Christodora

by Tim Murphy

  “Anyway,” Mateo says now, “thank you for taking care of her. I mean, when she first came to you when she was all scared.” He stands up to leave. “I wish I’d known her. I’ve only had this one picture all these years. From, like, 1984. Which I don’t have anymore.” He laughs. “She looks, like, so eighties in it. Her hair is huge.”

  “Just like yours,” says Hector. He braces his hands flat against the bed. “Hand me my crutches. I wanna take you down to Karl.”

  Mateo hands him his crutches, holds him up while he fits himself into them. “Why?” Mateo asks.

  “I think we maybe have something to show you.”

  Hector instructs Mateo to go down the stairs ahead of him slowly, walking nearly backward, so that if Hector falls and tips forward, Mateo can break his fall. So Mateo does, all the way down the narrow flight, until they’re in the hallway of the first floor. Mateo walks by the sitting room, where the fellows stare at him pitilessly through the doorway. Hector leads him back through the kitchen to a messy little office with a single window, where that guy in the video, Karl, the lefty-Moses white-beard-ponytail guy, is sitting before a tablet, tapping away furiously, sipping an espresso and listening to public radio through the tablet. Just like every other room in this house, his office seems to be a shrine to all the dead AIDS people, old photos and posters everywhere. It looks like all those people ever did all day was get arrested, Mateo thinks.

  The Karl fellow looks up. “Hey there, Hector,” he says. He sounds a bit professorial or preacherly, Mateo thinks. “Who’s this?”

  “You know who this is?” says Hector, out of breath. Now, to Mateo’s surprise, he sees there’s half a gleeful smile on Hector’s crazy, craggy face. “This is Issy Mendes’s son.”

  Karl fixes his eyes on Mateo, confused for a moment. Then his mouth pops open. “Issy Mendes’s son?” he loudly drawls. “Good Lord, that’s right. I’d heard somewhere she had a baby before— ” He stood up. “And it’s you?”

  “It’s me, sir,” Mateo says.

  Stunned, Karl looks Mateo up and down. “Well, holy fucking Jesus, no damn way!” He comes around from behind his desk. “Come here!” Mateo steps toward Karl, who embraces him passionately. Karl steps back, looks Mateo up and down again about three times, looks at Hector in wonder. “The grown-up son of Issy Mendes! My God, I hope she’s witnessing this. Where have you been all these years?”

  “I’ve been living in Los Angeles.”

  “He’s an artist,” Hector says.

  “Do you know the role your mother played?” asks Karl.

  “Not much,” Mateo says. “I found something online, an interview you did. That’s how I found you. And Hector was telling me a little.”

  “Oh my goodness,” Karl suddenly says, idea-struck. “Esther’s videos.”

  “That’s why I brought him down to you,” Hector says.

  “There is a woman,” Karl says. “She was in the movement, Esther Hurwitz. She put together that website that you found me on, the AIDS Warriors website. She has thousands of hours of tapes, of interviews and demos, that she hasn’t put online yet. She just got a Guggenheim grant for the project. And she was very good friends with your mother. So I’m voicing her, okay?” He motions for Mateo and Hector to sit down in chairs opposite his desk while he taps on his tablet. Mateo helps Hector down into a chair.

  “Hello, Karl,” comes an old-time New York voice, that now-nearly-vanished accent, out of the tablet speaker. “What’s going on?”

  “Esther,” Karl booms into the tablet. “I have someone here I very much want you to meet.”

  “I was just about to go out.”

  “I’ll be quick,” Karl says. “This is too good to miss.” He turns around his tablet and props it up on his desk so that it’s facing Mateo and Hector. Mateo is staring at a sixtysomething woman with a steel-gray crew cut and black-framed reading glasses, shelves messily crammed with books and papers behind her. Karl comes around his desk to wedge himself between Mateo and Hector so that the three of them are facing her.

  Esther finally cracks a smile, spying Hector. “Oh, hello, Hector,” she says. “How are you, honey?”

  “Hello, Esther,” Hector says, grinning.

  “Who’s the handsome young man with you?” she asks. “Is that your new boyfriend?”

  Karl and Hector both giggle. “No,” Hector says. “That’s Issy’s son.”

  Esther pauses, looking blank. “What?” Then slowly her face blooms open. “Issy Mendes?”

  “Issy Mendes,” Karl repeats.

  “My old friend Issy Mendes?” The woman is scrutinizing Mateo through the screen. “Well, oh my goodness,” she says slowly, then she starts to cry. Mateo doesn’t understand why his presence today is reducing everyone to tears.

  “Oh my goodness, you’re the baby she—oh my goodness, I have goose bumps all over!” Esther laughs. “What’s your name?”

  “Mateo,” he says. “Mateo Mendes.”

  “You have her name!” Esther says delightedly.

  “I took her last name later in life,” he says. Shortly after he started working with Char, when he needed a professional name, he took it. “Mateo Heyman-Traum” no longer sat right with him.

  “My God,” she says, brushing tears from her cheeks. “I can see her now in your face. Guys, it’s so strange, isn’t it? It was thirty years ago!”

  “We were just babies,” Karl says.

  “We were babies!” Esther echoes. “We’d never get away today with what we did then. We live in a fucking police state now. Three people can barely ding each other before the fucking NYPD-slash-FBI is shutting you down.”

  “Ping, Esther. Ping,” Karl says. “Get with the program.”

  “Right, ping, ping!” She looks back at Mateo. “You don’t know what it was like back then,” she says.

  “I don’t,” Mateo says.

  “You must have no memories of your mother,” she says.

  “I don’t.”

  “Well, let me tell you. Wow. She was a scared little girl from Queens, where nobody knew she had HIV, when she first came tiptoeing into the meetings. But she kept coming. And within about a year or two—wow, Mateo. She blossomed. That was the thing about the movement, wasn’t it? People came thinking they were dying but they ended up finding out how powerful they really were.”

  Karl nods soberly. “It’s true.”

  “So your mother—” Esther continues, then: “Oh, wait! Oh my God, you guys, I have the tape!”

  Karl and Hector start laughing. “That’s why we voiced you, Esther,” Karl says.

  “Hold on, Mateo, I wanna show you something,” Esther says. The tablet screen goes green but she keeps talking through it. “The winter of 1990, Mateo, there was a very, very important demonstration at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta to get the government to expand the definition of AIDS so that women would be included in it, because they weren’t. Because at the time the symptoms and illnesses the CDC used were mostly seen in men, so women weren’t being counted and they weren’t getting the money and attention and care they needed. And the people who led this particular demonstration were the women in the group, and especially the women with HIV. So watch this, okay?”

  Mateo stares at the green screen, his heart beating fast. “This is when, again?” he asks.

  “Nineteen-ninety,” Esther says. “Thirty-one years ago. When were you born?”

  “Nineteen-ninety-two.”

  “Well,” she says, “this is your mom before she was pregnant with you and also before she got really sick.”

  Suddenly Mateo’s watching old pre-digital video footage of a bumpy camera panning around some huge demonstration taking place, in pouring rain, outside the bland suburban offices of the Centers for Disease Control. Hundreds of men and women, some of them with their faces painted a ghostly white, most
of them wrapped in black garbage bags to ward off the rain, are massed in front of the CDC’s main entrance, blowing whistles and shouting, “Women don’t get AIDS, they just die from it!” The camera pans upward to the office windows, where workers in shirts and ties are frowning at the demonstrators, then back down to a round-faced black woman with short bursts of dreadlocks on either side of her head, holding aloft a megaphone.

  “My name is Katrina Haslip,” the woman says. “I’m from New York City and I’m a woman living with AIDS.” The crowd roars. The woman goes on to talk about the health problems she and other women have had that the government doesn’t include as markers of AIDS that could help her get treatment or disability benefits. Then the woman says, “Now I want to introduce you to someone to tell you that it’s not just white women or African American women who get AIDS, it’s Latinas, too. And you do not mess with an angry Latina!”

  The crowd laughs. As Katrina hands off the megaphone, the camera pans left to a woman—a short woman, also wearing a wet black garbage bag, her rain-bedraggled black hair pulled back under a black baseball cap with a pink triangle on its upturned rim.

  “That’s her, Mateo,” Esther says. “That’s your mom.”

  “That’s her, for sure?” Mateo asks. He’s craning forward, studying every detail of her face, trying to make matches with his own.

  “That’s her,” Esther says again.

  “Thank you, Katrina, my sister,” the woman on the tape says with the same accent Mateo always used to hear around the Lower East Side growing up. “My name is Ysabel Mendes and I am a thirty-one-year-old Latina from Corona, Queens, living with HIV/AIDS!”

  The crowd erupts, some people shouting, “We love you, Issy!”

  A broad smile breaks out on her face. “Woooo!” she cries, holding the megaphone aloft.

  “I’m here today,” she continues, “because the CDC doesn’t want to count me, even though I was diagnosed with this disease two years ago and my T cells are around one hundred when the average T cells are around one thousand. Even though I’ve had more small infections the past few years than you can count, including—and I’m sorry to maybe gross out the boys here—more vaginal yeast infections in a year than most women get in a lifetime. There!” She laughs. “I said it!”

  The crowd laughs with her.

  “The CDC doesn’t want to count me, doesn’t want to say that I have AIDS,” she goes on, “and that goes for me and all my HIV-positive sisters here today. And if you don’t count us, we can’t get disability benefits, we can’t get research, we can’t get treatment—we can’t get a chance to save our own lives!”

  The crowd goes wild again. She looks so strong up there, Mateo thinks, soaked in rain but triumph and anger flashing in her eyes. Those eyes he keeps staring into, that voice he keeps parsing, trying to see and hear echoes of himself. But even as he listens to her, he’s forced to admit—he talks mainly in the cadences of Milly and Jared, the people who raised him, not this woman’s. She’s from another world.

  “So I want to say to you, Dr. Curran and Dr. Roper and all your staff,” she continues. “I want to say to you, we’ve been trying since 1988 to get you to change the national AIDS definition to include us women. We’ve invited you to come meet with us. But you’ve ignored us. So that’s why today, even in this downpour of a rain, we’ve come to you! And we’re not going away until you hear us!”

  She’s drowned out by the crowd chanting, “ACT UP! Fight back! Fight AIDS!” but she’s got her megaphone up in the air again, elated, that huge smile on her face, all her teeth showing.

  “Woo-hoo!” she cries again, as though she’s at the top of a roller coaster.

  Esther stops the tape there, on that image of her. “So that’s your mother, Mateo,” Esther says, coming back on the screen. “A very courageous woman, you see. And you know something else?”

  “What?” Mateo asks.

  “She lived to see them expand the AIDS definition. It took until 1992, but they finally did it—they finally caved to all our research and all our protests and admitted we were right. They did it right before Katrina died in 1992, but your mother lived a whole ’nother year, and benefited from the change with her disability benefits, before she died.”

  “Which was when?” he asks.

  “Late 1993.”

  Late 1993, he thinks. He was eleven months old; he doesn’t have a single memory of being held in her arms. “You were really good friends with my mom?” he asks this woman, Esther.

  She pauses, smiles. “We were, Mateo. We were. After she got pregnant with you, she stopped coming to the meetings. I wanted her to keep coming, but she didn’t want anyone to know she was pregnant, she said. She was afraid they were going to judge her for having a baby when she had HIV. I told her that was ridiculous, that everyone knew she was protecting the baby by taking AZT. Still, she wouldn’t come. I couldn’t force her. So I would visit her because she was living in a group house for women, near me in the East Village, started by a lady named Ava Heyman—an amazing lady who died a few years ago.”

  “That was my bubbe,” Mateo says. “I used to visit that place, Judith House.”

  Esther frowns in confusion. Then, “Oh my God,” she says slowly. “Oh my God, that’s right. I remember now Ava telling me that . . .” She draws a blank.

  “That her daughter?” Mateo supplies.

  “Right! That her daughter adopted Issy’s kid.” Then her voice drops, slows. “Oh my goodness, dark-eyed Milly Heyman.” Then she stops. “Well, hmm, whatever. That’s for another day. But, Mateo!” She tears up again. “I’m having some kind of time-travel cosmic moment!” She laughs, which makes Karl and Hector—and even Mateo—laugh, too. “How old are you now, Mateo? What do you do?”

  “I’m twenty-eight,” he says. “I’m an artist. I live in L.A. but I’m in New York right now to do some of the art for the UnderPark.”

  Esther just looks at him, shakes her head. “Mateo,” she says. “If only Issy could see you. Mateo, I want you to know something very seriously. There’s not a lot of documentation and I know everyone’s forgotten about it, but your mother really was a hero.”

  Mateo feels as though the woman has just put a healing hand on a place inside him that’s ached his entire life, at least since he’d learned about his mother. “Thank you,” he says, wiping tears away. “All my life, I wondered. I never knew anything about her, where I came from. We didn’t really talk about it in my family growing up.”

  “Well, honey, you come from strong stuff,” Esther says.

  “Thank you. Can I watch the tape again?”

  “Of course you can. And I’ll send you a digital package with the tape and all the photos and clippings I have of your mother. Actually, you come see me and I’ll put them together for you here.”

  “Thank you so much,” Mateo says, half embarrassed that he’s crying, half not really caring. And she runs the video again. Oh God, there she is. Could he hold her? Could he only hold her? But she at least held him, he thinks. Years before he was old enough to remember. She’d held him.

  The tape runs out and Esther says good-bye, signs off, leaving Mateo, Karl, and Hector sitting there, the rain still pounding against the windows. “I can’t believe I finally saw her,” Mateo says.

  “You know,” says Karl, leaning forward. “The work isn’t done. AIDS isn’t over. There are millions of people around the world who can’t access cure therapy.”

  “I know,” Mateo says, nodding respectfully. “I read that.”

  Then Hector says, “Let him go, Karl. He came here to find out about his mother, not to get recruited. And you don’t wanna say it, but you know it. It’s over. AIDS is over. You won. There’s plenty else to do. But”—and here Hector goes into a sarcastic singsong—“fucking AIDS is over. We’re the last fucking ghosts from the AIDS days. We won the war, Karl.”

  Karl�
��s been half aloft in his seat the whole time during Hector’s rant, but now, to Mateo’s surprise, he just gives Hector a dirty look and sits back and folds his arms over his chest. He looks down, runs his finger sulkily over the glass of his tablet. “Why doesn’t it feel like we won, then?” he asks quietly.

  “Because you’re tired, Karl,” says Hector. “You’re fucking pooped like the rest of us. But we still fucking won. So relax, you still got a bunch of old broke-down ghosts to take care of. We still need you, honey.”

  With difficulty, Hector makes to rise. Mateo stands, puts a hand behind his elbow, reaches for his crutches and hands them to him one by one, until he’s upright.

  Mateo turns to Karl, who’s standing now, too, and offers him his hand. “Thank you so much,” Mateo says.

  Karl takes his hand. “Don’t forget us,” he says to Mateo. Karl’s face brightens, then he looks sly. “How about an art fund-raiser? A ShelterHelps art fund-raiser? We had an art auction in the movement once that raised nearly half a million dollars. Nineteen-eighty-nine. Remember, Hector?”

  “I do, babe,” Hector says, making his way slowly out of the office in front of Mateo.

  “We could do that again,” Karl continues.

  Mateo fixes his eyes on Karl. “Let me get through this project I’m on now,” he says, “and then I’ll get in touch with you.”

  “You promise? These folks may be cured, but they haven’t got two nickels to rub together—the survivors, I mean. They need this home, they need services.”

  “I promise,” Mateo says, before shuffling slowly out the office door and down the dim hallway with Hector.

  Near the foyer, Hector mutters from ahead, “I’ll walk you out. I want some air.”

  “It’s still raining out, I think.”