The Spectators

by Jennifer Dubois

  By the end there were funerals for so many people who were dead that you could hardly believe that once you’d known so many people who were alive. There was the painter from the Ansonia. There was Cherry Cerise. There was the stony-faced bouncer who’d once tormented us outside the Electric Circus—that one was drugs, we assumed (though we were trying not to assume things). Nick, his beautiful features distorted by steroids, whose family was poorer and much less afraid of us than we’d been expecting (though we were trying not to expect things, either).

  Loss of this magnitude does not only remove; it subsumes, retroactively obliterates. If all this death was not a nightmare, then these lives, it would seem, had been our delusion. Had there really been so many of us, once? We did not think it could be true.

  * * *

  —

  One sometimes hears that the dead appear to be sleeping. This was not the case with ours. Our dead were so dead they were uncanny; they made death into works of high camp. Next to our dead, objects seemed animate.

  Take, for example, a postcard of the David—saved for years for the very witticisms that you will shortly be reading to a room of assembled mourners. Your hands are shaking slightly, and the postcard along with it; you stare at the David accusingly. Paulie had loved this statue, loved that city. You’ve been there once yourself, to Florence, and marveled over the David’s aliveness. There is some impossible kinesis in his stillness—the sense of a flickering basilic vein, a still-twitching muscle, a ruddy, pulpy heart, caught just now between beats. This statue breathes—you can’t believe he doesn’t—every time you blink.

  Consider this image—this representation of a representation of a man—and then consider the thing in the coffin before you. Look at its scarecrow arms, its putty skin; at its crude, uncanny shape—primitive and only dimly anthropoid, like a cave drawing or a voodoo doll. (I look awful. You don’t. I’m horrifying. I look like a thing that was never even supposed to be a person. You’re not horrifying, and it doesn’t matter how you look. Yes, I am, and yes, it does.) Stare at this object for a moment, and then try to imagine it singing “I Just Called to Say I Love You” in a loud, morning-radio voice, sporting a pageboy haircut that doesn’t quite work with its jawline. It had done this once, the shape, but recalling this now seems monstrous, nearly blasphemous: as though the person is an insult to the thing, and not the other way around.

  Witness enough dying, and it’s life that begins to seem like the heresy. Let the dead bury the dead, you think, and leave whatever’s in the coffin alone.

  * * *

  —

  It was a time of exodus.

  We went to the Philippines for psychic surgery.

  We went to Mexico to see holistic healers.

  We went to Paris, to beg.

  We went to Beth Israel, to beg.

  We went to our parents, to beg.

  We never left home and still never came back.

  * * *

  —

  It was said that AZT was a poison.

  It was said that AZT cost ten thousand dollars a year.

  It was said that the virus had developed a resistance to AZT, though this was not reflected in the price.

  It was said, by Brookie: “Not an inefficiency in the free market!”

  It was said that our terror was useful to these people. And couldn’t we see that? And couldn’t we think what that meant? They are making fortunes selling us these poisons, which we gulp in unthinking gratitude. And then we wonder why we’re dead!

  * * *

  —

  Perhaps the political is always personal; only occasionally is it terminal.

  It was a time of collective action. It was a time of chanting.

  ACT UP, Fight Back, Fight AIDS.

  ACT UP, stand tall, tomorrow morning at City Hall.

  AZT is not enough, give us all the other stuff.

  It was a time of insurrection.

  It was a time of throwing caution to the wind.

  It was a time of empowerment.

  It was a time of backs against the wall.

  It was a time of militant pragmatism.

  It was a time of radical concessions.

  It was a time of war.

  It was a time of when in Rome.

  It was a time to ask politely.

  It was a time to ask again.

  It was a time to beg, if it came to it, but then it had been that time for a while.

  It was a time of agitprop and spectacle: kiss-ins in hospital lobbies, pharmaceutical executives ambushed at their homes. Bodies in open coffins paraded past City Hall, supplicants dying-in at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

  It was a time of actions speaking louder than words.

  It was a time of silence speaking louder than words.

  It was a time of anything speaking louder than words, because words were always cheap and anyway we were out of them.

  It was becoming a time of imagery. A pink-eyed, rabid-looking Reagan on a poster. Bloody handprints on a sign. Over a hundred red balloons bobbing at the AZT pricing protest, and no Paulies anywhere to break into song.

  * * *

  —

  There were, to the very end, the punch lines.

  Did you hear they officially discovered the cause of AIDS? It turned out to be track lighting on industrial gray carpet.

  The guy who’d played Verkhovensky in The Dispossessed: “I’m not gonna take this lying down.” He had to sit upright for a full twelve days before he died because of a lesion blocking his windpipe.

  Paulie, purple from internal bleeding, the CMV running helter-skelter: “You should see the other guy.”

  How does Anita Bryant spell relief? A-I-D-S.

  Another one from Verkhovensky: “When I’m gone, throw a party. I’ve already sat the shiva.”

  * * *

  —

  It was said by the Catholic Church that condoms encouraged immorality.

  It was said by the bathroom graffiti: USE RUBBERS AND LIVE!

  It was said by the CDC that AIDS was the leading cause of death of men under the age of forty-four.

  It was said by Ed Koch: “How’m I Doin’?”

  It was said by Stephen: “Keep your powder dry.” This was said in his suicide note, so nobody could ask him what he meant.

  * * *

  —

  Some fates are generational; dodging them feels historically mortifying. To keep showing up at funerals became a special sort of shame—like being an able-bodied British man strolling around the cricket pitch at the height of World War I.

  But perhaps it was not too late for us! Test results told you what the body made known to the test: but bodies have a lot of tricks up their sleeves. Could we ever be completely sure we had been spared? Over time, this terror became a sort of hope. We’d compulsively revisit the possibilities, the places where fate might have come to meet us. We’d long ago memorized the usual suspects—the slut, the sailor, the candlestick maker—though deep down, it was our happiest nights we regarded with the most suspicion: first times with cherished lovers, best times with dearest friends. Over time, however, this came to seem crudely childish—this crypto-capitalist superstition that whatever we valued most would cost us highly. Young people do not want to die for anything—but if we must, then let it be for love! No, we thought: that would be too easy. In later years, we thought instead of smaller moments—those accidental evenings we’d be ashamed to say we treasured.

  The Halloween—this must have been in ’81?—when we’d slept with a man dressed as Reagan: if AIDS had any sense of humor whatsoever, it’d be then. Greenwich Village flickered with lanterns and gleeful mischief, and we forgot we were supposed to be unhappy.

  Or the night we’d taken a tab of MDA and danced to “Gloria” with a tubby little character acto
r, strictly off-off-Broadway.

  Or laughing with a man in horn-rimmed glasses over something truly disgusting in the Bloomingdale’s bathroom. We’d fucked in a stall a minute earlier. Now we were laughing so hard that the boys fucking in the other stall threatened to call the manager, which made us laugh even harder.

  * * *

  —

  To the end, there were the exceptions: the miracles and anti-miracles, the outliers and loopholes.

  The diagnosed were dead within a year, except that Brookie wasn’t.

  People everywhere were monsters, except at that one spaghetteria in the Village where the staff were always kind to the dying, even when the dying were not at their best.

  The dying were angels, except that once in a while, they were not.

  The entire world had ended, except that here, still, was New York City.

  * * *

  —

  One day in ’88 we return from Café Orlin to find Stephen sitting by an open window. He’s wearing a wet T-shirt, looking etiolated and strange. He’s recently grown a mustache, which we find questionable. He’s begun working out, wearing plaid shirts, the whole bit—it doesn’t suit him, and is anyway about a decade too late.

  We stare at him questioningly, and he shrugs. Maybe this is not really the beginning of anything. Stephen has known the ending to his story all along; we have, too, if we were ever really listening.

  “It’s a relief, in a way,” he says at last—and I, at any rate, believe him.

  TWENTY

  cel

  They find the second shooter’s body in a river up in Oregon, wedged against a dam. He’d shot himself some miles upstream—he must have done it in the water, hoping to anonymize his corpse—and Cel thinks this is pretty smart, before she thinks about how fucked up it is to think this way. They find his suicide note folded in a ziplock bag in his pocket—another smart move, Cel reminds herself not to think—but its contents aren’t immediately released.

  “You must stop watching that,” says Nikki, as coverage enters its fourth hour. She unplugs the TV with a flourish, and declares that the whole apartment is going out.

  Cel stares at her blearily. One of her eyes is closed, and it feels like it might be stuck that way.

  “Out,” Nikki says again, pulling Cel to her feet.

  “I’ll pass,” says Elspeth. She is coloring on her nails with a green Magic Marker.

  “Oh, come on!” says Nikki. “It will be fun! There’ll be men there.”

  “That’s okay,” says Elspeth. “I already know a few.”

  “Ooh. Anyone special?”

  “Yes, actually.” Elspeth begins to fill in her thumb. “There’s this man I’ve known for years. Handsome and smart, but tragically short.”

  “That’s too bad!”

  “Twice a year we get blindingly drunk and he spends four hours complaining that no one’s ever loved him, until I sort of try to tell him I do. Then we both forget about it and do the whole thing again in six months.” She blows on her nails. “It’s perfect.”

  “A woman needs a man like a whatever needs a whatever,” says Cel.

  “Exactly,” says Elspeth, and begins on her other hand.

  “We can get you a real manicure, you know!” says Nikki.

  “We can?” squeals Elspeth, and Cel gives her a look like Cool it.

  Cel tells Elspeth she’ll be home early, though in fact she intends to stay out very late. At the bar, she keeps catching herself scanning the crowd for Scott, and when someone taps her on the shoulder at a quarter past two, she turns around with a pointless smile. But it’s only one of the bartenders, looking harassed, shouting something Cel can’t hear three times before handing her a slip with Luke’s phone number on it. Cel glances at the bartender with a questioning can-I-use-your-phone? kind of face, but he’s already looking at her in a do-not-even-try sort of way, so she jostles her way outside to find a pay phone.

  Luke answers after a half a ring. He tells her to meet him at the studio at 6 A.M., which is in three and a half hours.

  “Well, Christ, Luke, why six? I mean, why not now, since we’re all up?”

  He tells her the ferries aren’t running yet and she asks him what ferries and he tells her not to worry about it.

  “Six o’clock,” he says. “It’s an emergency.”

  “Do you live on Staten Island, Luke? Because that’s also sort of an emergency.”

  “Six o’clock,” he says, and hangs up before she can ask how he knew where she was.

  * * *

  —

  When Cel arrives at the studios, Luke is lying in wait. He is spectral and wavery down the darkened hallway, but unmistakable even in silhouette—Cel can almost see his coiled nerves, his radiating impatience that something that should have happened already has not. It isn’t even six yet.

  “Jesus, Luke, you scared me.”

  “No, I didn’t,” he says. Then: “You walk really slow, you know that?”

  In his office, Cel watches as Luke flips on the lights, then hovers fretfully in a corner.

  “Cel,” he says, in an odd, abraded sort of voice. If he were about to fire her, she is sure he would be in a better mood.

  “Luke, I know things have been terrible,” says Cel. “I know. But whatever it is, we will deal with it.”

  “You don’t.”

  “I don’t—what?” Cel blinks. “I don’t know?”

  Luke finally sits, so Cel does, too. She hadn’t realized she’d been waiting for him, the way Mattie does for his guests.

  “Cel, listen.” Luke’s voice is husky with a weird out-of-character sincerity, as though he’s about to make some kind of declaration—of love, or something even worse that Cel is too scared to imagine.

  “I’m listening?”

  Luke buries his head in his hands and begins shaking it—manually, abnormally.

  “Christ,” says Cel. “What?”

  “It gets worse.” Cel can hear from Luke’s voice that his jaw is set.

  “It—gets—worse?” The present tense makes this feel less like information and more like prophecy. “What gets worse? And worse than what?”

  Luke issues a strange, half-crazed little laugh.

  “Luke!” Because this is an emergency, Cel allows herself to snap her fingers in front of his face. “Please speak normally.”

  At this, Luke finally raises his head and plants his gaze on Cel’s. As soon as he does, she wishes he hadn’t.

  “Cel.” He looks amazed at what he’s saying. “They were writing letters.”

  “What?” Cel’s relief that Luke is finally talking seems to be swamping her comprehension. “Who was?”

  “Mattie and the kid.”

  “The kid.” This comes out in a tone of senseless innocence. “Which kid?”

  Luke stares at her miserably; his eyes look almost moist, which is certainly impossible. There is a blank beat between them.

  “You mean the shooter?”

  He nods, and Cel feels her mouth fall open. She hears herself gasp “No!”—actually gasp it, like an overacting member of the studio audience.

  “Yes,” says Luke. “The shooter. That kid.”

  Cel’s mouth is still open; she closes it. Her shock has overridden her standing policy against letting Luke ever see her surprised, though he hasn’t seemed to notice.

  “Why was he writing Mattie letters?”

  “The answer to that, I’m afraid, is in the letter.”

  “No.”

  “Who knows? It might turn out to be a sort of epistolary mentoring relationship. There’s a grand tradition of that, you know! Perhaps we’ve got a Letters to a Young Poet for the modern age.”

  “I didn’t know Mattie wrote anyone back,” says Cel.

  “Chicken Soup for the Homi
cidal Teen!” says Luke, and cackles worryingly. He has begun contracting back into his usual attitude for disaster—harassed, half-amused, self-martyring: It figures, it figures, it just really, really does. This is one of Cel’s most despised of Luke’s many despised modalities—this tone that implies that the universe has arranged this specific catastrophe in order to persecute him specifically; that all calamities have him as their intended target, and any other harm is purely collateral. But it’s nearly comforting to hear it now—if the problem is only Luke’s, then it can’t be only hers.

  Cel heads for the window. Outside, the wind is picking up: spumes of cloud moving swiftly over the city.

  “Those don’t open, unfortunately. In case you were thinking of jumping.”

  “I didn’t know Mattie even read his own mail.”

  “Well, I suppose every celebrity has a soft spot.” Luke’s voice is too bright now, shiny like a fake coin. “I mean, with some celebrities, it’s Make-a-Wish. Or sometimes it’s dogs, you know? So this is kind of like that, except that instead of dogs or little bald cancer children, Mattie decided to mentor a mass-murderer-in-training.”

  Above Seventh Avenue, the clouds are beginning to hump in a way that reminds Cel of a picture of burial grounds she’d once seen in National Geographic. What were they called? For a long time, she’d made a whole big point of remembering.

  “Christ,” she says.

  “You know, I’m not sure He’ll be much help at the moment. But who can you call in a pickle like this?” Cel can hear Luke tapping his foot. “What was the name of Eichmann’s defense attorney? He might have a few ideas.”

  The burial mounds were kurgans, Cel remembers. She feels an idiotic relief, trailed by a baseless optimism—if this letter thing seems unbelievable, maybe it shouldn’t be believed. Really, it’s too crudely absurd to be true—a steroidal hyperextension of reality’s logic, like the paranoia of a schizophrenic or the punch line of a joke. Mattie M is terrible: how terrible is he? With this, Cel feels a fizz of hope.