Tim Murphy - Christodora

“It’s a threat!” David smiled. “You know I need you.”

Hector glanced sideways at him. “How are you doing? Are you pooping all the time?”

“Not as bad as I thought it’d be.”

“Chris is having a fucking hard time.”

“I know.”

They parted ways outside with plans to reunite at dinner. Hector went back to his hotel room, closed the drapes, took a melatonin, stripped down to his underwear, tried to sleep and could not. He thought of what a naysaying bitch he’d been the entire conference, thought of his own anhedonia amid the hope and joy, and, deep down inside, finally admitted it was because of Ricky. He was watching lovers who’d lived in agony the past few years, waiting for one or both of them to die, realize they were getting a second shot, waking up to the reality-of-life shit that wasn’t going to go away — bills, mortgages, disability payments, employment prospects. They were cursed with the divine gift of having a messy life to go on living. They would suffer through that debt, that paperwork, that uncertainty, and at the end of a day with all its trials, they would meet in the same bed, they would grasp reassuredly at each other’s bodies, however thick around the waist or wasted around the limbs or butt; they might even find their way back inside each other again. They would go on, they would have more ; they might not even appreciate, amid the stress and fear of putting a life back together and managing dozens of nauseating medications and insurance calls, how lucky they were that they’d won the AIDS lottery, made it to the finish line, run out the clock.

“You should be here, Ricky,” he said aloud, his mouth mashed into his pillow. He wanted Ricky’s stupid things clustered around him in bed. That’s how he’d slept the year after Ricky died, on pills and crying surrounded by Ricky’s shit. Then there’d been the excitement of the Clintons. He supposed he owed Chris for dragging him into the Drug Movement Coalition; suddenly they, the scrappy, leather-jacket-wearing bad-boy faggots from New York, were surrounded by feds who wanted their input and expertise, flying or Amtrak-ing them down to D.C. twice a month, putting them up in good hotels, conference-calling them.

If the feds had absorbed their tormentors in order to neutralize them, it had worked. He and Chris had gladly sucked up the bureaucratic royal treatment even if they’d paid for it by earning the rejection of (most of) their former comrades. That wasn’t so bad when you were taking meetings with Clinton’s honchos, when David Mixner introduced you to Hillary at a cocktail party — Hillary, who knew who you guys were, who thanked you for “the amazing, courageous work you guys are doing”—when you could see the prospect of a big federal or pharmaceutical job in your future, after the coming protease revolution. Already, Hector could see certain folks from the movement — the more complaisant ones, those who’d always half granted the feds and the drugmakers the benefit of the doubt — going in that direction, into their cushy jobs as community liaisons or marketing consultants in the bright-eyed new landscape of the chronic manageable illness, supposedly no more menacing or stigmatized or weird than high blood pressure or diabetes.

Lying in the hotel bed, Hector conceded that, all through ’93, ’94, and ’95, an ever-widening river of good data, mixed with a steady ambient wash of self-importance, had anesthetized his grief. He’d needed that. But now a maw of emptiness and rage was opening beneath him. Idly, he rubbed his bare, trimmed chest beneath the sheets. He’d faithfully hit the gym through these past years of high-level consultancy, grunting out his misery over barbells and machines. His chest was broad and he wished beyond anything that the arm caressing it at this moment was Ricky’s, not his own. But that sunny, silly cutie, like a blond sliver of sunshine on the timeline that Hector envisioned as his life, had missed the drawbridge, along with Issy and Korie and a baleful lot of others. It had all happened in the very, very worst years of sickness and death, Clinton’s first term, overwhelming loss mingled confusingly with tidings of the coming respite.

Hector wished he could cry, but he could not. He wrapped both arms around a giant, nearly human-size pillow and said, again, “I wish you were here.” He lay there in his strange hollowness and emotional muteness for several more minutes, thinking about the queen’s expensive, legendary palm on his face. He hoped Ricky had seen that! Double snap! That would’ve signaled triumph to Ricky — not the data, not the outcomes, not the plunging viral loads and soaring CD4 counts, but the diva idol’s $30,000 hand on Hector’s cheek. Well, Hector thought, we all measure success differently.

The melatonin made him feel funky, cotton headed, but he forced himself to rise, dress, reapply gel to his hair, and go meet Maira, Chris, and the others in the lobby to catch a cab to Davie Village. There were thirteen of them at dinner — from New York and D.C., some Vancouver locals, David and Ed from Chicago, even Paisan from Thailand — convivial, some toasting with beer, some with ginger ale, everyone’s bowels holding out through the spicy food, everyone talking about the Internet and AOL. Hector got mildly drunk and, at one point, put his arms around Chris and Maira, on either side of him, smiling goofily.

“Someone’s cheering up finally?” Maira asked.

“I’m allowing myself a very small window of self-congratulation,” he replied.

She leaned in closer to him, kissed him on the cheek — a rare show of tenderness from somewhat-severe Maira. “It’s about time,” she said.

They had a plane to catch home early the next day. As soon as he was in his room, he plugged the phone cord into his laptop, heard that satisfying dial-up crackle and wheeze. Mentions of AOL at dinner had made his insides flicker delicately; it had become his great pleasure, his balm, his late-night, soft-digital-glow Shangri-la the past eight months. Shortly, Hector — no, make that RicanTopStud57—found the room he’d been setting aside for himself until the end of the conference: “Vancouver M4M4now.”

CouverPrtyBud:

Wassup rican?

RicanTopStud57:

Wassup?

CouverPrtyBud:

You go out tonight?

RicanTopStud57:

Just dinner. In town for work. At the Hyatt.

CouverPrtyBud:

Nice. Want company?

RicanTopStud57:

Swap pics?

A minute or two later, he got mail. Color pic of a late twentysomething sandy blond, dancer’s body, naked on his stomach on the bed, throwing a smile over his shoulder, a butt Hector knew he could easily make himself at home in for an hour. Certainly, yes, he wanted company. Thirty minutes later, the front desk rang up his company, who stood before him in a Bjork T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off, cargo shorts, and flip-flops, backpack hung over one shoulder.

“I’m Nick,” he said, slipping inside, sliding his backpack onto a chair.

“I’m Hector.”

Nick wasted no time, pulled off his tank top and dropped to his knees in front of Hector’s fly, which he quickly unzipped. “Where are you visiting from?”

“New York. I’m here for the big conference.”

“What conference?” Nick was caressing Hector’s briefs now.

“The big world AIDS conference.”

“Mmm,” went Nick, as though he’d hardly heard.

Okay, thought Hector as Nick got busy on him. He’s focused on one thing. Okay, no problem. Hector, by rote, started saying the usual bullying, encouraging things he’d said to the endless succession of boys who’d knelt before him like this, all too eager to service RicanTopStud57. Hector obliged him with the reacharound, the digital probing that elicited bass-deep moans of expectation from CouverPrtyBud. .