Tim Murphy - Christodora

Mateo’s eyes bugged out. He couldn’t help laughing. “What the fuck, Freakshow? Get back here, you’re freaking me out.” Carrie rode Mateo wordlessly, her head dead on his shoulder, a damp spot growing on the futon where they were joined.

But Hector didn’t move for several more seconds. Then, wordlessly, Hector was putting on his clothes, grabbing his wallet and the keys to his rental car.

“You’re fucking leaving?” Mateo asked. Alarmed, he pulled Carrie off him and stood up, so fast he fell to his knees. The room was spinning and stretching; it felt like a funhouse one minute and a horror show the next. The techno music from the porn filled his entire head and wrapped around his brain in strange ways. Freakshow was walking out the fucking door! Where the fuck are you going? Mateo tried to call to him, but he couldn’t — instead, Mateo found himself crawling toward Hector, terrified he was leaving.

You can’t leave me now, Mateo tried to say, but could not. He watched the last of Hector’s construction boot as he closed the door behind him. Mateo reached for the door, opened it, crawled and stumbled down the hallway of the apartment, but Hector could still somehow run, and he did.

Mateo watched Hector from the window in the stairwell as he drove away. Sunlight was emerging. Mateo was naked, stinking and sweating, in the stairwell where anybody could find him. Carrie and the beanpole were back in the apartment, with all the drugs, doing God knows what. You should go back inside, he thought from somewhere far away. A huge part of his body and mind were screaming to resume the animal coitus. But he was paralyzed, standing and staring out at the street. He couldn’t muster a fully formed thought. Eventually he started masturbating. He watched a stray morning jogger pass. How much time had slipped away? Minutes? Hours?

Then he heard distant sirens. Were they really sirens? Yes, they were. And they were getting closer. But Mateo still couldn’t move. With fascinated detachment, he watched the ambulance pull up in front of the apartment, disgorge itself with paramedics charging up the front walk with all their gear. He could hear the commotion on the floor below as they buzzed every buzzer. He finally determined to turn around and go back inside the apartment, and when he did, shuffling naked down the carpeted hallway, he was met with the team of five EMTs.

There he was, alone. That was the first thing Milly thought when she saw him, in the playroom of the Catholic boys’ home in Fort Greene where she’d agreed to meet her mother before lunch. There were other boys about twelve feet away, all of them black or brown, all of them four or five years old and involved in an elaborate game of toy-car smashup, but this boy whom Ava had standby guardianship over until he someday found a real home, whom Ava had said she wanted to check in on, lay alone on his stomach, on the bright orange carpet in the cheerful room full of sunlight and bright-colored pictures on the walls and primary-color beanbag chairs, and drew scary, hairy creatures with dark Crayolas on white craft paper. The first thing Milly noticed about him was his riot of glossy black curls.

Milly and Ava knelt down beside him. “Emmy, this is Mateo,” Ava said. “Mateo, this is my daughter, Millicent.”

“Hi, Mateo,” Milly said. “What are you drawing?”

For several seconds, Mateo didn’t stop his work. Then he glanced up at them both quickly. “Monsters,” he said.

“Oh, wow, monsters!” Ava exclaimed. Her nasal Queens accent pierced the room, Milly noticed. “What kind of monsters are those, Mateo? Are they friendly ones?”

Mateo looked up at Ava and rolled his eyes, which made Milly giggle a bit inwardly. “No,” he said flatly. “Monsters aren’t friendly.”

“Some monsters are!” Ava insisted. “What about the Cookie Monster?” God, Milly thought, her mother was being so loud. “You know who the Cookie Monster is, right?”

Again — studiously, it seemed — Mateo let a few beats pass, colored a few more strokes, before looking up with his exquisitely bored brown eyes. “No,” he said.

“We don’t have a TV in the house.”

Milly and Ava looked up. It was Sister Ellen, who ran the house, a stocky, short-haired woman in jeans, a sweatshirt, and a Yankees cap. “It’s a good thing,” the nun added.

“Not even for Sesame Street ?” Ava asked. “You can’t deprive kids of Sesame Street !” She was half joking, Milly thought, but she also wasn’t — she was bossing. “Emmy, can you imagine if you hadn’t had Sesame Street ? It’s the best babysitter!”

“You can’t miss something you don’t know that you don’t have,” Sister Ellen said lightly. “When these guys get placed in foster homes, the TV thing is out of our hands, but as long as they’re here—” She broke off. “That’s a policy I set. I’d rather they read. Or play, like they’re doing now.”

Amused, Milly watched her mother pretend to consider and respect this point of view. “Of course,” Ava said. “I just thought you might make an exception for Sesame Street .”

“No exceptions,” Sister Ellen said.

Chastened, Ava stood up and continued chatting with Sister Ellen. Milly turned back to Mateo. “Can I draw with you?” she asked him.

“If you want,” he said, not looking up. He was, what, four? Five? Milly considered him for a second from her perch a foot or two above him. She couldn’t really see his face, just that mop of curly black hair. He wore an oversize Yankees T-shirt (in fact, Milly noticed, several of the boys did; Sister Ellen, in her staunch Yankees fandom, had worked out some charitable thing where the boys got visits from the players and free shirts and hats) and painters shorts and sneakers that looked like they were from Old Navy. She noticed his little chubby hand and how it held the crayon (raw sienna) masterfully, loosely. She reached for a blank piece of paper and the box of Crayolas.

“Do you mind if I use burnt umber?” she asked him.

“Nope.”

She set to her drawing, plucking other colors from the box. She was delighted when she noticed he’d begun peeping over from his own drawing, with longer and longer glances.

“There,” she said, holding up her work. “What do you think?”

“What is it?” he said, not looking up.

“It’s you holding hands with a friendly monster.” And that’s what she’d drawn: her best rendering of Mateo, dressed as he was in this moment, holding hands with and smiling alongside a big, smiling, fluffy, blue-and-yellow-colored creature, a New York streetscape sketched in behind them.

He rolled his eyes at her piteously, as though she’d failed to comprehend him the first time. “Monsters aren’t friendly,” he said, then went back to his own drawing.

“I figured I’d make up one that was. The world’s first friendly monster! That’s okay, right?”

He didn’t bother to answer this. Milly sat there and looked at the top of his head. Then she looked at his picture. She could see his skill. She knew he had looked at pictures in books and instinctively knew how to recreate lines. She gave up trying to engage him and just watched him draw. Coolly, he didn’t acknowledge her once, though he certainly had to know she was still there.

Her mother and Sister Ellen came back in the room. Milly stood.

“So you’re an artist, your mother tells me,” Sister Ellen said. Milly was starting to see why her mother and Sister Ellen had ended up working so closely together the past few years. They were both bossy, blunt women who probably got things done very quickly.