Christodora

by Tim Murphy

  Bubbe had told him all this when he was twelve, “old enough to fully understand,” as his parents put it. He’d felt better knowing that Ysabel had been able to accomplish things before she died and hadn’t lived a totally sad life. But he thought a lot about that disco-party boom-box side of her, too. The Sheila E. side. The side that looked a bit like a good-time party ho.

  “She didn’t know who my real father was?” he asked Bubbe.

  She sighed, stroking his hair more. “She got really lonely and scared sometimes and she reached out to different places for love,” Bubbe said.

  He was old enough at that point to read between her lines. Nobody knew who his real father was. He could’ve been anybody. He was embarrassed to feel tears, hot tears of shame, pool in his eyes.

  “Now, hey,” Bubbe clucked, holding him by the chin. “That man was handsome, whoever he was. That’s obvious.”

  That made him smile a little bit.

  He comes back to earth, back to the final crit with Adeyemo. After that, school’s out—forever! He’s back downtown in the hood now, the East Village, at Two Boots pizza with Zoya, Alexa, Horatio, and Yusef and Ignacio, these two art-head juniors who want to inherit his mantle—Ignacio with his Mohawk and obsession with lucha libre masks. They’re all just talking shit, swapping around iPods. Eventually Oscar, who’s having the party at his place that night on East Broadway, comes around. Oscar, who graduated from the not-special neighborhood high school, Seward Park, three years ago, and nobody really knows what he does—something tech related in a warehouse in Red Hook. But Oscar has his own place and always has beer and herb, which is key. Oscar, with so many cornrows you can’t count them, and his vintage 2 Live Crew T-shirt on today, and his vague coolness without purpose that could be M-Dreem’s own fate, he knows, if he hadn’t had certain opportunities handed to him by—well, by them. Mr. and Mrs. Parental.

  “Look at the children about to graduate,” Oscar says, sitting down with the crew. “The future of New York City.”

  “M-Dreem, show him the future,” Horatio says. “Show him your spiders.”

  He pulls out his big spider illo. “You like this, Oscar?” he asks.

  Oscar’s eyes pop out; he jerks back from the image. “Fucking spiders, damn! You one mad sick nigga, M-Dreem. But you got skills, I’ll say that.”

  M-Dreem beams; he doesn’t know exactly why Oscar’s opinion means so much to him, but it does. “Thanks, my nigga,” he says. Zoya looks at him and smirks, sensing his self-consciousness with that word; he smirks back at her. What? he wants to ask Zoya. Are you my fucking conscience? But he knows the Parentals hate that word, too. Maybe partly because when he uses it, he reminds them that, not being white, he can sort of use it, but they can’t.

  “You niggas coming tonight?” Oscar asks. Hell, yeah, they chorus. “That’s good,” he says. “I gotta go get this party ready.” And then Oscar’s gone.

  It’s hours till the party, but M-Dreem doesn’t go home. Home always makes him feel vaguely uncomfortable, even though he doesn’t know quite why. Ever since that flare-up with the Parentals last year, that incident with him punching the wall and calling her the B-word, it’s never been quite the same with them, even if therapy and time have softened the impact. So today, he and Zoya and Alexa go to Alexa’s place a few blocks away and smoke herb and listen to the new Mos Def. They end up in a cuddle puddle, Zoya and Alexa spooning him on either side, him wondering if Zoya can feel his boner as he falls asleep, knocked out from the weed. They all wake up at ten o’clock, Zoya and Alexa taking an hour to dress and fix their hair while he smokes more herb and watches stupid reality TV, and then they head over to Boots again for dinner, two slices between the three of them because they’re all mad broke, then over to Oscar’s, where his friend Nanyelis, the shy bi girl, is DJ’ing: Ghostface Killah, Back Like That. A bunch of kids from school are there plus Oscar’s crowd of slightly older, scarier, intriguing who-are-theys. M-Dreem’s drinking Negras from the fridge, and Oscar comes over. He always hooks people up. He offers M-Dreem and the girls X, and the girls decline but M-Dreem does a whole one, and in about an hour, and a little more herb, he’s dancing, having the best time. Someone’s got a rainbow-patch clown wig on, clothes are coming off, he’s graduating from high school, he’s going to Pratt, he’s got mad skills, Madvillainy sounds sooo sick coming out of the speakers right now.

  At some point the girls are like, “We’re leaving, you coming?” and he’s like, “No, I’m gonna stay,” and Zoya gives him a long hug and she’s like, “Be careful, baby,” and they’re gone. The kids from school thin out; he feels like he’s going into a deeper, darker zone, dancing now mostly with this older white girl with a cute tooth gap and short bleached hair like that English model Agyness Whatever’s Her Name, reaching out, holding hands, eventually with his hands slipped into the back of her jean shorts, and finally she grabs his hands again and says, “Come on, let’s find Oscar.” And she winds him back through the apartment.

  They find Oscar in a back bedroom, behind a door only cracked open, with some of his friends. They all look half asleep and happy, passing around a plate and inhaling something off of it with a straw. Oscar looks up and smiles when M-Dreem comes in. M-Dreem whispers to the Agyness girl, “What’s that?” and she goes, “It’s heroin.”

  “Ah, shit, man,” he says. He hasn’t tried that one. That one’s a no-no.

  Agyness girl kind of frowns at him and tugs at his arm. “Snorting a little isn’t very strong,” she says. “You’re done with school, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sooo?”

  Artists must have these experiences, M-Dreem thinks. Out of pure experience comes pure expressions of form; he needs to have new visions, see new forms. He sits down on the floor with Agyness, hand in hand, his heart pounding. The plate comes around to Agyness, who passes it to him.

  “Here,” she says. “You go first. Just do a little bit.”

  He uses the straw to separate out a bit from the pile of tan powder, which looks like a tiny mesa on the plate.

  “Not that little!” Agyness laughs. So he separates out more until Agyness nods her approval, then he nudges it into a jagged line.

  “Don’t stop snorting until it’s all gone,” Agyness says.

  He doesn’t. He’s repulsed by the dirty, bitter taste that stings his nasal passage, then the back of his throat. His vision goes cross-eyed and he thinks, I can’t believe I just did heroin. I’m a scumbag. This would kill the Parentals. But five seconds later, he’s exactly where he’s wanted to be his whole life but never knew it, back with her, before he was born, inside her; nothing’s begun yet, just this warmth and protection, this liquid blanket. There hasn’t been any separation or detachment or ache yet.

  He snorts another messy line into his other nostril and burrows down deeper into the liquid blanket. Everyone else in the room sort of falls away like a movie camera rushing backward from a set. He locks eyes with Agyness, but it’s not Agyness, it’s her, 04/14/1984.

  “I wanna know you so badly,” he says. “I wanna ask you so many things.”

  “There’s so much I wanna tell you,” she says. “Most of all, honey, I’m so sorry.” Now she’s crying.

  “Don’t cry,” he tells her. “You didn’t know.”

  He curls up in her lap, his Airs up by his butt, his arms between his knees. He can hear himself purring; I’m a little baby kitten, he thinks. I just came out of her and I’m getting my sustenance from her. He loses any sense of the floor underneath him or the sounds around him; he and she are like a balloon they let go of. And she’s telling him the whole story of what happened, New York City before 1992 and him.

  Four hours later, at 4:30 in the morning, he drifts back from a reverie to look up and see Agyness running her hands through his hair.

  “Are you okay?” she asks.

  “I’m itchy,” he s
ays.

  She smiles. “That’s just the H, it’s normal. It goes away.”

  “I’m cold, too.”

  She pulls a blanket from the bed, where Oscar’s curled up on his side with Tamara, his sometimes girlfriend the past two years, and arranges it over M-Dreem and herself. All has gone silent and dark in the other rooms; the party has ended.

  “I should probably get home,” he murmurs, wiping drool from the side of his mouth.

  She pulls him tighter. “Don’t go.”

  “No, I have to go.” He rises and vomits slightly on the two of them.

  “Oh God,” Agyness groans, in slow motion.

  In the bathroom, where they clean up with mildewed towels, he feels itchy and cold, yet still velvety and delicious inside. For as long as his memory stretches back, to those patchy few recollections of the boys’ home in Brooklyn, he can’t remember a time—even the happy times with the Parentals and friends and fun and art and success in school, at the beach in the summer or those trips to Europe—where a sense of being lost and wrong didn’t hover at his right shoulder, and now, for the first time, it’s not there. I am coming back here, he thinks, meaning the H, kissing Agyness good-bye.

  He walks home up Essex Street as church bells strike five, every streetlight an object of blurry, dancing beauty. He crosses Houston Street, absent the baseball cap he arrived at the party with, looks at all the stoops and gated storefronts with wonder, moves like liquid gold up Avenue B, feels a spasm of nausea and manages to bend over a garbage can just fast enough to avoid vomiting all over his T-shirt again. Long after the vomiting ends, he rests bent over the can, bracing himself above it with both hands, falling into another feel-good fugue, starring the funny-looking Sheila E. shorty, for seventeen more minutes before a vague voice far back in his head propels him home.

  In the wee hours at the Christodora, Ardit, the Albanian doorman, tends to doze before the tiny TV in his room in the basement, so M-Dreem enters a sepulchral lobby, falls into a blissful nod once again with his right hand on the button of the elevator, and rouses himself from it a good two minutes after the elevator arrives, just long enough to hit the sixth-floor button. When the doors open on that floor, he feels a strong weight pulling him down toward the hallway carpet just outside the elevator, just another short, um, reverie, but he manages to shamble his way down the hall. Fumbling in his pocket for keys, he slowly registers he’s lost them—just when the apartment door swings open to reveal, in a nightgown, Millimom. That is what he most often calls his Female Parental, a smirking hybrid name.

  She turns forty next year and betrays the first lines emerging on her forehead and in the corners of her eyes—the beautiful, dark, perpetually anxious, and beleaguered eyes of Millimom. And now those pained eyes are burning with five A.M., been-waiting-up-all-night pain. He sees her New Yorker and big ceramic tea mug on the dining-room table in the apartment’s dark recesses.

  She steps back from the door, scrutinizing him head to toe. “Where have you been?” she asks in a half-whisper, trying not to wake Jared-dad in the room beyond.

  Stepping inside, he makes his best effort to open his eyes wide, stand up straight, smile with a sort of no-big-deal, nonchalant air of apology. “Sorry I’m so late, Mom. There was a graduation party.”

  “I’d think that if you’re going to party till dawn, you could at least give me a call.” She sounds not so much angry as baffled and hurt.

  “I know, I meant to, I just got caught up in the excitement and the flow.”

  “Couldn’t you have just texted?”

  Now their eyes are in the mother-son deathlock. He resists the urge to scratch his upper body, which is crawling with itches. Then he caves and lightly scratches his rib cage, where the itching is the worst.

  Milly’s nose wrinkles. “You smell like vomit,” she says. “You’ve been drinking.”

  He exhales with relief. “I did drink a little,” he says. “It was graduation night.”

  She crumples back, frowning. “I just wish you had called. Dad and I left you a message this afternoon congratulating you on your last day.”

  “I know, I—” he begins. Then his stomach seizes and he brushes past her and into the bathroom, where he locks the door just in time to stick his head in the toilet and puke again.

  “Mateo,” he hears Millimom call from the other side of the door, “are you all right?” But even the puking felt good, and now that it’s over, he feels especially good. Another hazy wave comes over him, just as he hears his name again, Mateo, on the other side of the door, but this time in Jared’s deeper, sharper tone. He’ll get up in a moment, he thinks. But for right now he curls up with his head on the ledge of the toilet, and before he knows it, he’s nodding on 04/14/1984 again, purring away.

  THREE

  Directly Observed Therapy

  (1981)

  What if they could ban smoking in all city restaurants and bars? Surely anyone would say it was a crazy idea—New York thrived on smoking, it was a city of smokers, in and out of the bars, in offices and walk-ups, the sidewalks alive with bobbing Marlboros and Virginia Slims and Newports in the neurotic, fearful hands of people in Armani and tracksuits—but what if, what if?

  The thought kept nipping deliciously at the edge of Ava’s other thoughts—gotta make a dentist appointment; gotta stop at Balducci’s and buy coffee and brie; oh, shit, gotta make a dentist appointment for Emmy (her endearment of the abbreviation M.)—as she dressed for work that morning, with Sam off already for his run around the reservoir, and Emmy already being walked to school by Francelle. What if she became the health commissioner who banned smoking in restaurants and bars in the first big city in America? It could happen by ’86, ’87, she thought. First, nab the top spot, then start a public campaign, get Koch’s ­support—she could make her big mark by the time she was forty-three, forty-four. People would say she was crazy, but if you didn’t think big thoughts, how could you make anything happen? Isn’t that where big change began, with big, bold thoughts? Women, particularly, needed to have more big thoughts, she believed, recalling all the theory books about women and health she’d read in grad school, suddenly wanting to reread them all, just to reconnect, just to refresh.

  She was having so many thoughts! How would she get them all down on paper into proposals, outlines, workable flowcharts? She needed to invent a system to catch all these ideas: the public programs, the public-private partnerships, the synergies, even just ways Renny could run the department better. She needed to enlist the help of that intern from Columbia whom Renny was sending her way, the one he probably plucked because he was Puerto Rican, just like Renny. Renny isn’t so bad! she found herself thinking, though she usually hated the man—well, no, okay, not hated, chafed under the man . . . her boss, for God’s sake! But Renny could be funny! And warm! All his “ay coños!” when he was fed up with red tape and the bullshit stonewalling and inertia out of Koch’s office. She was going to reach out to Renny today somehow, touch his arm, set up a lunch date—once she had some of those ideas down on paper!

  In the mirror, she examined her hair, her clothes. She tore off her jacket and the metallic-gray blouse with the bow tie and pulled out the purple silk shell with the deep scoop neck, put on a gold chain over it. Why did she always separate day and night clothes? Why couldn’t she bring just a little bit of luster into that drab office? She picked out a slightly higher pair of heels, grabbed her brush and the hairspray, and made her hair a little bigger and looser, bumping up the black feathers on either side. A darker lip gloss. Work was more fun this way! Goal number one for today, Wednesday, May 6: Have fun! Do the work, but have fun!

  Sam came in, sweaty, once she was downstairs, nibbling a piece of toast—she wasn’t very hungry; so much for the all-natural peanut butter she’d usually smear on it—downing a quick cup of coffee, and going over memos for meetings later that day (the infant mortality rate summit
in early July, the herpes thing, the problem with the restaurants in Chinatown). He was her hunky Brooklyn boy, her strong-jawed, dark curly-haired Elliott Gould, her lawyer man with the soul of an artist. She was surprised, and pleased, by the surge of attraction she felt for him at 8:14 A.M.—a time they were usually both so busy getting themselves and Emmy out of the house they barely managed a good-bye peck on the cheek.

  “Come here, you big sweaty lug,” she said, putting down her papers, slouching back, and parting her legs. Which led her to another thought: She wasn’t a girl from Queens anymore; she was an Upper East Side woman! She’d made it! She never really thought about that!

  Sam looked at her funny, but intrigued. “I thought you didn’t like me sweaty. Especially when you’re all pulled together for work.”

  She stood up, kicking off her shoes. “Things change,” she said, aiming to sound smoky.

  His eyes narrowed at her—a little dumbfounded? A smidge concerned? Then a smile of gratitude bloomed. “No bullshitting me, Aves?”

  She shook her head slowly, reaching for him, pulling off his sweaty old Cardozo Law T-shirt. She wasn’t bullshitting. Oh my God, her work clothes were coming off! This was happening—suddenly they were on the kitchen floor. “Holy shit, Aves!” exclaimed Sam. “What the fuck!”

  Francelle stepped in with a bag of groceries. “Oh, good Lord,” she blurted out. She all but dropped the bag on the floor near the door. She retreated, calling back, “I’m running more errands!”

  Ava and Sam burst out laughing, mortified and delighted—this would certainly make things awkward around the house with ­Francelle—and kept going until they were both done, then lay there on the parquet, clothes down around their ankles, breathing heavily, exhausted.

  “Was something in your coffee?” Sam asked her, cradling her on the floor.

  She giggled. “You just looked so sexy to me, all sweaty. My Elliott Gould.”