Like a Love Story(54)

“I’m sorry,” I say, standing up. “I have to go.”

“Zabber, I’m sorry,” Tara says with genuine regret. “I’m so on edge. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. You know I support you no matter what.”

“I know you do,” I say, hating myself for lashing out at her.

“I just wish you supported me too,” she says pointedly.

I’m reminded again that I want love, passion, life.

“I do support you, but I also have to go,” I say. “I . . . I have somewhere to be.”

What is Art doing right now? Is he already in the cathedral? Or is he getting ready for the big day, dressing himself up in fancy clothes?

“With Judy?” Tara asks.

I nod. I could tell Tara where I’m going, but I don’t have the energy for that right now. I just want to be near Art.

“I thought you said you broke up,” Tara says, suspicious.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ll see you later.” I begin to walk away, but some melodramatic impulse makes me turn around and add, “I have my own life to live, you know.”

I don’t know what has gotten into me. I don’t know who the boy is who just said that to his sister. But I like him. He sounded a little bit like Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan, defiant and edgy, a person no one messes with. This is the person I feel myself becoming as I walk the frigid streets of the city toward the cathedral. I don’t even walk, I strut. I treat the city like my runway. I will myself to turn all my nerves into confidence, to release all the butterflies in my stomach into the cold city air, so that there will be only one butterfly left. Me.

As I get close to the cathedral, I can hear them. It sounds like thousands of people, and when I turn a corner, I realize that it is. Maybe five thousand. All kinds of people. Young and old, men and women, from every background. They swarm like bees, screaming and chanting and singing and holding signs like ACT UP Fights AIDS, Stop the Church, Keep Your Religion Out of My Body, and Thou Shalt Not Kill over a photo of the cardinal.

Well-dressed newscasters are everywhere, with their hard hair and their hard smiles, trailed by cameramen, holding equipment, wires connecting back to trucks parked around the perimeter of the church. A man dressed like Jesus screams that he too wants to go to heaven. A group of women sing a song about their bodies belonging to them. A black drag queen in an evening gown and a large white hat raps on top of a box, rhyming homosexual with indefensible, and Catholic with Sapphic, and AIDS with renegades. This is nothing like the New York Stock Exchange. There were some spectators there, some media, but nowhere near this. I enter the crowd of people, and as soon as I do, I feel myself turning from butterfly into caterpillar again, longing for a cocoon. How will I find Art among all these people?

I push my way past crowds, making eye contact with person after person, their energy and passion transmitting into me, giving me strength. I was too young to remember much of the Iranian Revolution, too young to have gone out into the streets with my dad, who was a part of it. But I remember him describing the energy to me, and I remember driving by a protest. It felt like this. Crowds, chants, anger, passion. I close my eyes and take it in. For a moment, I’m seven years old again. My country is in the throes of chaos. My father is the chaos. My mother fears the chaos. My sister is becoming the chaos. I am in between, hoping for order, not realizing it will never come, at least not to this country. And soon enough my mother will choose to escape to a new life, while my father will be eaten alive by his own demons. I open my eyes again. I pray that the revolution for these people turns out better than my father’s did. That unlike him, they live, and that unlike him, they create a better world.

“Hey,” a man says to me. “I know you.”

I blink my eyes. Do I know him? And then I remember. It’s the man from the deli, the one in the fur coat, the one Art took a picture of. He’s wearing the same coat now, and holding a sign that reads Keep Calm and Rage On.

“You’re Art’s friend, right?” he asks.

I didn’t think he could get any thinner, but he has, in just two months. There is a lesion on his neck now, big and dark and purple.

“Hi,” I finally say. “Yes, my name is Reza.”

“Right,” he says. “Reza. Isn’t this magnificent? Listen to all these people. It’s the sound of centuries of repression being beaten into the ground. It’s the sound of change.”

“Do you know where Art is?” I ask urgently.

“I think he wanted to be in the church,” he says. “You know Art. He’s got to be at the center of the action. Come on.”

He gifts his sign to another protester, then takes my hand to lead me inside. I freeze when I notice another lesion on his palm. I feel its texture on me. I remind myself this isn’t how you get infected, and I grip his hand so tight that the lesion disappears in our united palms. There’s no purple anymore. Just my brown hand gripped into his black one.

“You know I’ve wanted to scream at churches since long before this disease,” he says. “This is like a lifelong dream come true.”

“What did you want to scream?” I ask as we get closer and closer to the church.

“Just a great big fuck-you for messing with my brain as a kid, for making me feel shame, for making my momma think she shouldn’t love me for who I am.” He takes a breath. “Of course, I wasn’t Catholic, but it’s all the same to me. I don’t care if you’re Baptist, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish, or one of those adorable little Scientologists. If you use God to tell people created by God that they’re sinners for who they love, then I give you a great big middle finger and I invite you to sit on it.” He raises his free hand up into the sky and points his middle finger at the cathedral and screams a loud guttural scream, years of emotion coming out of his tired lungs. I notice a gold ring on his ring finger when he does this, and I remember the man who was with him at the deli, the man who isn’t with him now. I hope he’s just lost in the crowd.