The Great Believers

by Rebecca Makkai

  Bodily fluids were the last things Yale wanted to think about. He said, “What if there are different strains? Some people think you could get—”

  “That’s the biggest bullshit. They want to police your sexuality, and then even once it’s too late, they want to police it some more. There’s no reason to stop getting laid. It’s just that your dating pool’s changed.”

  Now, in the car, Yale wondered if Asher was inviting him to the DAGMAR meeting just to fix him up with someone there. He wanted to ask, and he wanted to ask if he should be offended or flattered that Asher was always so interested in his sex life, yet had never volunteered to participate in it. Not that Yale had ever propositioned him. Not that he could.

  Asher said, “You owe me one favor in exchange for this ride. Either you come to the meeting or you visit Charlie.”

  He took his eyes off of traffic long enough to look at Yale, and Yale’s face did involuntary things. He tried his best to smile casually. “Maybe I’ll get in touch with his mom.”

  Asher said, “Does it really ever go anywhere?”

  “Does what?”

  “Love. Does it vanish?”

  Yale looked at his own hand, resting on the dashboard to keep himself steady whenever Asher braked suddenly. “I mean, we never want it to. But it does, doesn’t it?”

  Asher said, “I think that’s the saddest thing in the world, the failure of love. Not hatred, but the failure of love.”

  * * *

  —

  He didn’t go see Charlie that night, although maybe that was the day he knew he would eventually. He didn’t see him for a year and a half, not until October of 1989, when Charlie, although it had nothing to do with that infected eyelid a year and a half earlier, had gone blind.

  Teresa met him at the elevator. She’d aged a million years.

  Yale had been to Masonic for a few tests, but he hadn’t been up to unit 371 since he’d visited Terrence that once, years ago. The acquaintances who’d landed here, like Charlie’s copy editor Dwight, hadn’t been close enough friends to visit.

  The place looked worn in now, in a good way. Broadway posters hung on the walls, and the place was done up for Halloween. A man in a gown leaned on the nurses’ station chatting, his feet in fuzzy yellow slippers, his arms covered with lesions. There was a board with Polaroids of all the staff and volunteers, their names markered on the white strips. The biggest difference this time was that Yale knew that unless his insurance fell through and he ended up at County, he was looking at the unit where he himself would die. This would be his final home, and the faces of those two passing nurses would, in time, be the ones he was most familiar with in the world. He would know every detail of this linoleum, every light fixture.

  He hugged Teresa and asked how things were. “They’ve moved him to a single,” she said, “and I don’t think it’s a good sign, do you? I just want to sleep. He’s—listen, he’s been under a lot of sedation lately, and they had to sedate him again this morning for his bronchoscopy, and he’s still quite out of it. I don’t know that he’ll know you’re here, necessarily. I should have called you back and said, but I was hoping he’d be recovered by now. The thing is, he’s not—even when he’s not sedated, he’s not fully here. I should have said.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”

  Yale followed her, and as he first entered the room he squinched his eyes shut. He opened them, slowly, to a man who wasn’t Charlie. He wanted to tell Teresa she’d taken him to the wrong place, that this withered fetus on the bed was no one he knew. But Teresa was stroking this man’s scalp, and when the man’s mouth hung open, Yale saw Charlie’s teeth. He was an alien, an Auschwitz skeleton, a baby bird fallen from its nest. Yale’s mind kept reaching for metaphors, because the simple fact of it—that this was Charlie—was too much.

  There wasn’t much room between the door and the bed, but Yale covered it as slowly as he could. He grasped the bedrail, looked at the cards taped to the walls.

  Teresa was tired, and Yale told her he could stay, told her to go home and rest. She hugged him and left.

  He didn’t know if he should talk. He could explain that he was here, check Charlie’s face for a reaction. But with the sedative still in effect, and with Charlie blind, Yale had a cushion of anonymity right now—one it would feel safe to stay in, at least for today.

  Later, if Charlie was ever lucid, he could tell him everything he’d been wanting to. The good parts, at least. He could say, at least once, that he forgave him. And even if Charlie never fully woke up—well, he’d still say it. Maybe it would still count.

  He sat on the chair by the bed.

  The nurse came in, and she showed Yale a small pink sponge on the end of a stick, showed him how he could hold it to Charlie’s lips to give him water.

  He did it for a while, and he ran his thumb over Charlie’s wrist, listening to the thrumming of the walls.

  He fed him water, drop by drop.

  He could feel it, all around him: how down the corridor, and down other hallways of other hospitals around Chicago and the other godforsaken cities of the globe, a thousand other men did the same.

  2015

  It made no sense. Or maybe it did. It had to. She was awake, and it was 2015, and here was a man, very much alive, whose eyes and gestures and voice were Julian’s.

  Fiona sat on the studio’s cement floor, the back of her head against a cupboard. Julian was explaining to the rest of them what Fiona had stammered in the hallway. “What’s the line about rumors of my death? Richard, should I be insulted that you never talk about me?”

  Serge found the whole thing hilarious, called Julian a zombie, laughed at the look on Fiona’s face. Cecily didn’t know Julian; she got Fiona a damp paper towel for her forehead.

  Richard said, “Fiona, I only found him myself two years ago. We knew you didn’t know where he was. That was the surprise. But if I’d thought for an instant that you’d believed he was—listen, I’d never have sprung that on you.”

  How much had she even talked to Richard in the past two years? Not at all, really. She’d emailed to ask if she could come. Before that . . . well, it felt like they’d talked, but that was just a product of seeing his name pop up so often in the world, and of their being such old friends.

  Julian stood above her, helpless, running his thumb across his chin. She stared at his face, the ways it had changed. Beyond the normal transformations of age, he had what she recognized as some facial wasting from AZT, and—she was certain—cheek implants to counter the fat loss. Not great ones either. A couple of her volunteers at the store had similar cheeks. And his face had broadened—the steroids, presumably—so that he looked blocky, carved. Still handsome but profoundly different. As if he’d been reconstituted from a police sketch.

  He said, “I work in accounting for Universal. We’re shooting right on Richard’s street. Not that I get to be on set. They only flew me in three days ago and I’m in a sad little office.”

  She said, “Where—usually—” but she didn’t have words for the rest of what should have been an easy question.

  “I’m in L.A. I looked for you on Facebook, you know. A bunch of times!”

  “Oh.”

  “Hey. I’m sorry.”

  She wasn’t sure why he’d said it, but she worried he’d read her mind: Why, she was thinking, should it be Julian Ames, of all people, to show up, a ghost at the door? Why not Nico or Terrence or Yale? Why not Teddy Naples, who’d evaded the virus only to die in ’99 of a heart attack in front of his class? Why not Charlie Keene, for that matter, who was an asshole, but did so much good? She’d loved Julian. She had. But why him?

  She made herself smile, because she hadn’t smiled yet.

  “I really did try to find you,” he said. “I should have asked Richard.” His voice was the same. Julian’s voice.

 
“You did ask, remember? Last year, in L.A. And I said I’d get you her email. I forgot, of course.”

  She said, “It’s okay.”

  Richard said, “I feel like a lout.”

  They decided what everyone needed was sandwiches, and Serge was dispatched to buy them. By the time he came back with five plastic-wrapped baguettes of ham and cheese in a paper bag, they were all sitting around the table, and Richard had adroitly defused the awkwardness with a story about the time Yale Tishman had thrown a birthday party for his roommate at Masonic, a man he’d just met who’d had no one in town to visit him. Yale had told them all to bring little presents, and Fiona, to be funny, had bought a Playgirl on the way, only to learn on arrival that the guy was straight. A gruff IV drug user from downstate. “He was not amused,” Richard said.

  Fiona still felt detached, floaty, confused. She kept looking at her own hands. If these were the same hands she’d had all along, then it wasn’t impossible that Julian Ames was sitting here across from her, opening his sandwich, asking if Richard had any napkins.

  There were events she’d believed herself, for years, to be the sole custodian of—when all along, those parties, those conversations, those jokes had stayed alive in him as well.

  Julian said, “Leaving is one of my great regrets in life, Fiona. I want you to know. I thought I was running off to spare everyone, and really I was abandoning them. I’d never imagined they could go before I did. Not in a million years. And I know, from Richard—I know you took care of Yale in particular. It should have been me. I should have been there for him.”

  “Cecily was there too.” Fiona’s voice croaked out as if she hadn’t talked in a week. “It was me and Cecily in the hospital. We did shifts.”

  Cecily said, “It was mostly you.”

  “But he died alone.” It was the cruelest thing Fiona could have said, not just to Julian but to Richard and Cecily too. And to herself. “He died completely alone.”

  Julian set his sandwich down and looked at her until she looked back. “Richard told me,” he said. “I know, and I know it wasn’t your fault. Anyone could have died alone. You know, the middle of the night, if—”

  “It wasn’t the middle of the night.”

  Cecily put a cool hand to the back of Fiona’s neck.

  Serge mouthed something to Richard, and Richard mouthed back “New York.” Serge must have been asking where Richard was when Yale died. Richard’s career had been blowing up.

  Fiona, to change the subject, managed to ask Julian to recount his last three decades.

  “If you’re asking how I’m still alive,” Julian said, “I have no idea.” But he did, really. He’d gone to Puerto Rico in ’86, and he’d stayed a year, mooching off an old friend, selling T-shirts on the beach and getting stoned. “I was so sure I was ready to die,” he said. “And then when I heard about AZT, it was like—like if you were trying to drown, but someone threw you a rope, and you couldn’t stop yourself from grabbing it.” The problem was that Julian had no insurance, and the drug cost more than half of what he’d made a year back in Chicago. So he went home to Valdosta, Georgia, where his mother, who’d thought she’d never see him again, was happy to let him live in his childhood bedroom, happy to spend his father’s life insurance and remortgage her house for her youngest child. “She was a saint,” he said. “A southern gentlewoman. She was built for church and afternoon tea, but it turns out she was also built for crisis.” For a while she made him keep working—he got a job with a local film production company—because she was so certain he’d survive, and that when he was cured, he wouldn’t want a gap on his résumé. (Fiona remembered Julian’s sweet optimism before his diagnosis, the way he was always sure the disease would be cured, sure he was just about to become famous. He must have gotten it from his mother all along.) He grew sicker and sicker despite her care, developed resistance to the AZT. “I had about half a T cell left,” he said. “I weighed a hundred and eight pounds.”

  Richard said, “And that’s when I saw you.” Fiona knew Richard had run into Julian in New York sometime in the early nineties, that Julian had come up there with a friend to see one or two good shows before he died. He was in a wheelchair. This was when Richard had taken that last photo of him, the third photo of the triptych. Richard had called her afterward, and then she’d called Teddy to marvel over the fact that Julian had lasted that long.

  “Right. And after that I was in the hospital for a solid year. That New York trip was a bad idea, in retrospect.”

  Serge said, “And then what?” He was the only one who’d finished his sandwich.

  “Then it was ’96! Suddenly the good drugs came out! There’s a few months I don’t even remember, I was so out of it, and when the fog lifted, I was home again. I could lift my arms and I could eat food. Next thing you know, I’m jogging. I mean, really it took a while, but that’s what it felt like.

  “For a long time—you’ll appreciate this, Fiona. For a long time, I wondered if I was a ghost. A literal ghost. I thought I must’ve died and this was some kind of purgatory or heaven. Because how was it even possible, you know? But then I thought: If this is heaven, where are all my friends? It couldn’t be heaven if Yale and Nico and everyone weren’t there. So I guess this is just plain old earth. And I’m still on it.”

  Serge excused himself to answer the phone. He’d been texting all day, and although all his acquaintances seemed accounted for, not all of their acquaintances were, and there were still urgent and worrisome things to be discussed.

  Julian said, “My husband had basically the same experience. He calls this his second life. To me that sounds too born-again, but then he didn’t grow up in the South. He’s right, though; that’s what it feels like.”

  There was a ring, a golden wedding band, on Julian’s left hand.

  How utterly strange that Julian could have a second life, a whole entire life, when Fiona had been living for the past thirty years in a deafening echo. She’d been tending the graveyard alone, oblivious to the fact that the world had moved on, that one of the graves had been empty this whole time.

  “Speaking of mothers,” Julian said, “and speaking of Yale Tishman. Richard, did I ever tell you I met Yale’s mom? Maybe twelve years ago.” Fiona put her hands flat on the table, steadied herself. If Julian was indeed a ghost, he was a tormenting one. He turned to Fiona and Cecily. “I was working on set for this sitcom pilot called Follywood. You never heard of it, it didn’t get picked up, thank God. And she was playing a doctor. I wouldn’t have recognized her face, but I knew her name. Jane Greenspan. Remember?”

  Fiona remembered the woman’s nose, just like Yale’s, and her broad mouth. She’d seen her pixilated a hundred times, and in real life only once, only briefly. That Tylenol commercial ran for a few years, and Fiona had slowly memorized her face, knew it well enough to recognize her when she’d popped up in other ads throughout the years. Why?, she’d lamented to anyone who would listen, except for Yale himself. Why did that have to be the parent who’d left? Of all the parents of all the gay men she knew? An actress mother would have understood a gay son, wouldn’t she? For Yale to be alienated from her for reasons that had nothing to do with his sexuality just felt excessive, perverse.

  Richard asked Julian if he’d talked to her, and Julian said, “Not about Yale. It would’ve felt cruel. I don’t know. I mean, how do you even start that conversation? I was good friends with the son you abandoned. And then I thought, What if she didn’t know he’d died?”

  “She did,” Fiona said, and her voice was cracked glass.

  She couldn’t breathe. Even though she didn’t want to be out on the street, she was about to say that she needed fresh air. But Serge had gone to the door and was returning, having let Jake Austen into the studio.

  And then she was stuck, because everything had to be explained, the story told over: the misunderstanding, the strange reunion, R
ichard’s chagrin, Julian’s whole life.

  Jake grinned like it was the coolest thing in the world. “Okay,” he said, “I gotta say, I feel a little vindicated. This is why I wanted to ask about the triptych, Fiona. Because I saw the update. I mean, you sounded so sure of yourself, I thought maybe I’d misunderstood.”

  Fiona didn’t follow, and Richard explained how last year, when Julian had passed through Paris, he’d taken his photo again. One of the pieces for the show was an updated group of four photos. “A quadriptych,” he said. “Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.”

  “Can you believe it?” Julian said. “After all this time, I’m a model again!”

  And the way he said it was so exactly like Julian Ames, so much the way he’d have said it at age twenty-five, that Fiona walked straight over to where he sat and kissed him on the forehead.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said. “I’m so, so, so, so glad.”

  1990

  Even though they were only going to march, not chain themselves to lampposts or anything, Yale and Fiona had written Gloria’s phone number on their arms with a Sharpie, as well as the number for Asher’s law office—although Asher was far more likely to get locked up than they were. Gloria had a sprained ankle but had volunteered as a remote bail buddy to at least ten different protestors, and Yale was concerned that if they all got arrested, she’d run out of money, leave him to languish. “She’s the most responsible person I ever met,” Fiona said. It was true; Charlie used to say she was the one writer in the world who’d never missed a deadline. Gloria had left Out Loud behind and was at the Trib now, writing features. But just in case, Yale wrote Cecily’s number too. They both wore bandannas tied loosely around their necks, though Yale had doubts they’d work against tear gas. He felt like a silly cowboy.