Tim Murphy - Christodora

The boy looked like Issy, he could see it now. The nose — not as flat as Issy’s, but flat. And the fucking wild hair! But the boy’s skin was lighter. The boy’s eyes and his build. Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no, no. Hector began to cry. No, no, no, please God, no. He found and swallowed half of another Klonopin, started the car, drove onto a wider, multilane road. He drove past a massive, modern yellow-brick building. Then he saw there was a big crucifix on it and, at the ungodly hour of 6:52 A.M., some women were walking into it. He parked his car across the street and walked toward the church. CATHEDRAL OF OUR LADY OF THE ANGELS, said the sign. Hector felt he had nothing to lose at this point. He went inside the church, which was the size of a stadium. He passed a woman on the way in and expected her to grimace, because he knew he stank, but she smiled. In a second, he could see why. A mass was getting under way, with some engaged attendees, but they were clustered what seemed a quarter mile beyond, in the first ten rows.

The rest of the endless sea of pews was dotted with homeless people, some of them with mountains of baggage at their side. Hector sat in one of the last rows. In his youth, in the many churches he’d been inside in San Juan and New York with his mother, grandmother, aunts, and cousins, the only church that approached this one’s size was St. Pat’s in New York, which he and the other activists had stormed on a Sunday years before to protest the archdiocese’s AIDS policies, its opposition to condoms, and its hatred of gays.

“I hope it’s fucking okay that I’m here today,” he said aloud, as though waiting for approval. Nobody so much as turned toward him, which irritated him slightly. Were they deliberately ignoring him? He could feel the Klonopin kicking in — his eyes didn’t feel quite so much like they were straining to crawl out of their sockets. He laughed softly. “Fuck you, Ricky,” he said — he thought he said it aloud, at any rate; he wasn’t sure, just as he wasn’t sure if the legions of characters on the tapestries hanging overhead were moving, watching him, talking about him.

“The thing with you, Ricky,” he continued to himself, mumbling parts aloud, “you just didn’t want to live. That’s why I say fuck you, as harsh as that sounds. Because you didn’t even care that there were two people involved, not just you. You put me through that for, unh, what would that have been, from about 1989 when I first knew until ’92. You wouldn’t get tested, you wouldn’t go on meds until they forced you on meds in the hospital and it was too late, and you fucking — what about all my other work? I had to give up all that fucking work, going to Washington, because you wouldn’t take care of yourself, and then I had to watch you die, like I didn’t have better things to do that year.”

He must have really been talking out loud, at least at some point, because a guy with a leathery tanned face and a matted beard four pews ahead finally turned around and said, “Shut the fuck up, man.”

So he did, closing his eyes for a minute, one hand thrust in his pants. But at some point, the monologue began again: “You just weren’t very educated. And that your father, cutting you off. Well, that’s no reason to make me watch you die, you dumb fuck. You never had any interest in the data. Not at all. You were a dumb twink, basically.” Hector laughed. “A fucking hairstylist. I ended up with a fucking hairstylist.”

He started crying, tears engulfed with lust. “But I miss your beautiful face, Ricky. I miss it so much. Every day. And I miss your ass.”

“What the fuck, man?” The matted-beard guy four pews up had turned around again. “This is a fucking church.”

Hector didn’t even know why the guy was talking to him. He tried to look squarely at the guy through his tears. The guy looked like a filthy, sun-baked version of Charlton Heston. “I’m sorry,” he told the guy.

Now the guy’s face lit up, laughing. He made an exaggerated sign-of-the-cross benediction in his direction. “Well, my child, I forgive you. Get your hand out of your pants, though, man. You look like a fucking pervert.”

Hector took his hand out of his pants. The Klonopin was pushing down on him now like a giant, velvety hand. Probably it would be okay for him to lie down for a little bit, to get twenty minutes of sleep before he got back in the car. So he did that, feeling hugely warm and calm and protected, unable to stop babbling to himself as he fell asleep.

When he woke up, a fat, gentle-faced Latina, probably Honduran or Salvadoran, was standing over him, gently shaking his shoulder.

“Sir, you have to leave the church now, it’s almost six o’clock, we’re closing.”

“It’s seven in the morning,” he said.

“No, sir, it’s six o’clock in the evening. You’re the last person in the cathedral. You have to leave now.”

Six in the evening! Holy shit. Hector stumbled his way out of the cathedral and onto the street. His car was gone. “Oh fuck me, no,” he said. He’d parked it illegally and it had been towed? He had no idea. He’d left his wallet in the car — or at the girl’s apartment? He couldn’t remember. He hadn’t a credit card or a dollar on his person and he really didn’t much give a shit. He looked back at the benches outside the cathedral, walked across the street, lay down on one, fell asleep. How much time passed before the same fat Latina was shaking his shoulder?

“Sir, you really can’t be sleeping in front of the cathedral.”

“Why not, it’s not a public space?”

“Do you want me to call our homeless outreach for you, sir?” She was taking her cell phone out of her bag.

Hector laughed. “No, I’m not homeless. I live in New York.” He didn’t see the need to elaborate, so he lay down again and passed out. How much time passed before the same goddamn fat lady was shaking his shoulder? This time when he looked up, she was standing there with two guys, two more Honduran-looking guys with crew cuts.

“Sir, you want to come to the cathedral’s shelter for the night and have a meal and a shower and a cot?” one of the guys said.

Hector gathered lucidity for all of four seconds. He was currently in no position to figure out this mess with the vanished car, how to get back to Palm Springs.

“Sure, why not?” he told the guy, who helped him up. He got inside a minivan that drove for a few minutes on the freeway until it pulled off into a side street, next to a cinder-block building. There was a big room inside with another big old cross on the wall looking down on about fifty men, all of them black and Latino, crashed out on cots, some massed in a corner on old couches watching TV or playing cards. The place stank. As soon as he walked in, in his soiled, too-tight white jeans and tank top, they started jeering at him. “Faggot” this and “ maricón ” that. Hector was still so wasted, he didn’t much care.

“Come on, man, leave me alone,” he said wearily to one of the guys closest to him who tossed off a maricón . One of the worker guys walked him back to the showers, where he stripped off his grimy clothes and stood under the stream, lathering himself, relieved to be getting clean despite the starkness of the cinder-block stall. He realized he had left the rest of the Klonopin in the car and had his first frisson of worry over how he was going to start feeling when everything started wearing off. Couldn’t he already feel, standing here under the lukewarm stream of water, the first stabs of depression and anxiety that always came with the crash?

The staffer guy came back with a towel and a clean, used T-shirt and pair of jeans, so big for him he had to hold them up while he walked. A horrible, sinking sense of abjectness — one he could usually fuzz over and modulate after every drug run with a mix of Klonopin and sleep — started seeping in. The worker brought him to a cot with a thin, beat-up pillow, and he lay down on it fetally, wondering if it had bedbugs. Five minutes later, the worker brought him a bologna-and-cheese sandwich on Wonder Bread on a paper plate. He took one bite and realized he was ravenous, that the last thing he remembered consuming was a protein drink twenty-four hours ago. He finished the sandwich in about four bites and lay down and said his usual prayer for when he finally went to sleep during a crash: “Por favor, Dios, ayúdame a dormir esta noche.”