The Spectators

by Jennifer Dubois

  It was said by Brookie: “See?”

  * * *

  —

  It was a time of secret iconographies. We carried lingams and rosaries, rabbits’ feet and crystals. We sent away for mail-order injections, for megadoses of vitamin C. Paulie wore worry beads, though he mostly kept them under his shirt; he adopted a macrobiotic diet and spoke mistily of “going to the other side.” Peter began to polish his war medals, and then display them. Toward the end he produced his uniform, and displayed that, too, on a hanger. (“And now he wants ‘Taps’ at his memorial,” Nick had whispered, mystified.)

  We ate health food; we wore earth tones. We watched wellness visualization tapes. We may have prayed a couple times, but you’ll never get us to admit it.

  We will admit to calling sex lines. We’ll admit we omed into white lights.

  * * *

  —

  But then, there were the unforeseen advantages!

  Announcing you had AIDS was like pulling out a loaded weapon. Some guy actually robbed a bank this way. Paulie, inspired, used it to chase away a mugger.

  And then, there were the extra police at the pride parade.

  And then, there were the reconciliations: ones we’d thought would never come, ones we’d thought were coming long ago, ones that never actually materialized but did, until the very end, seem possible. Because anything at all was possible: we understood that now.

  * * *

  —

  It was said that you should go to the ER if you got turned away at St. Vincent’s. It was said the law said they had to take you.

  It was said that Rock Hudson had gone to Paris. It was said he might be cured!

  It was said that this was a mistake.

  It was said there might be promising drugs in Mexico.

  It was said the Mexican drugs were not effective.

  It was said they were effective, and the powers-that-be knew it, and that this is why they were illegal: because they might put the medical establishment out of business.

  It was said that you could sell them at a considerable markup in San Francisco either way.

  It was said there was a house on Fire Island whose every last tenant had died.

  It was said that homophobia was the greatest threat to gay health.

  It was said there was a Buddhist abbey north of Bangkok where monks tended to the unclaimed ashes of the dead.

  It was said you were lucky if it didn’t go to your lungs.

  * * *

  —

  AIDS was a story that started without you, long before you realized you were in a story at all. We scoured our pasts for points of entry; we scanned obituaries for names. We thought of our trips to California, to the bathhouses in San Francisco. We thought of the gorgeous muscle-shirted Puerto Rican. But then, this disease didn’t get where it was by being obvious. And so we considered the inverse—men and moments that seemed counterintuitive, if not straightforwardly benign. What about the aging hippie we’d met at the Palladium? It had been a “Golden Oldies Night” and we’d gone as sort of a joke. Maybe that was the beginning.

  Or perhaps a sleeker sort of irony was afoot here. Perhaps we had gotten it in San Francisco, but maybe not from the men—maybe it was from the shot of methedrine we’d been persuaded to try there. A pretty Chinese boy had wrapped surgical tubing around our bicep until the vein bulged; maybe this had been the fatal penetration.

  We were beginning to understand the Aristotelian anomaly at work here. AIDS was both a fatal flaw and a rising action—leading inexorably to the cathartic crisis called death—yet there was no discerning its inciting event. But half of us were going blind like Oedipus, and didn’t we deserve to know why? Habeas corpus, we bellowed! This is America.

  * * *

  —

  Paulie lingered longer than anyone had expected—descending with exquisite, almost imperceptible slowness, like a predator after its prey. Just when we thought we’d come to terms with some new phase of his absence (What terms? we wondered manically. Define them, define them!)—just when we thought we’d jettisoned inappropriate hope and superstition—he’d wake up just enough to show us we were wrong. We were always surprised, though never surprised enough; we saw that we had, on some level, been awaiting his resurrection.

  Sometimes they’re waiting for something, murmured one of the nurses. We worried that he might be waiting for us to give up. And so we tried, and vowed we had, and then he’d stir and show us that we had not, and we’d weep and promise to do better. And so, in the end, he must have given up on us.

  When it finally happened, we shouted insanely at the nurse. She’d been a saint throughout; we thought that we might hit her. We had a wild urge to pull the fire alarm. The nurse brought us water in a plastic pitcher. Brookie wept until he actually spit up, which was one of the few emissions we’d not yet seen in a hospital.

  When the stethoscoped man finally came to do the time of death, Paulie had been gone for at least a half an hour. We kept asking the stethoscoped man if this mattered. Very kindly, he told us it did not.

  And even then, we could not be entirely convinced. We stole glances at Paulie’s chest; we caught each other doing it. And so what if we were! At this point, we were beyond taking anyone’s word for anything. If Paulie was so sure he was dead, then he was going to have to prove it.

  * * *

  —

  And he did, every day, for years and years, until finally we believed, and required proof no longer. Enough is enough, we’d think—when finding his curling Streisand poster in a box of tax returns, when hearing some awful show tune and inexplicably knowing all the words. Okay, we’d think, we get it. You’re gone and we’ll miss you forever. Now, enough. Show’s over. Off the stage!

  The lesson is, never encourage a ham.

  The other lesson is, never issue a dare to a dead person. They’ve got all the time in the world.

  * * *

  —

  It was said, at last, there was a test.

  It was said the test yielded no new information: the single-virus theory was, after all, just a theory.

  It was said: “Like gravity is a theory? Or like Freudian theory is a theory?”

  It was said the test yielded inaccurate information: it issued false positives for liver damage, LSD use, vaccines.

  It was said the test yielded irrelevant information: HIV did not cause AIDS. Do your homework, it was said! It was said, follow the money.

  It was said the people who said this were denialists and idiots, lunatics and murderers—though who wasn’t being called a murderer in those days?

  It was said the test yielded redundant information: because what, fundamentally, did it tell you? All it told you was that you would die someday; all it told you was the single thing that could be said with certainty about everyone. The test flipped a trick coin and called its prediction prophecy; to submit to its verdict was to participate in an epistemological con.

  It was said the test yielded too much information: it was a biological aleph, revealing not only what you had, but who you were. (“The thing in the tube literally turns purple,” said Brookie.) It was said this information was likely to be of interest to insurers, to employers—maybe even prosecutors, in the twenty-five states where it was still illegal to exist. And sure, maybe San Francisco would get around to passing some reasonable protections—but we should be clear by now that New York, being half run by closet cases, was not going to be getting its shit together in that or any regard. And anyway, if your paranoia stopped at criminal prosecution, then you needed to reacquaint yourself with the twentieth century. It was said that medical concentration camps could be next.

  It was said, by Stephen: “Not a chance. People wouldn’t stand for it.”

  It was said, by Brookie: “What people? You’re telling me Reagan wouldn’t?”
r />   “Koch wouldn’t.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Well, forget Koch. New Yorkers wouldn’t. And how would they pull that one over anyway? Just every fag in Greenwich Village disappears without anyone noticing?”

  It was said that this was literally what was happening right now.

  * * *

  —

  Did Matthew Miller take the test right away? He had a show on WNYC by then, where he discussed the issues of the day. He still lived on West Fourth Street, as far as anyone knew, and he must have seen many of us by then: young people with peeling-off skin and highly visible chest IVs, their canes tapping tentatively over West Village cobblestones. And when he saw them, had he been afraid? Had he worried over moles, lingering colds, bruises he couldn’t remember acquiring? Would he have known to worry that flying might trigger latent pneumonia, and the next week obsess over the possibility that last summer’s sunburn might—even now—be fatally depressing his immune system? Had he been glad for another reason to avoid having sex with Alice? And had he thought back to that writer—the one he’d hired and then forgot to fire for a decade—and found himself wondering, for the very first time, how deep his sad, annoying loyalty had gone? His love had been a pleasure, and then a liability, and now maybe it would save Matthew Miller’s life. Did he recognize the irony of this? Did it make him wretched with terror and regret? And is it wicked to hope that, at least for a time, it did?

  * * *

  —

  Because the relief Matthew Miller would feel when he finally took the test—oh, for him, it would be so easy. In other quarters, things were not so simple.

  The mostly unspoken corollary of Why me? is: Why not you?

  Why not you?

  Why the fuck not you?

  Survival is a gruesome sort of blessing: one not to be trifled with, nor entirely longed for. It is not an easy fate to wish on anyone—not even Matthew Miller, not even yourself.

  * * *

  —

  Many of our final illnesses came from the animals: in the end, they claimed us for their kingdom.

  On our bodies, warts mosaicked into scales; on our tongues, fur sprouted, rendering us dumb as beasts. Thorny corollas of herpes scabs made faces reptilian. There were the chameleon-like chromatics: blood leaking from capillaries, flushing skin to plum. The blue ichthyic hands of end-stage pneumonia. Backs speckled from thrombocytopenic purpura, making human men look venomous—like snakes or lizards or those strange little octopuses in Thailand you can step on without noticing and then die from four hours later.

  These were the final insults, our last dismissals from the human family. We died of bird tuberculosis, pigeon-toed and flightless, hobbling on forked passerine feet. We died of toxoplasmosis, foaming at the mouth like rabid dogs. Perhaps it is universal—this sense of chimerical morphing. We are all made creaturely in death. And yet it is a very particular loneliness to die from a disease meant for sheep or cats, from a parasite that was never even after you in the first place. It was something like dying in outer space, your body condemned to float out beyond the carbon cycle, through eternities not our own.

  * * *

  —

  To the end, there were the perverse beauties. Not only the moral kind—the kindnesses, the sacrifices, the depths of human bravery and goodness, all the abstractions we either found or pretended to find inspiring (inspiring: such a terrifying concept, implying similar feats might one day be expected of us all). There were also those moments of concrete prettiness; images that appealed, almost reflexively, to our vestigial sense of the aesthetic. Paulie’s limpid, hollowed-out face in the moonlight, a couple days before he died. The perfect symmetry of the wen on Brookie’s shoulder, like a coin pressed into skin. The fearful elegance of the lentivirus itself: its shape, its strategy of haunting.

  All this wreckage and suffering, all this otherworldly ugliness and waste—amidst all of this, we were denied even the purity of our horror. In those moments of loveliness, we’d remember that this apocalypse was not complete, and thus not inevitable.

  And this was a violence of another order.

  EIGHTEEN

  cel

  “Luke, it was an ambush,” says Cel on Tuesday morning. She is in his office again. She cannot remember showing up, or knocking, but here she is; the facts must speak for themselves.

  Cel’s voicemail had been completely full that morning. There were messages from journalists of every variety of credibility and decency; some were left at odd hours, from reporters with heavy accents. The Ohio shooting itself hadn’t registered much beyond American media—the global press seeming to regard American gun violence as a bewildering, highly niche concern—but the story of Mattie’s opinions about it is, apparently, of worldwide interest. The European journalists had a lot of questions about the Mein Kampf comment; the Americans were mostly interested in Mattie’s gun remarks. The NRA has issued a statement about the comments, and many of the reporters wanted Cel to comment about that. She’d listened to the messages fretfully, with a dim, half-guilty sense of excitement.

  “It was completely unacceptable,” she says. “Beyond a cheap shot. But really? In the long run? It’s their fuckup.” Cel tries to say this in the authoritative voice that rich people say such things—as though her personal displeasure implies significant fallout. “And in the long run? It’s gonna cost them.”

  Cel has expected Luke to yell, but he says nothing, only pores serenely over a stack of photos. His silence compounds the eerie quiet of the building: this is normally the time of day when the lights are tested, the guests are prepped. Tomorrow, filming will resume with a drag queen beauty contest—an anodyne throwback that makes Cel think snobbishly of Mattie M’s competitors.

  “There will be consequences,” she adds randomly, in a severe, vaguely Old Testament sort of voice. Still Luke says nothing. Cel does not like this newly passive, inert Luke; it has the feel of something worse than the calm before the storm—the desiccated beach before the tsunami, perhaps.

  “I mean, Luke, I’m not going to bullshit you.” Luke likes when people say this sort of thing. “We’ll be playing defense for days.”

  “What do you think of her for wronged wife?” Luke is holding up a picture of a woman with teased hair and bifocals. “Too confusing?”

  “What?” says Cel. “Oh. I think so, yeah. What are those glasses?”

  “I know.” Luke considers the photo sadly, then puts it down. “How about her?” He holds up another. “Too sexy?”

  “What? I mean, yes, probably. Wait, why are you doing this?”

  “I’ve given myself a demotion.”

  “Oh.” Cel hadn’t realized this was an option. “Does Mattie know?”

  Luke issues a snort like a teakettle. “Does Mattie know.” He says it decisively, as though this comment explains itself. “Mattie, thank God, is not my problem anymore.”

  “Did you quit?” says Cel. This comes out sounding alarmed, which makes less than zero sense.

  “Ha, no,” he says. “You aren’t that lucky. They’re bringing in someone external.”

  “Oh.” Cel has heard of this sort of thing—studios hiring someone to echo the prevailing views more stridently than anyone in-house would dare.

  “Which doesn’t mean you’re fired, necessarily,” says Luke. “Though it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not.”

  “Ah,” says Cel. She hadn’t thought to care.

  “But he’s not listening to us,” says Luke. “So let’s see if he listens to someone else.”

  “Sort of a wait-till-your-father-gets-home scenario.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know, but sure.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Eddie Marcus. From Advantage Consulting. Mattie wanted him. Apparently they go way back.”

  “Back to what?”

 
; “The less we know about that, the better. But, Cel, to be completely honest?”

  Cel gestures By all means, even though he isn’t looking.

  “To be honest, I can’t see it mattering. From what I’ve heard, this Marcus guy isn’t very credible. Maybe Mattie really is just bringing him in to Kevorkian this whole thing. Which honestly? Is fine by me. Just as long as it’s humane and I don’t have to know the details.” Luke spins around in his chair. The back of his neck is paler than the rest of him, and his exposing it feels like a strange form of vulnerability—as though he’s a beta predator admitting defeat. “Although I have to say if that’s the plan, then you were doing a pretty good job of it already.”

  He spins back around, and gives Cel a look like he’s caught her giving him a look. Which maybe she was? These days, almost anything seems possible.

  “You know, I haven’t been entirely fair to you, Cel,” he says. This sarcasm is cross-cutting in so many directions that it might not even be sarcasm at all. “All this time I’ve been thinking you were terrible at your job. But that depends entirely on what your job actually is! As a publicist, it is true, you are extraordinarily incompetent. But I look at this kamikaze mission Mattie’s on now, and I wonder if maybe I’ve got it all backwards. Maybe he hired you to help him crash this thing. In which case, I’ll be the first to say, well done!”

  Luke pulls out another photo. He regards it for a long while, his fingers drumming against his chin. Outside, volute-shaped clouds drift through a painfully blue sky.

  “Is that—are you playing a sonata or something?” says Cel.

  He stops.

  “Why did I even come in here?”

  “I don’t know,” says Luke. “All I know is that today I’m judging beauty contests.” He flutters the photographs. “If you want to help out, we’re still short on tiaras.”