* * *
—
Cel decides to walk, since it seems that no one will care. She heads south, past tourists in culottes, girls in Bettie Page bangs. A woman led by an army of officious dachshunds. Old men playing chess in the park, using bottle caps as pawns. An economy old Hal would have liked. One of them, with gray-matted hair and a bright red nose, winks at her.
In front of the Sunshine Hotel, she’s almost run over by a taxi. “Watch where you’re going!” the cabbie shouts, and Cel is nearly touched by the depth of his anger. Once in Times Square she saw a man scream Look the fuck out! just before a bus nearly barreled through another man in a crosswalk. Afterward the shouting man’s terror had morphed into a sort of trembling apoplexy; he could barely bring himself to shake the other man’s hand.
Cel becomes aware of an umber cast to the light; across the street, men are packing up their drums. She scurries underneath an awning promising BABES GO-GO GIRLS BEAUTIFUL LADIES, moments before the rain hits. She waits. When the rain downshifts, Cel makes a dash to the sidewalk, almost slamming into a woman walking her dog. The woman, Cel sees, is crying. Cel scrambles away before fully registering the other details (leash wrapped three times around wrist of one hand, half-smoked cigarette in the other), muttering apologies she knows will be drowned out by the dopplering honks of what seems—but cannot really be?—a single spectacularly outraged taxi.
* * *
—
Cel is home early enough to do laundry—which, by God, she does! By the time she gets back to the apartment again, she is panting, her legs like aspic: six months in New York and she still hasn’t managed to master her own stairs. She leans against the wall, thigh muscles twitching, before fishing out her key. The key is strictly a formality: their lock is so easily picked that Cel had taken to using her Smith ID for a while until Nikki proclaimed this bad for morale.
Inside, the floorboards croak boisterously—Cel always feels a bit reproached by them—and today, this feeling is compounded by the sight of Elspeth, sitting primly on the sofa.
“Well, well,” she says.
“Oh, hi!” says Cel, dropping her laundry basket.
“You forgot about me,” says Elspeth. “Why are you wet?”
“I was at the Laundromat and my clothes didn’t dry. I didn’t forget.” Cel hangs these statements together as though one supports the other: no one can say she has learned nothing from working in television.
“Did you use the dryer I told you?” says Nikki, emerging from her room.
“Yes,” says Cel, dropping onto the sofa. “I even took someone else’s stuff out. I had to touch so much whimsical underwear, and it still didn’t work.”
“You’re, like, leaking cold water,” says Elspeth.
Cel throws her a blanket and pats her on the head. Elspeth is wearing the usual—flowered skirt, clunky glasses, bafflingly large sneakers. Her green skunkish-striped hair is arranged into stalagmitic points.
“Nice hair,” says Cel. “You look like the Statue of Liberty. I guess you’ve met Nikki.”
“I have indeed met Nikki,” says Elspeth. “She was just telling me about her, um, pants?”
“It’s a skort,” says Nikki. “Like, it looks like a skirt? But underneath it are shorts.”
“The wonders of New York.”
“Oh, I’m sure you can get them everywhere,” says Nikki. “Even Massachusetts.”
Elspeth kicks Cel under the blanket.
“I thought you were supposed to be here later,” says Cel.
“I was supposed to be here at noon,” says Elspeth. “I left you a message and everything.”
“Sorry. It’s been kind of—hectic around here.”
“I can imagine. Well, no, actually, I can’t. Anyway, I had so much time to kill I wound up waiting for student rush tickets to Phantom. Then I actually got them, and I called and you still weren’t home, so I had no choice but to actually go.”
“You did?”
“My God, the daddy issues in that thing! It’s like Freudianism set to song! Have you seen it?”
“I have,” says Nikki. “A couple times.”
“Isn’t it hilarious?” says Elspeth. “And I mean, disturbing, obviously.”
“I think it’s romantic,” says Nikki.
Elspeth looks at Cel with an expression of blunt disorientation, as though she’s gotten off at the wrong bus stop. Cel pats her foot reassuringly.
“I’m sorry I forgot,” she says.
“You said you didn’t forget.”
“I know,” says Cel. “I’m sorry about that, too.”
* * *
—
On Wednesday, the CPA calls for a boycott of The Mattie M Show.
“A boycott!” says Luke on the phone. “Well, why not, right? First apartheid South Africa, now us!”
The boycott makes the first hour of the Today show: already it is clear that offscreen, something real is beginning. The CPA’s targeting seems reasonably savvy—pitched at companies conservative enough to be sympathetic to the cause, successful enough to consider withdrawing their business, and big enough to hurt the show badly if they did. These are the companies that have never been thrilled to be advertising on Mattie to begin with, but for whom, until now, the calculations have been relatively straightforward—not only because the ads reliably move sales, but also because Mattie’s viewership is wide enough to serve as a proxy for public opinion. Mattie is just too popular to be a branding liability, no matter what any of the advertisers think privately; for this reason Mattie regularly wins business from “family-friendly” companies who shun considerably milder shows with somewhat smaller audiences. But now, it seems, the calculus is shifting.
On her way to Luke’s office, Cel nearly trips over the new publicist.
“Excuse me,” she says, and the man nods magnanimously. His hair is cicatrized with something she can only hope is gel, and Cel can tell from just looking at him that he has absolutely always been rich. What is it, the way a person with money seems the host of every room he enters?
By way of greeting, Luke hands Cel a Coke with a straw. She’s been a straw fanatic ever since reading an article about pull tabs and rat urine. She keeps accidentally bringing this up at parties. Suzanne Bryanson is on TV again, looking marginally more polished—she’s invested in some decent makeup, at least a bit of eyebrow intervention. Ominous upgrades, she thinks, implying a commitment to the long haul.
“I can’t imagine what Mattie meant with that comment,” Suzanne Bryanson is saying. They must be talking about Mattie’s Mein Kampf remarks. “But I do know it is ultimately a distraction. That conversation is the same as the endless debate about the authenticity of Mattie’s fights. But that’s not really the point, is it? The point is that we want those people to have been hurt. We feel entitled to the reality of that violence.”
It’s obvious that much of this is memorized, though Cel doubts many people will notice, and she truly can’t imagine who will care.
“We are disappointed as consumers if it is fake,” says Suzanne Bryanson. “And over time, this deadens us to pain. It contributes to a sort of latent mass sociopathy in the culture.”
Cel has never seem someone attempt such Gettysburg-ian loftiness on television, let alone pull it off.
“I cannot listen to this shit,” says Luke, turning off the TV.
“I met the publicist,” says Cel.
“Well, allow me to kiss your ring.” He stares into the hallway, where aerial hoop performers twirl sedately. They’re here to entertain the audience during commercials, but the juvenile delinquent episode has been canceled yet again—and so once again there is no audience, and the twirlers twirl for no one.
“Will it shock you if I’m not overly optimistic about that guy?” says Luke.
“I think I’m pretty much beyond
shock at this point.”
“Ha!” says Luke. “Don’t let Mattie hear you say that. He’ll take it as some kind of dare.”
* * *
—
The boycott makes the nightly news, then the eleven o’clock, then—weirdly—the Tonight Show monologue.
“Turn that off,” says Elspeth. “Go to bed.”
“I am,” says Cel. “I will.”
She doesn’t. Instead, she watches the midnight rerun of Mattie M on the NBC affiliate. Tonight’s Forbidden Passion is about the brother and sister. They’re actually sort of sweet, those two: young and reasonably attractive, by Mattie M guest standards: their resemblance faint enough to register only as looking good together. They’d held hands even when the camera was off, Cel remembers.
She watches until the booing starts, then turns it off and tries to sleep.
NINETEEN
semi
1986–1989
In January, we gathered blankets and meds and went out to see the comet. In the park, they’d turned off all the lights. Stephen said it didn’t do that much for the stars.
“So, what?” said Brookie. “You want to catch this thing the next time?”
We huddled together, shivering for our various reasons. We stood amongst bond traders and dark-lipsticked lesbians and young men with skin flaking off their faces, men who did not go out much anymore in the daytime. We stood amongst the drunken longtime homeless; the bewildered newer homeless, recently sprung from the hospitals. And then, there it was, baldly visible through the weft of branches: exactly as prophesied, and right on time.
“They can figure that out,” said Brookie. “They can figure out how to put a man on the fucking moon!”
“I thought you didn’t believe in that.”
He sighed. “I believe in everything nowadays.”
Above us, the comet was a glowing goetic arrow, streaking over its spectators and beyond: over the apartment in Chelsea and the little theater in the Village, over the hospital room where Paulie had died and the beach where we’d first met him. It sailed over the firelit oil drums in the Bronx and the nude dancers tonguing Plexiglas in Times Square; it sailed over newsstands selling I ❤ NY crack pipes and that monstrous new dormitory they were putting up on Third Avenue. It streaked over our newly transfigured haunts—the Everard Baths were now a shopping center, the Saint subsumed by NYU—as well as the city’s many mad renovations. They had replaced every single china mosaic at the entrance to Bethesda Terrace; they had redone the Crotona Park Pool—where, in another alleged lifetime, a young Matthew Miller had played. For let it not be said that our government was doing nothing for us! Let us render unto Caesar all the credit he deserves!
Yes, in the world beyond our hospital rooms, New York was lurching itself back to life. The comet streaked over the new boutiques in Park Slope, the skyscrapers distorting the long-static skyline, the bistros winking along Columbus Avenue. Columbus Avenue used to be a slum where servants lived with their carriage horses: Matthew Miller told me this once, and for all I knew, it could be true. There have, of course, been stranger resurrections.
“It’s nice to see something no one else will see again, either,” said Brookie.
* * *
—
It was a time of prophecies and pilgrimages.
We flocked to the faiths of our childhoods, or else invented our own. We spoke of deities and demiurges, undines and alchemy. We marveled at the second law of thermodynamics; at the fact that, on a different day each year, all the ginkgo trees in New York City bloom quietly, synchronically, in the night.
It was a time of cultic initiation—of underground studies and buyers’ clubs. It was a time of Hail Marys. There was peptide T, albendazole, oral amphotericin B, dextran sulfate—drugs that almost certainly wouldn’t save you, but that probably wouldn’t kill you, which was more than you could say for most things, those days.
It was a time of mass conversion. Young people’s sense of immortality is widely thought incorrigible, but this doesn’t match with my notes—another footnote for the anthropologists, who are, after all, our eulogists. The young may be skeptical of mortality, but they can be persuaded—it only takes a generation watching itself go extinct.
Beyond this, transformations varied. Some of us were seized by serenity heretofore unthinkable. Bitchy cynics beamed from underneath their covers, speaking in slogans and sincerity. The chronically conflicted were finally certain, radiating the sort of deep ataraxia they’d never found in Valium. There were the reifying effects of illness, compounded by the body’s vanishing. By the end, our people were so skeletal they could only be martyrs—prisoners of conscience; wild-eyed prophets wandering the desert; victims of the sorts of evils that always shock the world, though only, of course, in retrospect.
* * *
—
The other symptoms were the side effects.
Paulie: nearly comatose from antibiotics, which anyway were failing. Bright purple tumors clustered in his gums. His breath scraping its Sisyphean way to the surface—which was, we kept telling ourselves, a sound we wanted to keep hearing.
Nick’s chest, still vaguely gorgeous, puckered where they’d lasered off his lesions. His abdomen stapled where they’d removed part of his liver. He was glad it wasn’t his stomach; other people, he said, were not so lucky.
Brookie, shaking from interferon. Stripes tigering his arms, for what reason we may have never asked. We were coming to accept these sorts of things; we were learning.
* * *
—
It was said the double-blind studies were something to consider. An even-odds shot at a placebo: oh, what the hell, at this point.
It was said that the double-blind studies were sadistic. It was said that it was perverse to let your life become a controlled variable, your suffering a sunk cost, your death the foregone conclusion against which other, more surprising outcomes might be gauged. And then to spend eternity as a data point in some ambitious creep’s paper!
It was said that all of this was a necessary constituent of publishable medical data. It was said one might as well be useful.
It was said that we would make ourselves useful to science just as soon as science made itself useful to us.
It was said that dying usefully was a last chance to live meaningfully, for anyone who hadn’t gotten around to it yet.
It was said that what had just been said was unforgivable, and that the sanctimonious fuck who said it deserved the goddamned sugar pill.
It was said that nobody had meant any of this—not a word, not a word, not a single useless word.
* * *
—
There was still sex, of a kind.
Sex was Clorox and nonoxynol-9; mutual masturbation at great distances. Sex was hydrogen peroxide and coming into the air. Sex was inspectors from the Department of Consumer Affairs flooding the bathhouses, hectoring everyone about voluntary compliance.
Brookie: “That’s when you have a safe word, right?”
Sex was jack-off clubs and safe sex signage, safe sex pledges, safe sex lit. Sex for some of us was still just sex: Stephen went to the bathhouses until they closed and then went other places instead. “Bernie Goetz,” we called him fondly: our very own Death Wish Vigilante.
Or maybe sex was somewhere else entirely, in the other profane sacraments. Kneading the skin of a hyper-articulated spine. Whisking iodine along a nipple. Sex was in the wishbone silhouette of jutting ilia, the phallic morphology of a keloidal scar. Sex was in the lytic cycle itself—its penetration, its intimacy. Sex was a hand cupped lightly around a single bony finger, a calyx of supplication: as futile and fleeting as love itself.
* * *
—
We called to hear the sound of the phone ringing. We called to see who would still pick up. We called for hospital room numbe
rs and funeral arrangements and hometown mailing addresses. Cherry Cerise was from West Virginia! How had we never known that? She was going to get shit for that, all right, when she came back to New York.
We called to try to speak of other things. What did other people talk about? Well, the economy was tanking, for one thing. The murder rate was doubling, even if you didn’t take our deaths into account, which nobody did. Other people worried about tainted Tylenol and Legionnaires’ disease; they worried about leaking Freon gas from the skating rink in Central Park. They worried flagrantly over the little boy who fell into the polar bear cage at the Prospect Park Zoo, the lone jogger assaulted in the park.
“None of Us Is Safe,” intoned the New York Post.
“Oh?” said Brookie mildly. “I hadn’t heard.”
We called to learn if we could stop by with a sandwich, and if not a sandwich, then with soup, and if not soup, then flowers, and if not flowers, then could we maybe just stop to say hello, and if not today, then tomorrow, or the next day, or the next?
We called to find out what we could do, and we called to be let off the hook.
We called to be told we might be needed; we called to be told we weren’t, anymore.
* * *
—
The funerals cycled ever faster; on the weekends, we juggled them like lovers. By now we were used to military-shiny coffins, to their sickeningly quilted interiors—we were beginning to have opinions on these things! We were familiar with the newest technological upgrades: the deceased appearing on video, in living color. We were used to the people who actually seemed surprised to be there—every funeral had one: a clueless parent, a well-intentioned boss, a teenage niece. Dramatic tension comes from the sense that events might unfold differently than they do: we watched tiredly as they grieved.
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