The Great Believers

by Rebecca Makkai

  He called Asher, who’d volunteered to pick him up. It would be the first time he’d seen him since the protest, since the kiss. Yale had been the last into that particular paddy wagon, so although Asher had been arrested a minute later, he never saw him—in part because, thanks to Fiona’s persistent screaming about lawyers, Yale was sent to the hospital rather than put in the holding cell.

  Asher could be there in five minutes. Yale leaned his head back on the sofa, smelled the fabric. Teresa was going around with the Dustbuster. He said, “I have a story about the map.” The one Nico had drawn on. She stopped cleaning, sat on the floor in front of the couch, her knees tucked under her chin. “Okay, this little car he drew, way over here?” Yale pointed. “We were in our friend Terrence’s car, and we were supposed to head south on the expressway, but we ended up shooting off west on the Eisenhower instead. Terrence had no sense of direction. Which is odd for a math teacher, right? So we got off the highway and got totally turned around, and it’s this terrible neighborhood.” Yale remembered all of them slinking low in their seats, as if that would keep them safe. “But we went in a big circle and eventually we found all these streets named after presidents, which we thought was good, because they go in order, and they stretch all the way back downtown, to the lake. Charlie was always complaining he couldn’t find his way around downtown because he couldn’t remember the presidents. If they were named for the British monarchy, he’d be set. So we’re going back down through the president streets, you know, Madison, Monroe, Adams, Jackson—and just in that one part of town, before Van Buren, the next thing was this tiny street called Gladys Avenue. And Charlie goes, ‘There was a President Gladys?’ He was serious. Terrence never let him forget that, oh my God. He used to make up facts about the Gladys administration.”

  Teresa let out a small, shallow laugh.

  “I’m not telling it right,” he said.

  “No, I like that. I like it very much. He had such good friends, didn’t he? He had a family here.”

  And there was the low buzzer, a sound from his distant past. Yale kissed Teresa’s cheek and she told him again to walk carefully, to breathe fully.

  * * *

  —

  Asher didn’t have his car. “It’s too nice out to drive,” he said. Yale promised he was okay walking—it really only hurt when he bent or twisted—and Asher suggested they stroll around and wind up at St. Joe’s, where he had a two o’clock appointment. “I’ll get you a cab from there,” he said.

  Yale was too nervous to talk normally. He found himself chattering and then falling silent for long stretches. Asher needed to duck over to Halsted to find an ATM. As he pocketed his cash he said, “You heard about County, right?” No, Yale hadn’t. “Cook County Hospital is now officially, drumroll please, treating female AIDS patients.”

  “Seriously? That fast? Like, because of the protest?”

  “You didn’t think it would work, did you. Listen, Yale, I’m not making it up. This shit works. I want you to stay involved.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “I need to tell you something.” They turned down Briar again, although there were more efficient routes to St. Joe’s. “I’ve put off telling people, and I’ve particularly put off telling you. But I’m moving to New York.”

  “Oh.” He felt it as a pain in his rib, even though he hadn’t twisted, hadn’t bent. They were back in front of the apartment now, in front of the same place he’d gotten his heart broken four years ago, so why not break it again in the same spot? His cheeks stung. Not his eyes, but his cheeks—how odd. Asher stopped and faced him.

  “There’s stuff I can do nationally with ACT UP from there, stuff that’ll make a bigger impact than what I can do from Chicago.”

  “Yeah, who needs Chicago.”

  “Yale.”

  “No, sorry. It’s good. That’s really good.”

  “Listen, it’s like, I was born to fight. I was born angry. I hated my dad, I hated the world, I pick fights with strangers, right? And I look back and it all makes sense, because maybe I was born for this. Maybe I’m getting religious or something, but it feels like I’m here for a reason.”

  Yale looked at everything that wasn’t Asher, nodded. “You know what Charlie said about you once? He said if we didn’t have you, we’d have to invent you.”

  Asher laughed. “Well, you have me. You had me. You still have me, just—”

  “It’s okay.”

  They started walking again. He could ask him to stay. He could kiss him again and tell him he’d do anything if he just stayed in Chicago. But it wouldn’t work. Asher might kiss him back, but there was no version of the future in which Asher chose love—temporary, fragile, illness-laden love—over the fight. (And who was he kidding? It wasn’t love. It was attraction. It was a seed that might have grown, given better soil, more sun.) In every version of the story, Asher was correct. He shouldn’t stay here, just to make Yale happy for a year, three years, until they both got too sick to make anyone happy. He should be in New York banging on doors and making news. In a way, Yale had already asked at the protest; he’d already received his answer.

  Here was the house, the one Yale had picked out for himself a thousand years ago, the piece of the city he was supposed to own.

  Yale said, “Stop a second.”

  “What?”

  He faced the house, closed his eyes, and he put his hand on the rolled-up cuff of Asher’s shirt. He wanted to bathe in it for five seconds, the future he might be having if it weren’t for everything. He’d have broken up with Charlie, sure, and Charlie would be coked up in some downtown condo by now, and Yale would have this house, and he and Asher would be together. He was sure. Asher would be lighting the grill in the backyard. Fiona and Nico and Terrence were on their way over for dinner. Julian was hanging out on the porch with a drink, fresh from rehearsal.

  Asher said, “Are you okay?”

  Yale opened his eyes and nodded.

  * * *

  —

  They walked east to right below Belmont Harbor, and then they walked through the park on the path.

  They talked about Richard, whose solo show was coming up that summer at a gallery in the Loop. “Who ever thought Richard would get an actual show?” Asher said. “I thought it was all an excuse to meet models.”

  They talked about where in New York Asher would live (Chelsea) and when he was leaving (two weeks) and how often he’d get back to Chicago (occasionally, mostly for work).

  They talked about Yale’s rib, about the stupid bottle of Imodium that had broken it, about how he didn’t care and he’d do it all again.

  Yale told him about Bill leaving the most important artist out of Nico’s great-aunt’s show, the guy she loved her whole life. “It was the whole point,” Yale said. “It was the point of everything.”

  Asher told him he shouldn’t be the one holding power of attorney for Yale anymore. “You need someone who can be at the hospital right away. If I’m in New York, I can’t make decisions for you. You should ask Fiona. I’ll draw up the papers.”

  Yale might have protested that it took just as long to drive from Madison as to fly from New York, and he might have said he couldn’t bear to do that to her, but Asher was right. And there was no one else left, no one he trusted as much.

  “She’ll be done with college by the time you get sick. You have a lot more time.”

  Yale said, “I used to worry about Reagan pressing the button, you know? And asteroids, all that. And then I had this realization. If you had to choose when, in the timeline of the earth, you got to live—wouldn’t you choose the end? You haven’t missed anything, then. You die in 1920, you miss rock and roll. You die in 1600, you miss Mozart. Right? I mean, the horrors pile up, too, but no one wants to die before the end of the story.

  “And I really used to believe we’d be the last generat
ion. Like, if I thought about it, if I worried about death, it was all of us I was thinking about, the whole planet. And now it’s like, no, it’s just you, Yale. You’re the one who’s gonna miss out. Not even on the end of the world—like, let’s hope the world goes on another billion years, right?—but just the normal stuff.”

  Asher didn’t answer, but he took Yale’s right hand in his left hand, wound their fingers together. They walked on like that, Yale’s heart pinballing around his battered ribcage.

  If Yale weren’t physically incapable of sex right now, if Asher hadn’t just been talking about the leg pain and nausea he was still experiencing from his pills, Yale might have held out hope that the afternoon would end in someone’s bed. A one-time thing. As it was, the hand-holding was an end in itself. An acknowledgment, a dip into that same parallel universe he’d spied on back at the Briar house. And was friendship that different in the end from love? You took the possibility of sex out of it, and it was all about the moment anyway. Being here, right now, in someone’s life. Making room for someone in yours.

  “Get a load of these two!”

  A male voice, close behind. Asher tightened his grip on Yale’s hand before Yale could even figure it out.

  “Hey, Louise! Get a load of these two!”

  “Don’t turn around,” Asher whispered.

  Yale thought Asher might want to drop his hand, but of course he didn’t. Asher didn’t even quicken his pace.

  A woman’s voice, farther back: “Bert, don’t be an ass.”

  “I’m not the one into asses! Hey, ladies! Gimme your time, will you? I got some questions!”

  “Bert!”

  “Listen, ladies. Hold on.”

  But the voices were farther away now; perhaps Louise had detained Bert.

  Distantly: “Get a load of those two!”

  * * *

  —

  Asher and Yale didn’t say anything else the rest of the way to St. Joe’s.

  Yale promised he’d get a cab, but then he didn’t. He walked to the El. He wanted to be near other riders, packed tight. He wanted to see the city from above, to pass close enough to people’s windows that he could see their kitchen tables, their fights.

  The world was a terrible, beautiful place, and if he wasn’t going to be here much longer he could do whatever he wanted, and the thing he wanted most in the world, besides to run after Asher, was to fix Nora’s show, to give Ranko Novak’s awkward paintings and sketches their due, such as it was.

  He thought about people who could help. There were the Sharps, but after everything they’d done for him, he couldn’t ask another favor. He hardly knew anyone at Northwestern anymore. He certainly couldn’t drag Cecily back into things. Across from him on the El stood a teenager with a column of silver hoops up her ear. It made Yale think of Gloria. Gloria was at the Trib. Gloria would help. He had no idea how, but she would know how.

  One stop before his own, a man limped onto the train and looked like he was about to lurch into Yale’s lap, but then he opened a canvas bag. “Got socks for sale,” he slurred to Yale and the woman next to him. “Dollar pair. Two dollar, three pair. One size fit your foot.” He pulled out a Ziploc with a pair of clean athletic socks, yellow stripes at the top. They looked improbably thick and comfortable. “You got holes in your sock?” This was to Yale. “These make you feel better. Good socks, you feel all better. One dollar, all better.”

  Yale found a dollar and gave it to the man, who grinned, toothless, and presented him with the socks. Yale stood for his stop and squeezed the bag.

  A gift from the city, it felt like. Something soft to put between himself and the earth.

  2015

  Fiona and Cecily took a painfully long cab ride up to Montmartre, to the garden square where Claire had told them to wait. Traffic was terrible throughout the city; everyone was back on the road, but the roads weren’t back to normal. Fiona wondered if news trucks were still blocking things up, or if everyone was just driving distracted, skittish.

  Square Jehan-Rictus wasn’t square-shaped but an oblong stretch of sidewalk looping through shrubbery, enclosed by fences and low brick walls. The green benches, if it weren’t for the bird shit, would have been lovely places to sit with a book on a summer day.

  It was sunny but cold, and Fiona already worried Nicolette would be too chilly even as she feared Claire and Nicolette wouldn’t show up at all.

  Cecily checked her watch. She said, “This should have been the hospital waiting room. The two of us waiting together for the baby to be born. Better late than never!”

  They walked the loop, past the tiny playground. They stopped at the mural next to it, a shiny wall made to look like a chalkboard, with white writing and scraps of red. “It must be all ‘I love you,’” Cecily said. Te amo in one place, a hand making the sign-language word for love in another, most of it incomprehensible to Fiona—Thai and Braille and Greek and what might have been Cherokee. Above it all, a painting of a woman in a blue ball gown, with words in a bubble: aimer c’est du désordre . . . alors aimons!

  Fiona felt, as she had on the bridge, that Paris or its more mischievous ghosts were directing messages straight at her. But that wasn’t it at all; this was simply a city that talked about love, that acknowledged its constant invasions, its messiness. What would happen to Chicago, she wondered, if they covered it with things like this? If they filled up Clark Street Bridge with painted padlocks?

  Cecily squeezed her arm, turned her to the walkway: A little blonde girl, swinging her legs out of a small stroller. Above her, Claire, smiling uncertainly. Nicolette hopped out and ran straight past them to the playground, her pink coat open, rain boots trying to fall off her feet.

  Fiona and Claire hugged stiffly, and Claire and Cecily shook hands even more stiffly. In the midst of everything else, it hadn’t occurred to Fiona till just now that the two of them didn’t know each other. Fiona must have carried Claire on her hip a few of those times she’d gone to visit Roscoe the cat, to catch up with Cecily—but those visits had tapered off quickly. Whatever bond had been forced upon Fiona and Cecily in Yale’s hospital room didn’t have lasting power; trauma wasn’t always the best glue.

  Fiona turned to watch Nicolette scramble up the steps and cross the little bridge to the slide. She had it all to herself, and it was sized just right for her. She looked less like Nico than she had in the picture and more like Fiona herself, really.

  Claire called to her, and she ran back from the bottom of the slide, buried her face in Claire’s legs. “Can you say hi? Can you say hi to Fiona and Cecily?”

  It sounded so odd, but maybe, if everything went well, the two of them could pick out grandmotherly names for themselves. Grandy, Nana, Mimi. Mémère, even. She could deal with Fifi, a name she’d rejected her whole life, but one that might sound right coming from a French grandchild. She wanted to squeeze Nicolette, run her hands down those soft cheeks, but she didn’t want to scare her, and she didn’t want to scare Claire either.

  Claire handed them a tote bag with Nicolette’s snacks and juice, a change of clothes, a couple of picture books. She told them Kurt would be there in an hour and a half. “And you could come to the bar in an emergency.” It was only two blocks away.

  “She’s toilet trained?” Cecily asked, as if she were suddenly remembering a script from decades ago.

  “Of course. She won’t need to go, she’s a camel.”

  And she was off, with only a couple more instructions, a quick hug for Nicolette—who stared at her two grandmothers with interest after her mother had left, but didn’t seem afraid in the slightest. She must have been used to sitters.

  Fiona sat on one of the benches by the playground and unpacked the bag so Nicolette could see the crackers, the sippy cup of juice, the Pénélope books—a little mouse playing a color game at school in one, learning about seasons in the other. But Nicolette was
content for now to do the slide, run up to the two women and grin while they clapped, circle back and do it all again. There was time yet to call her over, see if she’d sit on someone’s lap, if she’d speak to them in either English or French.

  Cecily said, “She’s just so beautiful.”

  That Fiona should double over crying at that precise moment made a kind of sense, absurd as it was; this was the first time Cecily had shown any real emotion at all, and so Fiona’s tear ducts seemed to have taken it as an invitation. She could feel Cecily staring at her with concern, and when she looked up she saw that Nicolette had stopped her circuit and was standing in front of her, her little eyebrows squinched together.

  “Did you fall down?” she said in English so perfect and clear that Fiona could only cry harder.

  “She’s fine, dear,” Cecily said. “She’s just a little sad about something.”

  “What is she sad about?”

  What a question. She managed to say, “I’m sad at the world.”

  Nicolette looked around as if there were something wrong with the garden square.

  She said, “My friend has a globe!”

  Cecily said, “Don’t worry about it, honey. Fiona will be fine.” This was convincing enough for Nicolette, who was off again, making cat noises. Cecily put a hand on Fiona’s back.

  Fiona said, “I sent away his mom.”

  It was the thing she hadn’t let herself blurt out to Julian in Richard’s studio the other day, the thing she hadn’t let herself think about when she learned that Claire had been through labor without her, the thing that had been buzzing at a low vibration beneath her every thought about Claire since she’d disappeared, and before that as well. The thing she’d mentioned only once to her shrink, even then changing the story enough, downplaying it enough, that Elena had barely noticed the telling.