Christodora

by Tim Murphy

  Korie’s eyes flickered with fear. “You think so?”

  “There are major toxicities to consider,” Chris all but barked at him.

  Korie frowned. “What?”

  “He means that it could have side effects,” Hector said. “It could mess with your head. But let’s have coffee after the meeting and talk about it. I still have to talk to Marty but I think it’s worth considering.”

  To Hector’s surprise, Korie hugged him. “Thanks, sweetie. Nice to know that some of you data guys can stay human.” Korie shot a hateful look at Chris, who looked suddenly stricken, then Korie turned on his heel.

  Chris and Hector pressed forward. “What the fuck did that mean?” Chris asked him. “I just told him there was a toxicity risk.”

  Hector stopped, leveled a stare at Chris. “He didn’t know what toxicity meant. And neither did you two years ago, probably. Stop throwing your knowledge around. People are really sick.”

  Chris just looked at him, openmouthed, but said nothing. Hector stared him down for a second, then, with a quiet new sense of authority, continued to push forward, glancing back once to see if Chris was following him. Which he was.

  The meeting was called to order. Various committee leaders gave reports, questions were taken, motions to vote were made, votes were cast, actions and new committees were elected into being. Esther Hurwitz went on a long tangent about identity and marginalization until someone in the crowd, breaking the rules of order, shouted, “Wrap it up!” Hector and Chris stepped up to the mic to present.

  “This is the data committee’s report on the experimental drug ddI,” Hector began. These public presentations had helped him get over his shyness; the sense of usefulness he felt taking these arcane lab-bench and FDA-backroom goings-on and putting them into simple, blunt language for the people who needed the information most took him out of his self-consciousness and had brought him a new poise, a maturity, he felt. “This drug—”

  “Hector Villanueva, you’re fucking hot!” It was some queen way in the back of the crowded room. Hector felt his face go crimson, smiled. The room broke into hysterics and wild screams. “It’s true!” and “I second that!” came from other points in the room. Hector caught Ricky in the crowd, smiling and shaking his head with mock resignation.

  Hector took a breath and continued: “This drug looks like it will probably be the first drug approved by the FDA to fight HIV since AZT in 1987.” Boos and hisses. “I know, I know,” he said. “AZT is a fucking fortune and it hasn’t panned out the way we hoped. But there’s a lot of hope that when ddI is combined with AZT, that’ll be the punch the virus needs to—”

  There was a stir in the back of the room. “Ava Heyman, Health Department, AIDS killer!” someone shouted. People in the crowd pulled back. There was Ava, his old boss, her graying hair pulled back in a ponytail, her work glasses low on her nose, her groaning black leather workbag slung over her shoulder. She stood alone. Hector watched her from the dais, mesmerized.

  “I’m not an AIDS killer,” she said in her loud Queens honk, a touch of her trademark disgust in her voice. “I’m here to listen. And help.”

  “You guys at Health have done bullshit for eight years,” someone shouted. It was Ithke Larcy, the housing activist.

  “Ithke, you know that’s not true,” Ava shot back. “I’m not going to let you grandstand in front of a crowd. You and Karl were in last week and we mapped out a plan for subsidized housing units for HIV/AIDS-affecteds, and you know it’s under way.”

  “AIDS-affecteds!” spat Ithke, the locks on his head shaking with righteous rage. “Listen to how you talk. We’re people.”

  Ava flung her hands in the air. “Oh, come on, Ithke, gimme a chance here!”

  Chaos was erupting in the back, and Hector noticed a few folks advance toward Ava. “People, hold up!” he found himself booming into the mic. “Hold up!” The crowd quieted, turned back toward him, curious. Some knew, some didn’t, that he’d worked for Ava. Many relied on him to be a conduit to her, to Health. And here she was.

  “I know Dr. Heyman,” he told the crowd. “I worked with her at the Health Department for seven years.” Everyone stared up at him, eyebrows raised, as though to ask, And?

  “I knew she’d be here tonight,” he continued. “And believe me, if someone leaves work at the bureaucracy of the DOH and comes to one of these meetings, it’s because they want to help. So let’s build allies where we can use them and give Dr. Heyman a chance to listen in tonight and see what we do, and see what she can do for us.” He paused. “And please step back from Dr. Heyman.”

  Those aggressive combatants who’d stepped toward her backed away. The room was unusually silent. Across it, Hector and Ava locked eyes. Then an enormous, satirical smile broke across Ava’s face.

  “Thank you, Hector,” she called out. “You always were chivalrous.”

  Most of the room laughed. Ava felt her jaw and shoulders slacken. There, she thought. The worst was over. Her psych meds made her sweat, and she hoped the sweat under her blouse wasn’t spotting through the back. She put her heavy bag on the floor. Ithke and Karl came over to her, hugged and kissed her. It was amazing how these guys could turn on a dime on you like that! she thought. They were like hurt, impulsive little boys. What were they like to their mothers? What were their mothers like to them?

  She focused on what Hector had resumed saying: “So, yes, ddI . . .” How the clinical trials for ddI were so rigid, so exclusionary—God, Hector explained this heavy stuff to a lay audience so well, so clearly, no bullshit!—that nobody who really needed the drug could get in the trial. So, as activists, they’d forced the FDA and the drugmaker into meetings with them where they’d come up with a novel concept called parallel tracking: the drug company would fill its classic trial as best it could with patients who met the strict criteria, but it would also give the drug in a parallel-track trial to whoever needed it and met only minimal basic criteria. The whole thing would start in a few weeks.

  Ava nudged Ithke. “It’s amazing they pulled that off,” she said. “That kind of model at FDA is unheard of.”

  Ithke smirked. “Little by little, you’re all learning not to shut us out,” he said.

  So cocky! These boys . . . really! She could only smile back at him in the half-charmed, half-reproving way a mother might to her bratty son. Was Ithke HIV-positive? she wondered. Who around her was? A few looked sick, but most looked great—sexy, young, lithe. She felt like she was at a gay disco but with slogan T-shirts and sign-up boards instead of throbbing music. She thought about pills. All the fucking pills she’d had to take the past several years—the exhausting, rotating mix of pills and their weird, sweaty, enervating, weight-gaining, narcolepsy-inducing, strange-tics-and-sparks-in-the-brain-provoking side effects—the constant titrating up and down, the mind-numbing trips to her autocratic psychopharmacologist, all the tinkering and tweaking, constantly trying to get to that point where you felt balanced and minimally stable but not like a walled-off zombie. The mood swings and the pills had made her not only a public-health official, but a patient, conferring on her an empathy for sick people she hadn’t particularly asked for and still half resented.

  So many pills for her to choose from, and so hard to know how to use them. Whereas these guys—hardly any pills at all. The only real pill, AZT, so nasty and toxic. She’d probably never die of her disease as long as she stayed on her funky pharmaceutical soup. But who here would live? What if she knew that Milly might decline and die in the next five years? The thought gave her a wave of stomach sickness. What did the mothers of these boys think, feel? Did they even know their kids were gay? And Hector. Did he have it? She could never bring herself to ask him, not even in his final year at DOH when, for the first time, the edges of his anger and disgust started showing, more and more, in meetings and random conversations for the first time since he showed up as her shy intern in 1981.


  Ithke and Karl left her side now to present on housing issues. Hector stepped down from the dais, was working his way through the crowd to her. Before he reached her, a woman with wire-framed glasses, in a pair of overalls and massive black boots, approached her.

  “I’m Esther Hurwitz,” the woman announced. “I’m an activist and a writer. I chronicle the death toll. And I’d like to ask you: With how little you’ve done in this plague, can you live with yourself as a woman and a Jew?”

  Ava’s eyes grew wide. Then she laughed, incredulous. “I can live with myself as a woman and a Jew just fine,” she said. “How about you? And another thing: Is that really how you think you make allies with the health establishment in an epidemic?” she asked.

  “You’ve hardly been an ally,” Esther shot back. “You’ve been useless.”

  Hector joined them. Ava turned to him. “Who is this woman? She just accosted me.”

  Hector, baffled, said nothing. Ava glanced at him again. She missed him so much! She was . . . she found the word: she was proud of him.

  “Esther, she’s on our side,” Hector finally said to Esther. “Honestly.”

  Esther eyed Ava for several seconds behind her glasses. “None of you guys,” she finally said, “have done much to make us believe that.”

  Something in her tone softened Ava up. She was moved to see how many women—lesbians mostly, it seemed—were here tonight, when the women easily could’ve said this was the boys’ problem, not gotten involved. “That’s why I’m here tonight, honey,” she said.

  Esther folded her arms over her chest and frowned. “We’ll see, then,” she said. “Honey.” She turned and walked away.

  Ava turned to Hector. “Tough fucking crowd,” she said.

  “You don’t even know the half,” he said. He led Ava out of the main room toward the foyer, which was quiet. They sat down on a bench. “I saw your daughter tonight.”

  “Milly?”

  “She’s working across the street from our apartment.”

  Ava cocked her head quizzically. “Oh my goodness, that’s right. At a café, right?”

  Hector couldn’t help a smile. Poor Milly. Ava’d never exactly been the most attentive mother—she’d had the city’s health to think about. “At a boutique,” he said. “Reminiscence.”

  “Oh, of course, I knew that. Isn’t she a beautiful girl?”

  “She is,” Hector agreed.

  “I’m proud of her,” Ava murmured absently.

  They fell into silence. They could hear shouts and scattered applause in the great hall, but they were alone for the moment in the foyer. Their eyes met; they both smiled awkwardly. Ava took Hector’s large hand in hers for a moment, moved it to her lap, set it back on his own. “You’re a grant recipient!” she joked.

  He shrugged. “That’s me.”

  More silence. “Are you all right, Hector?” she finally mustered the nerve to ask him.

  He looked at her, shrugged again. “I am,” he said. “At least I was as of February, the last test. And I haven’t been with anyone but Ricky since.”

  “What about Ricky?”

  Hector pursed his lips. “This is between us, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “I think he might be. Swollen lymphs and a long cold this winter. I want him to get tested but he won’t. He’s afraid.”

  Ava said nothing for a while. Finally, she turned on the bench and said to him, in a deadly serious whisper, as though she was afraid someone might hear, because she was: “I care about you and I want to apologize to you. I didn’t do enough when this emerged. None of us did. Because of who it affected, and we didn’t want to get our hands dirty with it. We kept putting it off. Everyone has.”

  Hector laughed a bitter, soft laugh. “You think I don’t know that? You think that any of us don’t know that? Ava, why do you think we’re here, showing up at your offices with the New York Times on our tail, trying to embarrass you? This is what you pushed us to.” His hands were clenching as he spoke—oh, he hated showing his anger! “I would much rather be fighting this fight from inside Health, with my fucking colleagues.”

  “You know I spoke up for this, Hector,” she said. “With Steve. With Ed!”

  “Ava, you know that fucking closeted queen of a mayor hasn’t done enough. And neither have you.”

  Had he just said that square into the face of his boss of seven years? Apparently. A moment later, guilt stabbed him. For seven years he’d watched her drag herself to work, sometimes sweaty, sometime bloated, walking through the haze of new meds, new med combos. She had virtually bolted her mind down with meds to show up for work, for her daughter’s high-school years, so she’d never humiliate her husband and daughter again. Through it all, she’d missed only two weeks of work, for a hospitalization upstate in ’87, a kind of support camp to come to grips with her illness and, together with others in the same situation, learn to live with it. The deep lines in her forehead and around her eyes and jaw, at not even fifty, traced every sweaty, depressed, off-the-beam year of her past decade. Her hair was salt-and-pepper now, frizzy, pulled back in a plastic clip; she didn’t care much about being stylish and sexy anymore. She’d lost something and she had that dark nimbus, embodied by her ridiculously heavy old black workbag, to prove it.

  She met his level gaze. “You know a massive corps of new caseworkers are coming on in a few weeks at DAS.” She meant the city’s Department of AIDS Services, which, the past three years, had done an anemic job at best of coordinating services in the city. “I’ll tell you this confidentially right now. In a few days, Steve’s announcing me as DAS point person for Health. And I am going to ride that agency like you’ve never seen.”

  Hector smiled and laughed. “I’d like to see that!”

  She laughed in turn. “Ride them into the ground! And if, in three months, I’m not getting what I want—what we want”—and she gestured back at the great room—“I am cutting loose and going maverick like you. So, in other words, I have nothing to lose at this point. I stopped wanting to be the first female chief at Health about two years ago, so—so fuck it.”

  Hector studied her. “You know that all the information you just gave me, I now hold over your head.”

  She shrugged slightly, as though to say, So?

  “And you know that, as much as I like you, if I need to, I won’t fail to put it out there.”

  “Why the fuck do you think I told you?” she rasped. “You’re going to hold me to account. You and I are going to be in close, close touch in the coming months, my friend.”

  If I give you my trust and you let me down, I’ll kill you, he wanted to tell her. But he thought better of that. It’s good to be working with you again, Ava, he was going to say. But the corner of his eye caught a woman—a short Latina with her hair pulled back in a scrunchie had wandered into the foyer in acid-washed shorts and a baggy T-shirt, looking terrified. Ava, noting Hector’s attention break, caught the woman, too.

  “You need something?” Hector called.

  The woman turned, seeming scared to have been spotted. She said something and choked on it.

  “What did you say?” Hector asked. He felt his face and his voice softening, trying to calm the woman. That seemed to work. The woman walked straight over to him and Ava. “Is this the AIDS meeting?” she asked in a half whisper, as though invisible passersby might hear her.

  “It is. Las activistas,” he said with a laugh and a little bit of a gay flourish, something he had modestly refined in the past few years, though not very convincingly. He just never would be one of those flourish-y gays, like Ricky. “You wanna join? We need Latinas.”

  The woman bowed her head. It seemed like her face was twisting into some kind of embarrassed smile. But—no! She started crying. “I’m gonna die,” she sobbed. “I’m think I’m gonna die soon.”

 
Hector and Ava looked at each other, parted on the bench to make room for the woman, who didn’t look much older than thirty. The woman put her head in her hands and continued crying and saying, uncontrollably, “I’m gonna die.”

  “Shh, it’s okay,” said Ava, putting her arm around the woman. “Why are you saying that? Because you’re HIV-positive?”

  The woman nodded. Still crying, she said, “I have a hundred and thirty T cells. I don’t ever feel good any more. I have problems with my periods. They’re not normal anymore.”

  Hector and Ava exchanged another look. “Chica,” Hector told the girl, “a hundred and thirty T cells is a lot. Why do you think you’re gonna die any time soon? There’s meds and treatment for you.”

  “They didn’t help my friend,” she said, coming up from her tears for air, with what seemed like a bit of fighting spirit breaking through. “He took AZT and it just made him sick and he died anyway, in February.”

  “Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” Ava said.

  But Hector was connecting dots in his head. Of course. Tavi Peña. That crazy, cackling queen he’d worked with at GMHC. But Tavi, once he found out he was positive, as he got sick, didn’t want to come here, didn’t want to fight. He retreated back to Queens, to his family, which, thank God, loved him and took him in and nursed him. Hector had been to the funeral, to the memorial service in Jackson Heights, with its Spanish drag performances. But he hadn’t seen this sweet chica there. And then he remembered, now, that night at Paradise Garage so long ago, when this woman—a girl then!—and Tavi were so messed up. It was the night he met Ricky!

  “You mean Tavi, right?” Hector said to the girl.

  She snorted back tears. “Oh my God,” she said. “You knew Tavi?”

  “Yeah. And don’t you remember that night I met you with Tavi at the Paradise Garage? Like, five, six years ago?”