The Immortalists(28)
After lunch, they head to Star Pharmacy for rolling papers. Simon pays while the other two wait outside. They’re both staring at the pharmacy’s glass window when he comes back.
‘Oh my God, you guys,’ Tommy says. ‘Have you seen this?’
He points at a homemade flier taped to the window. THE GAY CANCER, it reads. Below are three Polaroid photos of a young man. In the first photo, he holds up his shirt to reveal purple splotches, raised and rippling like burns. In the second, his mouth is open wide. There’s a splotch in there, too.
‘Shut up, Tommy.’ Tommy is a notorious hypochondriac – he’s always complaining of aches in muscle groups no one else has ever heard of – but Beau’s voice is sharper than usual.
They huddle under the awning at Toad Hall to smoke. Simon inhales, sweetness and damp, and it should calm him but it doesn’t: he feels like he could jump out of his skin. For the rest of the day, he can’t erase the images from his mind – those terrible lesions, dark as plums – or the words that someone else scrawled at the bottom of the flier in red pen: Watch out, guys. There’s something out there.
Richie wakes up with a red dot on the white of his left eye. Simon covers his shift so Richie can go to the doctor; he wants to make sure it’s gone by Christmas Eve, the night of Purp’s annual Jingle Bell Cock. Few of Purp’s patrons visit family over the holidays, so the dancers paint themselves red and green, hang bells from the waists of their G-strings. The doctor sends Richie home with an antibiotic. ‘They’re like, “Maybe it’s pink eye,” ’ Richie says the next day, spraying Adrian’s backside purple. ‘This sweet little lab tech, she’s probably nineteen, she goes, “Any chance you came into contact with fecal matter?” I’m like’ – hand to heart – ‘ “Oh no, honey, I wouldn’t touch the stuff,” ’ and the men are laughing, and Simon will remember Richie like this later, his guffaw, his military buzz cut with the slightest hint of gray, because by the twentieth of December, Richie is dead.
How to describe the shock? The splotches appear on the flower seller in Dolores Park and on the beautiful feet of Beau, who once spun eight times without stopping and is now taken to San Francisco General in Eduardo’s car, seizing. These are Simon’s earliest memories of Ward 86, though it will not be named for another year: the squeak of meal carts; the nurses at the phone desk, their remarkable calm (No, we don’t know how it’s transmitted. Is your lover with you now? Does he know you’re coming to the hospital?); and the men, men in their twenties and thirties sitting wide-eyed on cots and in wheelchairs as if hallucinating. Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals, says the Chronicle, but nobody knows how you get it. Still, when the lymph nodes in Lance’s armpits begin to swell, he finishes his shift at Purp and cabs to the hospital with the article in his backpack. Ten days later, the lumps are large as oranges.
Robert paces the apartment. ‘We need to stay here,’ he says. They have enough food for two weeks. Neither of them has slept in days.
But Simon is panicked by the thought of quarantine. He already feels cut off from the world, and he refuses to hide, refuses to believe this is the end. He’s not dead yet. And yet he knows, of course he knows, or at least he fears – the thin line between fear and intuition; how one so easily masquerades as the other – that the woman is right, and that by June 21st, the first day of summer, he’ll be gone, too.
Robert doesn’t want him working at Purp. ‘It isn’t safe,’ he says.
‘Nothing is safe.’ Simon takes his bag of makeup and walks to the door. ‘I need the money.’
‘Bullshit. Corps pays you.’ Robert follows him and grabs his arm, hard. ‘Admit it, Simon. You like what you get there. You need it.’
‘Come on, Rob.’ Simon forces a laugh. ‘Don’t be such a drag.’
‘Me? I’m a drag?’
There is a blaze in Robert’s eyes that makes Simon feel both intimidated and turned on. He reaches for Robert’s cock.
Robert yanks back. ‘Don’t play me like that. Don’t touch me.’
‘Come with me,’ Simon slurs. He’s been drinking, which Robert dislikes almost as much as his work at Purp. ‘Why don’t you ever come anywhere?’
‘I don’t fit anywhere, Simon. Not with you white guys. Not with the black guys. Not in ballet or in football. Not back home, and not here.’ Robert speaks slowly, as though to a child. ‘So I stay home. I keep myself small. Except when I’m dancing. And even then – every time I get onstage, I know there’s people in that audience who have never seen somebody like me dance like I dance. I know that some of them won’t like it. I’m scared, Simon. Every day. And now you know what that’s like. ’Cause you’re scared, too.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ says Simon, hoarse.
‘I think you know exactly what I’m talking about. This is the first time you’ve felt like me – like there’s nowhere that’s safe. And you don’t like it.’
Simon feels his pulse in his skull. He is staked by the truth of what Robert has said like an insect to a board, his wings flapping.
‘You’re jealous,’ he hisses. ‘That’s all. You could try harder, Rob, but you don’t. And you’re jealous – you’re jealous – that I do.’