Tim Murphy - Christodora

She turned it over and read the date stamp: 04/14/1984. She turned it back around and stared at it intently. Neither Sister Ellen nor Mateo had ever mentioned this picture to her. But she didn’t have to think too hard to realize that it was likely Mateo’s mother, Ysabel Mendes, of whom her own mother had often spoken.

Milly scrutinized the woman’s face — not especially pretty but not ugly, either; eyes large and alive — looking for signs of Mateo. Mateo was lighter than his mother. He’d certainly received her wild curls, though. Milly felt tenderness for the woman, and gratitude, and also burning curiosity about exactly whom she’d gotten with to make Mateo. I hope you know he’s okay, she thought, talking to the picture. My mom took care of him for you. You can relax.

Later that afternoon, Milly was in the drugstore and bought a frame for the picture. She got home and took the frame into Mateo’s room and intended to put the picture in the frame and place it on Mateo’s dresser. But as she began to, she thought better of it. She found some photos she had just had developed of all of them at the beach and put one in the frame and set that on Mateo’s dresser instead. She left the photo of his mother tucked between his mattress and the wall, just where she’d found it, and never said a word about it to Mateo.

Occasionally in the coming years, when Mateo wasn’t home — and amid an overall new happiness and sense of purpose Milly felt upon being a mother, which settled deeply and comfortably into her bones and went a long way toward dulling the quiver of dread she’d lived with most of her life — she’d slip into his room and examine the photo and ponder the final years of Ysabel Mendes.

On the street in front of the apartment in Westlake, Hector got in his long-term rental car, shaking. You are so fucking high , he told himself. The deep, deep-down survival voice told him that if he didn’t take a Klonopin right now, he was going to do something very, very bad, like drive the car over the first cliff he saw. He found the pill in the front pocket of his jeans, chewed it carefully and thoroughly, washed it down with the rest of a sticky bottle of Gatorade lying on the floor of the car. The pill wouldn’t kick in for thirty minutes, he knew, but he still had to act fast. He pulled out his cell, started to dial 911, then noticed that the young, skinny twink he’d been with had left his own cell phone on the seat of the car. All the better, then. Hector picked it up, punched in 911. The woman on the other end was immediately barking for his name, address, phone number, location.

“There’s three people fucked up on drugs in an apartment on the corner of West Second Street and South Union and I think one of them is overdosing. You have to send EMTs.”

“Sir, what is the address and number of the apartment?”

He didn’t know. “It’s right at the corner of West Second Street and South Union. It’s off-white with a flat roof.”

“Sir, what is your name? Are you at the scene, sir?”

“I told you where it is, you just better get there,” he said.

He tried to hang up but the call, an emergency call, wouldn’t let him. He backed up the car to the building, where he noted the address and spoke it into the phone. He couldn’t remember what buzzer they’d buzzed only — when was that? How much time had passed? Fifteen minutes or three hours? The sun was rising in the east, pushing dazzling grades of red and gold into the sky, the neighborhood still silent. He threw the phone onto the small plot of lawn in front of the building.

The pill wouldn’t kick in for a while, but he had to drive — he had to get out of here. No, no, wait! He couldn’t go until he knew EMTs were coming. He started the car. The volume of the radio startled him. Had they really been blasting it that loud on the way here? He turned it down. It was that Lady Gaga song from the year before, “Born This Way,” the one that sounded like the old Madonna song. Paranoid from the drugs and making too many connections, he freaked out: it was a sign from Ricky, who’d been obsessed with Madonna!

He steadied himself to drive around the corner, where he parked. He blasted the A/C; he was soaked in sweat. He thrust his right hand into his pants and slowly masturbated to give himself something to focus on, to keep himself from going crazy. He dreaded that at any minute someone might walk or jog by with a dog, spot him behind his black sunglasses, but nobody did; he finally glanced at the car clock and realized it was 6:30 A.M. On Wednesday? Thursday? As soon as he’d flown in to Palm Springs over a week ago, as soon as he’d settled into the tiny studio apartment he rented each winter for nearly nothing from an old New York friend who’d long ago moved west but spent the winter in Puerto Rico, as soon as he’d made a meth connection and the glass pipe and torch had come out, he’d lost track of time. After that, it was just the laptop, the porn, the random visitors with their intermittent glances through the blinds at the sun-baked pool in the courtyard, from which they thought they heard laughter but which appeared deserted. Were people playing tricks on them? Hector and his visitors wondered, as the light and dark rotated rapidly outside like in a time-lapse video.

Now, in the car, he thought he was hearing sirens. No, wait, he was hearing sirens. He was relieved and terrified, because he often thought he was hearing sirens, getting closer, always waiting for the sirens to crest outside his apartment, stop, the silence, then the inevitable raid he’d been waiting for for years now that never happened, remarkably. (Why not? He had half wanted it to happen, to be delivered finally from his paranoia.) Unmistakably, now, these sirens were approaching. He heard them surge and stop around the corner. Gripping the wheel, he U-turned in the street, saw the ambulances pulling up in front of the building, and drove on. He felt his first wave of something approaching a notch less than psychosis. They might get in trouble with the law — how many drugs had he left in the apartment? — but at least nobody would die.

He drove aimlessly, so anxiously he was driving at a ridiculous crawl. His eyes felt like they were prying their way out of their sockets behind his sunglasses and he kept thinking he was seeing things — children, animals — in his periphery. He was in some truly nondescript part of L.A., all ugly, boxy, sand-hued 1960s apartment buildings, tired old palm trees in front of them, as the sun climbed higher and the same wearying California azure suffused the sky. What to do? Could he possibly get back to Palm Springs?

Then the thought sprang up on him again, hard, for the first time since that moment the boy had said the name aloud — Ysabel Mendes! — and he said aloud, “Oh my God,” and had to pull over again. He just sat there. Why had the boy said it? He started making horrible connections: the boy was living in the Christodora because Ava’s daughter had adopted him. Ava and Issy. Had he ever heard — had he heard, back in 1994, 1995, that Issy had had a baby before she died? Heard that from Ava or somebody in the world of AIDS? He couldn’t remember. By that point, he’d almost completely broken away from the original street activists and was usually either in D.C., in meetings with his elite colleagues and pharma and the feds, or off at big circuit parties, expensive raves for gay jet-setters, fucking everyone he could to forget about Ricky. He was ashamed to admit that when Ava had given him the date for Issy’s memorial service, he found the thought of attending too painful, so he’d not canceled his meetings in D.C. He’d sent flowers instead.