Christodora

by Tim Murphy

  But the links on Hector Villanueva seem to drop off after the early to mid-2000s. No mentions of his arrest in L.A. in 2012. Mateo goes back to the link of the interview with the Cheling guy and sees that it’s dated only two years ago. Still alive and actually very active with ShelterHelps, the Cheling guy had said. Mateo searches for “Hector Villanueva” and “ShelterHelps” and finds a pdf of a newsletter from this ShelterHelps, which seems to be some kind of nonprofit housing group for AIDS people or homeless people—he can’t quite tell if it’s either or both—and, pulled up from the newsletter, he reads: “ . . . included Trayvon Spratt, Hector Villanueva, Eduardo Salazar, and Melvin Robinson, residents of SH’s newly opened Brownsville home. Heading up Christmas tree duties . . .”

  The newsletter dates back only four months.

  Mateo looks up from his tablet at the sheets of rain pounding the Lower East Side. Oh, shit, he thinks. You’ve really gone down a wormhole now. He knows he should call Gary, his sponsor, or at least ping him a message: I’ve gone down the wormhole again.

  But he doesn’t. Zombielike, he looks up the address for this ShelterHelps Brownsville residence, and before he can even let himself think about it too much, he’s grabbing his keys and an umbrella. He’s down on the street holding the umbrella in front of him like a shield, fending off the rain, until he’s inside a half-flooded subway station, fingering the digital map on the wall to figure out the best way to Brownsville.

  Once he’s on the 3 train, he has nothing to do but sit there in a car with about six or seven other rain-bedraggled passengers, various dirty puddles of water on the train floor, and think about what a fool thing he’s doing, walking like a, yes, well, a zombie, right back into the belly of the beast. Fucking Brownsville? Where the fuck are you going? he thinks.

  When he steps out onto the elevated platform at the Rockaway Avenue station, the rain is still driving down hard. He pushes open the umbrella and makes his way through what, even amid the torrent, he can see is maybe the last ungentrified neighborhood in New York City—a warren of behemoth brick towers that make the projects of the Lower East Side look positively quaint. He pushes his way along, adrenaline charging through his whole body like before a drug rush, getting soaked by the diagonal sheets of rain, his umbrella offering little protection. Finally he finds the house, walks up its sad three-step brick stoop, and rings the bell, flattening himself out under the door’s narrow ledge to beat the rain.

  A skinny, short bald man, probably in his late forties and of Latin background, opens the door, wearing a Yankees cap and a faded Lady Gaga concert T-shirt from 2014. “This is a private residence!” he says.

  “I know, I know,” Mateo says. “Um, I’m here to see a resident. Hector Villanueva.”

  The guy’s face brightens, amused. “You here to see Hector?” He cackles. “He never gets visitors!”

  That stabs Mateo’s pounding heart a little. “Well,” he says. “I’m one.”

  The guy ushers Mateo inside to a little sitting room with black-and-white political demonstration photos on the wall and about three other guys, two chubby black men and a skinny queeny-looking old white dude, watching one of last year’s intergalactic blockbuster movies on the big, family-room-size tablet affixed to the wall, a keyboard and console beneath it.

  “Sit down,” the short Dominican guy says. “You want coffee?”

  Mateo declines, shaking rain from his head.

  “I’ll go up and tell him you’re here,” the guy says. “What’s your name?”

  “Mateo,” he says. “Mateo Mendes.”

  He trudges up the stairs. Sitting there half soaked, Mateo notices that the other three guys keep glancing at him. Finally, one of them, the chunkier of the two chunky black guys, says, “You Hector’s nephew or something?”

  “Hunh?” Mateo asks. “Unh, no. A friend. An old friend.”

  “You look like him!” the white guy exclaims.

  “Oh, really?”

  The less chunky black guy points a finger at the white guy. “You think all brown people look the same.”

  “That’s offensive,” the white guy counters.

  Then everyone settles back into awkward silence. Mateo sits there and stares dumbly at the cosmic shoot-’em-up unfolding on the tablet screen. He thinks about Dani, Char, Ruby, and the project, all back in Manhattan, which suddenly seems so very, very far away, as though he may never get back. It’s not too late for him to ping Gary, he thinks. He begins to pull out his tablet to do so, but then the short guy hurries back down the stairs.

  “What’s your name again?” he asks Mateo. “I forgot.”

  This sends the other three guys into cackles. “You don’t got AIDS no more but you still got AIDS dementia!” the chunkier black guy crows.

  “Shut up, queens,” the short guy says, unfazed. He turns back to Mateo.

  “Mateo,” he says clearly. “Mendes. I haven’t seen Hector in, like, ten years. I grew up in his building in the East Village.”

  The chunky black guy points at the little Dominican guy. “She can’t remember all that!”

  “I’ma cut you in your sleep tonight,” the little guy says. Then back to Mateo: “Hold on.”

  Mateo and the three guys settle back into their mute watching of the movie. Finally, the less chunky black guy turns to Mateo with what looks like a newfound suspicion. “Are you here to sell Hector pills or drugs?”

  “What?” Mateo says, startled. “No! Of course not.”

  “You better not be,” the guy says. “We are so damn sick of her little binges and her little crashes and all the tiptoe, tiptoe we have to do, bringing food to her room and all that.”

  The chunkier one turns from the screen. “Yeah, but she’s been pretty steady lately.”

  “She finally found marijuana maintenance, thank goddess,” the white one says.

  This last bit of news brings Mateo an internal heave of profound relief. In fact, now he notes that the whole house smells faintly of marijuana. Not that that’s any big deal—it’s pretty much legal everywhere. He wouldn’t be surprised if the house grows its own supply. Everybody else does.

  The short guy comes down again. “He says come on up,” he announces, plopping next to the white guy on the couch. “Second floor at the end of the hall. The door’s open.”

  “Thanks,” Mateo says. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the four of them watch him as he gets up to leave. Halfway up the flight of stairs, it occurs to him that he could simply leave now. He still has that choice. He knows this is not the way Sponsor Gary would have him do this: impulsively, without consultation, seeking out his former number one using companion. But beneath that mild panic, a quieter voice tells him to go ahead, and he does.

  He comes to the second floor, where the smell of pot has grown thicker. He walks down the hallway. He hears old R&B, maybe Mary J. Blige, coming from one of the rooms behind a closed door. The last door down, with a big Puerto Rico flag pinned on it, he peers in.

  And there he is, lying barefoot in bed with his back to Mateo, reading a tablet, rain pounding on his closed window. Mateo’s heart throbs, his head spins. He tries to make out the old smell, which was always so rank and earthy yet strangely comforting. He glances around the room—it’s plastered in posters and photos that are, variously, of near-naked musclemen, Puerto Rico, and the old demonstration days, all the shots with the hand-lettered posters and the cops and the handcuffs and the megaphones. The room looks like how Mateo remembers his derelict basement apartment: a mess. Clothes, magazines, and books everywhere, sprawled out on an old-fashioned woven carpet. A pot haze hangs over the room.

  Mateo knocks on the open door lightly, and Hector twists around in bed, looks at him. Oh God, Mateo thinks. His face is so, so worn, so much more creased and hollow, than the last time they saw each other, that nightmare in the L.A. apartment. Hector looks about half his form
er size, swimming a bit in his old jeans and a faded, pilly T-shirt that says, in black block letters on a white background, STOP THE CHURCH. Mateo notices two crutches propped against the bed. He must be, what, now—Mateo roughly calculates—sixty-five? Older?

  The two men just stare at each other. Mateo can feel his eyes filling with tears, which he blinks back firmly. “Do you remember me?” he finally asks.

  “Negrito, right?” Hector says. Oh God, that voice. It is all hurtling back to Mateo now so fast, so fast. That last psychotic night. Oh, shit. “Yeah, I remember you, kid. From the Christodora.”

  “Right,” Mateo says. He realizes his right hand is trembling, so he shoves it in his coat pocket.

  With great difficulty, Hector sits up in bed, swings his feet around. “Come in,” he says.

  So Mateo does. He steps into the small room with its sink and mirror in the corner, his eyes blinking a bit from the pot haze. He spies a Siamese cat curled up in the corner of the bed. The cat raises herself, stares at Mateo evenly.

  “That’s Dulce,” Hector says, reaching over to stroke away her concern. “She’s everybody’s here.”

  Mateo nods.

  “You can close the door,” Hector says.

  Mateo does, then just stands there by it.

  “You can sit there,” Hector says. He points to an old armchair by the window that Mateo hadn’t noticed, it’s so covered in clothes. “Just throw those clothes on the floor,” Hector says. “I’d help you but I can’t get up fast. I just had back surgery.”

  “It’s okay,” Mateo says, pulling clothes off the chair. As he does, that scent—leather, sweat, cigarette smoke, an outdated cologne—comes unmistakably back to him, sends him reeling into those days and nights nodding in the basement apartment, strangers’ feet passing by the window.

  Finally, Mateo sits. “I wanted to come see you,” he manages to say.

  Hector sits up in bed. “Why’s that? Do you wanna talk to me about some information you got?” He looks at Mateo narrowly, which unnerves Mateo, until he realizes it might be partly because he’s stoned, with heavy-lidded eyes.

  “Actually, there is some information I got,” Mateo begins.

  Hector holds out a flat palm to stop him. “I gotta tell you something first. I didn’t know, okay? I didn’t know until the very last minute.”

  Mateo frowns in confusion. “Didn’t know what?”

  Now Hector withdraws his hand. He looks at Mateo for a long moment, searchingly. Then his shoulders droop. “Don’t fucking listen to me,” he finally says. “My head’s fried. What did you wanna ask me?”

  “I wanted to talk to you about my mother,” Mateo says. “Ysabel Mendes. You knew her, right?” He’s surprised to find that his voice is getting hoarse, that he feels like he’s going to cry, but he gulps and carries on. “From the AIDS movement, right? You guys were friends, right? I found it online today. Why’d you never tell me?”

  Hector’s eyes have grown wide. “Negrito, I didn’t know she was your mother,” he says. He seems agitated despite his pot haze. “I didn’t even know she had a baby. She stopped coming around to the meetings. Then I was in D.C. all the time. We lost touch before she died.”

  Mateo sits there, staring at him, absorbing all this. “I always knew her name growing up,” he says. “I knew she died of AIDS and I knew she did stuff for AIDS. But I never tried to look that shit up until just recently. I didn’t want to know. But then I found this stuff online, this interview with this guy that runs this place—”

  “You mean Karl?” Hector asks.

  “Yeah, yeah, Karl. And he said in this interview—he said you and my mother were close, you worked on stuff together. Like, on the Latino committee?”

  Hector leans back again in bed, closes his eyes, and sighs. “We did,” he says.

  “But just like that you broke off with her and didn’t see her when she was dying?”

  Hector opens his eyes, looks at Mateo with a face full of shame, then looks away, saying nothing.

  Now Mateo’s crying quietly and wiping away tears. “Hector,” he says. He realizes it might be the first time he’s ever called him by his real name instead of Fagfunk or Freakshow or something. “Can you do something for me?”

  Hector doesn’t look up at him, but manages to say, “What is it?”

  “Can you just—tell me about my mother? Tell me what you remember about her?”

  Hector doesn’t look up. Mateo wonders if he’s fallen asleep. But then Hector makes a snuffly, creaking sound, and Mateo realizes that he’s crying as well, his creased face balled up tight.

  Mateo watches him, paralyzed. He’s scared the guys downstairs are going to hear Hector and come running up and accuse him of harassing their housemate. Eventually, Mateo gets up and goes to sit down next to Hector on the bed. He puts a hand gently on Hector’s knee.

  “Hey,” Mateo says. “Hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. I’ll go, okay? I’ll go.”

  But as Mateo is about to stand up, Hector reaches out and pulls him back down. “No, no, don’t go,” Hector says. He draws in a deep breath and sits up straighter. “I’ll tell you about Issy.”

  Mateo’s eyes widen. “Issy?” he says. “That’s what you called her?”

  Hector nods. “That’s what everyone called her.” Then, with Mateo sitting close by him on the bed, the cat climbing up between them, Hector tells Mateo about a night in, oh, he thinks it was 1988, 1989, a typical Monday night at a meeting of the movement, and Hector had just given a presentation, and he was out in the lobby having a breather when a woman, a short Dominicana with a huge head of hair, crept in and asked him, Is this the AIDS meeting? And Hector said yes, and said, Why? and she broke down and said she had AIDS and thought she was dying, and she was so scared, so scared, nobody knew, her family would turn her out if they knew, and she was going to die just like her friend Tavi had just died.

  And then he, Hector, remembered that, yes, he had met the woman, Tavi’s best friend, at a club, oh, say, five years before when it was only first breaking out that there was an illness going around. And how relieved this woman, Issy, was when she realized that, yes, they had met before. And how, he thinks, they all went out later that night, how it had felt good to dance together. And how this shy, awkward Issy did not know anything about the disease, but how she started coming to meetings, week after week, and how they formed a Latino caucus, and how she gained confidence that she was certainly not going to die any time soon, and maybe not die from this disease at all, because here they were working on new treatments—government-researched treatments, but also all sorts of experimental treatments, too—and it was very likely they would beat the clock. They—well, a lot of them—thought that, together, they would beat the clock. And he watched this insecure girl from Queens, a dental hygienist, become a very, very effective speaker and communicator and organizer and motivator of other women, Latinas, living with AIDS, and how, oh, she came to a very prominent place in the group going into 1990, 1991, along with a few other women.

  And how, then, Hector’s lover was dying, then died, and Hector cut everybody off and eventually split off into a group that all but moved to D.C. for three years, and how in that time, Hector got a call from the hospital that Issy was dying, she hadn’t been able to beat pneumonia again, and Hector said good-bye to her over the phone even though she wasn’t able to speak back to him.

  “You didn’t go to the funeral or anything?” Mateo asks.

  “I couldn’t leave D.C.,” Hector says. “We were so busy that year.”

  Mateo looks at him skeptically. “You knew about treatments that could have saved her?”

  Hector flashes an alarmed look at Mateo. “Oh, no, my friend, oh, no,” he says. “You have no fucking idea, you need to read your history. Everybody who was looped in, who wanted it, got the best that New York had to give, but it didn’t f
ucking matter until ’96, ’97, when the big guns came along.”

  Mateo is confused. His face must betray it, because now Hector says, “You need to read your history. We were rushing to get drugs made to save her. Everybody. But we couldn’t get to everybody in time.”

  Mateo sits there silently, not knowing what else more to say or to ask. Hector strokes the cat with his large, brown-flecked hand.

  “How’ve you been these past ten years?” Mateo finally asks.

  Hector shrugs, gestures around the room. “I’m still here,” he says.

  “Me, too,” Mateo says. “I’m still here.”

  Hector laughs quietly. “You’re better than here,” he says. “I read about you in the paper. You’re a big-time artist now.”

  “Not big-time,” Mateo says, embarrassed. “Like, small-time big-time.”

  “Small-time big-time,” Hector echoes, laughing. “You finally got your shit together. Good for you. How’s the lady from the Christodora who adopted you?”

  This catches Mateo off guard. “Uh,” he begins. “I don’t know. I haven’t really talked to her in a few years.”

  Hector’s eyebrow cocks. “Why not?” he asks. “She was always looking out for you when you were a little negrito.”

  This line of questioning makes Mateo distinctly uncomfortable. “I dunno, uh. We just needed time apart, that’s all.”

  “We? Both of you?”

  Now Mateo sits up a bit, defensive. “Well,” he says, “me. I needed some time out west to myself.” Hector regards him skeptically. “What about you?” Mateo asks to change the subject. “How have you been?”

  Hector looks down again. Finally he says, “What can I say? I don’t have the energy I used to. Mostly now, I sleep.”

  They fall back into silence. Mateo glances at Hector, who’s staring down into his lap, stroking the cat. Mateo realizes that the druggy, adrenaline-charged fear he felt on the way here, coming up the stairs, has passed. This is where, in the end, Hector’s madness had left him: in a group home in outer Brooklyn, with a little room and a cat. And yet this man knew his mother, the woman he never knew, and that means something to Mateo, makes him feel differently about Hector than he did back when he never much thought about his mother’s past as an activist.