Tim Murphy - Christodora

After the service, the three of them and the siblings and Ricky’s closest friends had lunch at a midtown restaurant. Hector was so grateful whenever one of the siblings or the friends would make a lame joke about how Ricky, with his white-trash sweet tooth, would insist they all get the chocolate-marshmallow-goo-covered dessert. After, Hector had walked Cathy and Jim and the siblings to their hotel, then taken the subway back to the Bleecker Street apartment. He had lived there virtually alone on and off for most of the past year, with Ricky at St. Vincent’s.

Eventually, he determined that he couldn’t weep anymore or continue on in such a state of acute grief and agitation. He took a Valium, chasing it with a glass of white wine from a bottle that had been in the fridge, half empty, for several months. It tasted sour, but he sat with it at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette, waiting for the Valium to kick in. When he felt blurry, he took the bottle back to the bedroom with him and walked around the room, gathering up more stuff of Ricky’s — a pilly sleeveless T-shirt from an old Whitney Houston concert, a pair of white gym socks, a photo from Fire Island, a red jockstrap, Ricky’s astrology book, Ricky’s ironic Strawberry Shortcake snuggle doll — and brought them all into bed with him and held them in his arms until he passed out.

Seven hours later, the phone beside the bed half woke him. An hour later, it woke him fully and he reached over and answered it with a cobwebby hello.

“Hector?” It was a woman’s voice. He grunted an affirmation. “It’s Issy.”

Ysabel. He hadn’t seen her in — what? — four, five months. A veil of shame descended over his semiconsciousness. “What’s up?” he grunted.

“Are you okay?” She sounded timid, small.

“I just woke up.”

“I just wanted to call and say I’m sorry I didn’t come today. I’m not feeling well.”

“I know, Ava told me. Don’t feel bad.”

“Did everything go okay?”

“Yeah, it went fine, thanks. You can ask Ava about it. I took a Valium when I got home and I’m just waking up from it.”

“Oh,” she said, sounding mildly chastised. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“It’s okay.” Hector sat up in bed, realizing that, half stoned, he’d surrounded himself with Ricky’s stuff before passing out. The framed photo of Ricky clattered off the bed and he reached down to pick it up. “How are you doing, Issy? You’re not in the hospital still, are you?”

“No,” she said. “I stabilized. I’m with Ava. At Judith House.”

“I’ll come see you this week, okay?”

“No,” she said quickly. “I’m not really up to it just now. I’ll let you know, okay?”

“Okay,” Hector said. “Thanks for calling, Issy.”

He hung up. Even in his haze, he felt that bad feeling he’d felt with Issy the past six months. It would never be the same again after what had happened. This, he thought on some murky, inchoate level, was what happened as people — a network of people — faced the end, as they realized their collective dreams weren’t coming true, that they were running faster but falling behind, that they were losing coherence and morale. They connected in rash, inappropriate ways, because, most of the time, they were unable to connect at all. The survival instinct was to isolate.

He managed to climb over all his Ricky memorabilia on the bed and stumble to the bathroom, piss, then crawl back to bed. He fell back asleep, but the phone rang again. What time was it? Midnight, one? He didn’t care. Was he hungry? Vaguely.

“Hector, it’s Chris.” Chris Condello, the movement’s bedheaded wonder boy, Hector’s partner in data wonkery. Hector had barely been to a movement meeting in six months, but he had to say Chris, despite his baseline brattiness, had been a good friend during Ricky’s sickness, visiting him at St. V’s and calling Hector regularly. He’d been at the memorial service earlier that day.

“You doing okay, Hec?”

“I was sleeping.”

“I’m in your neighborhood. You mind if I drop by?”

“What time is it?”

“It’s a quarter to one. I was at Uncle Charlie’s.”

“Are you drunk?”

“Drunk and on coke. You mind if I stop by? I wanna talk to you about something.”

“Sure, stop by,” Hector said. What did he care?

In five minutes, he buzzed Chris into the building and stood at his open door, scratching at his briefs, while he listened to Chris clatter up the three flights of stairs in his Dr. Martens. Chris came at him, drunk, high, and leering, his jet-black hair sticking up in about three different directions.

“Hot, greeting me in your Calvins like that,” Chris said.

“I’m glad you think it’s hot.”

Chris put his arms around Hector, burying his vodka-reeking face into his neck. “You doing okay after today, Hector?”

“I knocked myself out with Valium. You got a bump for me?”

Chris pulled out his wallet and extracted a little baggie of white powder, popped it open, dipped his house key into it, and held a fat bump to Hector’s left nostril, then another one to his right. Hector sucked up both greedily and reveled in the chemical shock to his senses. Chris did two bumps of his own, then put the baggie down on the table. They looked at each other, bug-eyed, swallowing back the coke in their throats, then started making out.

Chris pulled away. “You know how badly I’ve always wanted you to fuck me raw?” he asked.

“Oh, so you are positive,” Hector said. “That’s what you’re finally telling me?” He pulled his dick out of his briefs and pushed Chris down to his knees by his shoulder.

“Of course I am. Aren’t you?”

“No.”

Chris looked up at him. “Seriously, you’re not? I thought—”

“I’m not. You know it’s tough for tops to get.”

Chris considered this for about as long as his coked-out state would allow. “Great, so you can still fuck me raw then.” He put his mouth over Hector’s dick, but Hector pushed it away.

“Let me ask you something,” Hector said. “Is this why you’re always such a dick at meetings? You feel like you can be a cunt to people there who show up for help because you’re in the same boat?”

Chris laughed, taken aback. “I’m just there to get things done. I’m not you, okay? They know I’m in the same boat.”

“I don’t think they all do. How come you never told me?”

“Hector! Of course I told you. I told you when you told me about Ricky.”

“No, you didn’t. You never told me.”

Chris looked up at him and rolled his eyes, impatient. “I think I probably told you, Hector, but if I didn’t, I’m sorry. I just assumed you knew.”

How comically abject Chris looked right now, on his knees, saliva around his mouth, looking up at him, pleading and flustered. Hardly the Chris Condello that people venerated, that the New York Times profiled so breathlessly. “Just suck my dick, you jerk,” Hector said, treating Chris how he wanted to be treated. He shoved his dick back in Chris’s mouth.

Chris pulled it out for a second. “Then you’ll fuck me raw?”

Hector shoved it back in. “We’ll see.”

Over the next forty minutes, they did a lot of coke. Eventually, Chris was naked on Hector’s bed, on his stomach with his head mashed in a pillow and his legs spread wide, moaning away. Hector smeared lube on Chris’s butt and his own dick, but he couldn’t stay hard enough to put it in. In fact, the sight of Chris’s butt, fatter and less pretty than Ricky’s had been, and covered all over with a dark-brown fuzz, just depressed Hector, even through the coke high.

“I can’t do this,” he said, crawling off Chris and squeezing himself into a fetal position, a pillow smashed to his face.