverware wrapper. Like, sitting there wrapping silverware in napkins. Everyone wants their spoons handled by a guy with the AIDS runs, right? Wafer topper. I don’t even know what that means. The last one—for real—is fishhook inspector in Alaska. They don’t care that I can’t get to Alaska and I could never get this job. They care that it’s a job in the national economy. So yeah, my survival now depends on my proving I can’t top wafers.”

  Here came a bunch of guys in leather, a poster that read “Bound Up With Pride!” Some kind of garden club followed.

  “But I’m gonna get in on whatever clinical trials I can, meantime.”

  “And Asher’s helping,” Yale said.

  “Yeah. Asher. He can sort my nuts whenever he wants, am I right?”

  Yale felt his face catch fire.

  “Oh come on, you’d let him polish your bowling balls!”

  Yale attempted a noncommittal laugh.

  And here, ridiculously, before he could properly recover, was Asher’s AFC float. Here was Asher, waving like a politician. Yale waved, but he didn’t catch Asher’s eye.

  Three guys on unicycles came next, cutoffs and denim vests.