The Great Believers

by Rebecca Makkai

  The horses were way too close, and it was hard to tell what was going on, hard to see and hard to hear. A rumor spread down the line that someone had already been kicked in the head by a horse, that one of those sirens a minute ago had been an ambulance. The cops were constantly turning the horses backward, so their hind legs were a foot away from people’s faces. They were close enough to smell. When their hooves hit the pavement, Yale felt it shake.

  An organizer ran down the row. “If they arrest you, go like this!” he called, crossing his wrists. Yale asked why, but no one answered. “Don’t go limp!” the guy said. “They’ll drop you on your head!”

  “Are you afraid?” Yale shouted in Fiona’s ear.

  She shook her head, her curls in her face. “I’m too angry to be afraid! I’m too fucking angry! Are you?”

  “Yes! But I was dying anyway!”

  Someone kept shouting No violence!—but it was just one voice, not a chant.

  The cops swarmed closer. They picked a woman off the end of the line and carried her, screaming, to a police truck. They came back for the man next to her, and the man next to him. They wore blue plastic gloves. One wore a paper face mask.

  There were cameras still, but the news crews had all moved to the side; the people dashing through the front lines with camcorders were protestors recording this for posterity. One stopped in front of Teddy. “Say something!” he called, and Teddy shouted, “Their gloves don’t match their shoes!”

  The crowd took it up, an old favorite: Your gloves don’t match your shoes! You’ll see it on the news!

  The camera moved down to Yale. “Say something!” the guy said. “What are you feeling?”

  It was perhaps the least like Yale Tishman he’d ever felt. If he’d had the rest of his life ahead of him, he might have considered it the first moment of something new, the moment when he finally learned who he was supposed to become. But because he didn’t have that, he recognized it for what it was: a spike of bravery and adrenaline that might never be equaled in his remaining time on earth. He unlinked his arm from Fiona’s and he turned toward Asher, and he grabbed the back of Asher’s head and kissed him. Whether Asher was just showing off for the camera, Yale didn’t care, but Asher fully returned the kiss, his fingers in Yale’s hair, his tongue on Yale’s. Yale could taste the salt on his lips, felt Asher’s thick stubble against his own smoother chin even as the entire city fell away around them.

  When they finally pulled apart, he became aware of Fiona shrieking in delight, of Teddy whooping and applauding. Asher grinned at him, held his gaze, but then the cry went down the line to lie down.

  Yale flipped his backpack to the front and linked arms again and lowered his back and head onto the cool asphalt. He closed his eyes and braced himself. He didn’t want to get up and walk to the paddy wagon. He wanted to lie still, a passive corpse to be transported, the way people farther down the line had done. Light as a feather, stiff as a board.

  The shouting got closer, and the whistles got closer, and the screams got closer.

  He heard Fiona scream when Teddy was taken away, and then a minute later he felt her arm torn away from his. He reached for her, and she was gone. He kept his eyes shut.

  When they picked him up, it was by his clothes. By his shirt collar, by the backpack, by the waist of his khakis, by the shoes. He tried not to be limp, but he was.

  He looked at the darkness behind his own eyelids. He thought about how next weekend, he was supposed to help Teresa clear out the old apartment. He was supposed to take whatever he wanted of Charlie’s and anything of his own that had languished there for four years. This weekend he’d do this, next weekend he’d do that. This was probably easier.

  It was like being a child and falling asleep on the couch, flopping when your mother carried you to bed.

  But he landed on the ground, hard, his wind gone, and they flipped him over, his ribcage on the backpack, his cheek against the asphalt, a knee in his back. There were so many voices around him shouting. They yanked his arms behind him and they tightened something around his wrists, and he couldn’t move at all, couldn’t breathe well, but still they knelt on him.

  He heard Asher’s voice, but he couldn’t tell how far away it was. “Why are you doing that to him? Sir! Sir! Why are you doing that!”

  “He resisted.”

  “He didn’t resist! Sir, he did not resist!”

  He opened his eyes to a horse hoof and the brown fur above it, close enough that he might have stuck out his tongue and licked it. He closed his eyes again.

  He felt a shoe on his head, holding him to the street. He felt the Imodium bottle in the backpack, ramming into his left lower ribs way too hard. He felt something snap there. A searing, liquid pain.

  “Sir, this is unnecessary! Sir, he did not resist!”

  He wanted them to hurry up. He wanted to be in the wagon with Fiona already. He wanted to be home with an ice pack already. He wanted to know his bowels would hold out. He wanted Asher to keep shouting, wanted to keep hearing his voice.

  He went back to the kiss in his mind. He could live there a long time. It was warm there, and good.

  2015

  From the bedroom, Fiona Skyped her therapist. Elena’s image kept freezing but the sound would continue, so it seemed as if entire sentences came from her closed lips, or serious questions came from a mouth open in laughter. Elena said, “Waiting for anything is hard. And this is a lot of stressors.”

  It was three days since she’d knocked on Claire’s door, and she’d heard nothing. “I feel so foolish sitting here,” she said. “And for making Cecily come, when maybe we never even get to meet our granddaughter.”

  “Has Cecily seen Kurt again?” Elena was frozen now with her head down, her black curls filling the screen.

  “I don’t think so. I’m not prying. She took a day trip with her friend, the one she’s staying with.”

  “And you’re connecting with old friends too.”

  “I’m underfoot. And I’m just supposed to hang out six more days now till Richard’s opening?” Julian would be back then, at least. He’d had to fly to London but would return on Monday just in time. “If Claire hasn’t called by then, I’m leaving right afterward.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Well. I could—I could slip a letter under her door first. That wouldn’t be such a violation, would it?”

  “I think that’s a solid plan.”

  “I ruined things by going over there. How is that even fair? I fucked up all along by not being there enough for her, and now I fucked up by smothering her.”

  Elena took a deep breath—Fiona could hear it rather than see it, as Elena was now stuck with her lips pursed—and said, “Here’s something I’ve been thinking. We’ve talked so much about how there are things you can blame yourself for, but how Claire has to share the blame.”

  “I—”

  “And I know that’s been hard for you. To blame Claire. But I wonder if it isn’t time to let go of the whole idea of blame.”

  The sentence crashed Fiona back into a hundred conversations she’d had years ago. Asher Glass ranting about “blame and shame,” the twin scourges that scampered after the virus.

  Fiona said, “I’ve been down that road. The thing is, if you stop blaming people and everything’s still crap, the only thing left is to blame the world. And when you blame the whole world, when it seems like the planet doesn’t want you, and if there’s a God, he hates you—that’s worse than hating yourself. It is.”

  She expected Elena to tell her that she was wrong, that self-hatred was the worst kind—but Elena’s pregnant silence stretched too long to be good.

  Fiona said, “Hello?”

  Elena’s hand was frozen near her cheek. She was gone.

  * * *

  —

  It was still dark on Wednesday morni
ng when Fiona’s phone rang, and she thought at first it must be someone calling from the States. It was Claire.

  She said, “So, I want to let you know I’m safe. There’s stuff going on like five blocks away, I don’t know. But we’re fine.”

  “What’s happening?” Fiona was on her feet.

  “It’s a police thing, not another attack. But there’s some gunfire.”

  “Oh! Wait, are you—thank you for calling, sweetie. Thank you. You’re inside?”

  “Yeah, this officer came around. We’re basically on lockdown.” Claire sounded preternaturally calm. Fiona almost would have believed her steady voice if she hadn’t known that Nicolette must have been sleeping there beside her—and what mother could possibly be calm in a moment like that? She wanted to fly across the city.

  “You’re not near a window, are you?”

  “Well, it’s a small place.”

  “Can you move a shelf in front of the window?”

  Claire was quiet and Fiona worried she’d offended her. “Yeah, maybe.”

  “Are the doors locked?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you have enough food? Are you on Twitter? Richard’s boyfriend was getting his news from Twitter.” Because she wasn’t yet awake enough to stop herself, she said, “This is a sign, Claire. That you should come back to Chicago.”

  And she was sure, then, that this had done it, that Claire would hang up.

  Claire laughed. “Everyone here is terrified of Chicago. They can’t believe I made it out alive.”

  “Or we’ll get you a safer place in Paris. In a better neighborhood. Your father and I could chip in.”

  She was literally trying to buy her daughter’s affection. Well, her safety first, and then her affection. At five in the morning, with a shoot-out in the background.

  “Mom,” Claire said, “just go back to sleep, okay?”

  “Will you call again later?”

  “Sure. I—just don’t panic if you don’t hear from me, okay?”

  “I will panic, sweetie. But you could email your dad again, if you don’t want to call, and he could pass the message on. He appreciated hearing from you.”

  Fiona turned on the TV in the living room—on mute, because she couldn’t understand the rapid-fire French anyway—and she logged onto Richard’s computer to find CNN.

  * * *

  —

  By noon, she hadn’t heard from Claire, but she’d learned from the news that they’d caught and killed the last suspect. No reports of any civilian deaths five blocks away.

  It occurred to her to check if her phone had saved Claire’s number when she called. “Blocked Caller,” it said.

  * * *

  —

  She ate lunch, and then she called Jake and asked if she could see him again. He, too, was staying here at least until Richard’s opening; his story wouldn’t be complete otherwise, and his friend was (against what Fiona assumed must have been this woman’s better judgment) continuing to let him crash. He asked Fiona if she wanted to go for a walk, and she said no, she’d very much like to fuck him again if he could figure out where that might happen.

  He called her back with an address, a place that turned out to be a small office building in Saint-Germain, and he led her up to a small, empty office with a window, a desk, a chair, some architectural prints on the walls.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought there might be a couch at least.” It belonged to his friend’s roommate’s boyfriend, a guy who’d apparently understood instantly and handed over the key. Maybe everyone in France understood things like that.

  “This is perfect,” she said. She sat him in the chair and unbuttoned his shirt, straddled his lap. It was, fortunately, an armless chair. They got it cornered between the desk and the wall so it wouldn’t roll around. She lifted her dress, slid her panties to the side, lowered herself onto him. He groaned and tugged her bra down, and very soon, alarmingly soon, they were both done. The whole thing had been a shudder, a sneeze, some quick and involuntary trick of the body. He wrapped the used condom in a sheet of printer paper.

  “Don’t throw that in the trash here,” she said. “Walk it down to the street.” She was lying on the floor, stretching out her back. Jake put the paper wad on the chair and lay next to her.

  He said, “Are you okay?”

  “I just have strange ways of dealing with nerves.”

  “Hey,” he said. He ran a finger down her chin, her neck. “Why do you think we met each other?”

  “Because you were drunk on the airplane.”

  “I mean cosmically. People don’t come into each other’s lives like this for no reason. Why’d the universe throw us together?”

  “Did you say cosmically?”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t believe in it. Nothing’s random, it can’t be. The people we meet, the people we’re smashed together with, right?”

  “I’m not, like, ending up with you. This is not destiny.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I’m being philosophical. Don’t you ever think about that stuff? Like, where we go when we die?”

  “Christ, Jake, it’s two in the afternoon.”

  “I think it’s like sleeping,” he said, “but you get to help dream up the world. So whatever happens here on earth, all the weird stuff that just happens, a volcano erupting or whatever, that’s the collective dreams of everyone who’s ever lived.”

  “So these attacks—a lot of dead people dreamed them.”

  “Right.”

  “Huh.” She started laughing. “Yeah, no. That’s very wrong.”

  “I don’t actually believe it. But it’s nice to think. And it’s just that the world is so weird sometimes, it’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  “You think the dead control us.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m gonna tell you a secret,” she said, and he rolled onto his side. She had fresh gauze on her hand, and she picked at the edge. “We’re in charge of them. I mean, my friend Julian? When I thought he was dead, all the things we’d ever said to each other, all my memories of him, they were mine. One of the weirdest things about seeing him again was that something left me. Some kind of energy. Like the air whooshing out of a balloon.”

  Jake said, “Is it a relief, or are you sad?”

  “Not sad, that would be ridiculous.”

  “You lost a loss. That’s still a loss.”

  Fiona sat up. “Thanks, Dr. Seuss.”

  “What, did I hit a nerve? Hey, come back!”

  * * *

  —

  Out on the street, when she turned her phone on, a message from Claire: Everything was fine. And maybe tomorrow, did Fiona and Cecily, together, want to meet Nicolette and watch her for an hour while Claire was at work and before Kurt could get across the city to pick her up? Her babysitting had fallen through.

  1990

  The broken rib prevented Yale from doing more in the apartment than he’d have liked. Teresa insisted he sit on the couch while she paraded box after box of stuff in front of him. Charlie’s clothes, which he didn’t want. Charlie’s books, which he didn’t want either. The kitchen things that had once been his, but which he’d long since replaced. Nico’s stripy orange scarf. Yale couldn’t believe it. He ran his fingers through the fringe. He rolled it carefully into a fat cylinder. He’d give it back to Fiona, finally. Here was his own Michigan sweatshirt, smelling like a crypt. He wondered if Charlie had kept it on purpose, or if it had just stayed buried somewhere, unnoticed. Here was the map of Chicago that Nico had drawn on top of, illustrating the places they’d all been together—a tiny Richard with his camera on the Belmont Rocks, a tiny Julian holding a tray of food by the sandwich shop where he used to work, Yale wearing a beret at the Art Institute. This, he would keep.

  When he reached for it, Teresa said
, “Don’t keep moving all over. If you don’t take full breaths, you’ll wind up with pneumonia.”

  It felt good to be mothered. And with Charlie gone, he didn’t feel guilty taking up what little mothering energy Teresa had left. So he stayed on the couch that still, after all these years, softened itself naturally to the shape of his body, and he let her bring him tea with honey, and he let her fill two big boxes with things he knew he might never unpack.

  The apartment was bizarrely the same. Charlie hadn’t redecorated even a little, hadn’t added anything to the walls. The same refrigerator magnets, same sad plant on the windowsill. Yale was glad. It would have felt bad, in some inexplicable, unjustifiable way, to see physical evidence of the ways Charlie’s world had moved on. Or maybe it was just that he wanted to believe in a world where this apartment still existed, where it was forever 1985, where the door might open at any moment and there would be Julian with a party invitation, Terrence with beer, Nico with a new comic for Charlie.

  Teresa said, “You’re not going back to work, are you? Don’t even pop in. You know how people are, you check in and next thing they’ll hand you a mountain of papers. Tell me you’ll lounge at home and do nothing else.”

  He assured her he’d take as much time as he needed. One of the great things about DePaul was how little emotional investment he had in his work. They were currently raising funds for a new parking garage.

  Yale wouldn’t be able to carry these boxes home, even in a cab, so he promised he’d return next week when Teresa was here again from California. She’d been back and forth since Charlie died in December, though Yale wished she’d just go sun herself in the Caribbean for a month and sleep. “The fact that this plant is alive,” he said, “means you’ve been doing too much.”