The Prettiest Star

by Carter Sickels

He was eighteen. Now he’s twenty-four. In AIDS years, does age even matter? Before New York the only funeral he’d ever been to was his grandfather’s, a man he hardly knew. In the last two years he’s been to nine—all men between twenty-five and forty-five. How many others does he know who are sick? They don’t always tell each other. He doesn’t want to go to any more funerals.

The congregation is sparse, glaring gaps of emptiness. This is how it will be through spring and summer. Now that Easter’s over, people have absorbed enough religion to carry them through to Christmas. Birth, death, resurrection. Those are the days people remember.

How many loads of laundry have I done over the years? It’s strange to think about, how we spend our lives.

Once you know something, you can’t un-know it.

“If he comes back,” he starts, and I stay as still as possible, hollowness thudding through me. “What will people—” I force myself to speak, just to stop him from talking. “He’s our son,” I say. It is the right thing, but even as I say the words, they sound easy, rehearsed, false.

Travis’s words, spoken in the dark, ring in my head as I strike the match. He asked the same question six years ago when Brian left this family and all he knew. This isn’t supposed to happen, we raised our kids right, we weren’t perfect but we were good, and now here I am sneaking out in the middle of the night and our son, five hundred miles away, is dying from what is in his blood, dying because of what he did, dying because of what he calls himself, and what if he comes back here and what if people find out the truth, then what will happen to us? What will people think?

All I felt was a dull hammering in my chest that grew fainter and fainter as time went by. How could I feel him when he was dead if I couldn’t even feel him when he was alive?

When I’m wearing the soft foam headphones over my ears, the voices carry me outside of dinky, dead-end Chester, outside of myself to some better place that’s big and goes on forever, like the ocean.

As the credits roll, Mamaw suggests we sit on the porch to watch the world go by. There isn’t much to see.

We are in a dream. The three of us standing here watching him eat. The rain falling. The air heavy and fragile, like at a funeral. And, I guess that’s what it is, in a way. Because I think, for just a split second, that my brother has come back home to die.

Truth is, I missed my family. And, I didn’t know what else to do. I had to get out of New York. Everything reminded me of Shawn. And death. I saw my reflection in the ghosts of men I passed on the streets.

He slurps the tea, and the intimate noise jolts my memory, nothing specific, but just a deep feeling of knowing—he made the same sounds as a boy. For so many years I recognized his every sigh, movement, flicker of the eyes. Then he left, turned into someone else. My body feels like it’s going to crack open. With fear or love, I don’t know. “I’m glad you’re home,” I say.

He’s told me about her before. They lived together, but she wasn’t his girlfriend. I wished she was—that they were living in sin, but a different kind of sin, a normal sin.

But I also loved the waste, the freedom. No one was telling us how to live. We could do what we wanted. Annie took me under her wing and showed me the city I’d been dreaming of—the queers, artists, weirdos. Her world ran hot, and I wanted to be as close as possible to the flames. You only get one life, she used to say, before all our friends started dying, so you better make it fucking count.

Fuck this, I thought. I’m not scared of him, he’s scared of me.

He was an actor from California, but he’d been living in New York for a dozen years, and he carried the pulse of the city in him like his hot, quick breath.

I get why my parents don’t want anyone to know. In Chester, people think we don’t deserve to live, but it’s not just Chester that thinks this way—it’s most of America. Even in New York you feel the disgust grinding you into the dirt. God is taking care of the homosexuals. On bad days, the worst days, you wonder if they’re right. The politicians, the pundits, the preachers. Tattoo them, quarantine them, let them die in the streets. In America, 15,000 people have died of AIDS, and there are almost twice as many infected. President Reagan still has not uttered the word. Queers, drug addicts, Haitians—we’re the expendable, the scourge. They want us gone. When we die, Christians and Republicans must go wild with applause—that’s what it feels like. Sometimes I burn with anger, and I want to fight, to be seen. But most of the time, I’m just scared or tired. On my worst days, I feel the shame most of the world wants me to feel. I understand why my parents don’t want people to know, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t fucking hurt.

When you’re a kid, you don’t have to worry as much about fitting in.

On the way home, I ride past all the same houses I see every day. Same lawns and same trees. Same tire swing. Same falling-down chicken coop. Same cars on blocks, same stupid lawn decorations. The wheels of my bike roll over the busted sidewalk, weeds shooting up from the cracks. Brian says that people in Chester don’t know how to dream. He left all of this. He went to live on another planet, one that’s burning bright, but now he’s back—faded, broken, frail—and no one will tell me why.

He’s been home almost a month. We are figuring out how to be a family again. I hoped it would be easier, like he would simply step back into place. But I don’t even know what that place is anymore—too much time has passed, too much lurks in the unknown.

Maybe I should have been more demanding. Begged him. Gone after him. But I didn’t know how to swim across the river between us. He drifted further and further away, and I let him go.

Shawn told me to document everything, the good and bad. He was scared our lives would be forgotten.

I didn’t understand then, but I think I do now. The world is ignoring us. We’ve got to document, even if it’s just me talking to the camera in my parents’ basement. At least I’m here. A face, a voice. The world wants to silence and disappear us. Well, here I am. Look at me.

Later, I saw Bowie on TV performing with Cher, the two of them singing a crazy medley of songs, from the Beatles to Bing Crosby, long-legged, feral creatures in white pants. I was rapt, my body burning, and the edges of Chester exploding: there was a bigger world and I wanted to see it, to be in it. Bowie showed me that there was another way of being, you know? Like, he broke all the rules about gender, and just like life.

Here, everyone worries about what everyone else thinks. Once you escape that mentality, you don’t ever want to go back. But you did, Jess says, you came back. She’s sharp. Well, I said, sometimes you have to go back to the place you left. She goes, Why? Why, indeed? To understand who you’ve become. To reconcile. To say goodbye. I turned the record over. I don’t know, I said.

Everyone’s desperate for the pain and fear to go away. There’s no cure now, but there has to be one one day, that’s what we’re all thinking. Because if not, then what? The other option is unthinkable. Death, death, and more death.

Maybe he figured out I was queer a long time ago, before I did. I didn’t know how to say the words to myself until I was living far away from here. That was when I discovered another language, not my family’s tongue, but one that was older and bigger. I found another home. Now that home is burning down and nobody wants to put out the fire.

People around here gravitate toward boredom.

If he saw me here, he would be disappointed, even angry. There is something thrilling about this.

I push the screen up and climb out my window onto the roof and look up at the stars pulsing through the darkness. People used to use the stars as a map, as a way to navigate the world, but now they’re just something to look at. I find the bright points of the Big Dipper, curved over the woods like it’s not very far away at all. It’s the only constellation I know. I wouldn’t know how to get anywhere.

It gets exhausting, pretending you’re someone you’re not.

But, still, when I sat in front of a mirror and brushed on blush and eye shadow, glued on eyelashes, I felt a wild shock of delight. Boys came to me because I had the right touch. A few of them are dead, others sick, others infected. They were thrilled to be wearing makeup and sparkling gowns and wigs, and to be free from their fathers’ disappointment and shame. They were so beautiful.

New York was all dancing with shirts off, bare chests bumping. With music inside our hearts, we moved in ways that we had never been allowed to before. I had sex, I fell in love—with the city, with men. I met men who looked at me like nobody ever had before. Everything I used to dream about, but better. Before we started dying, we were part of an electric dream. Alive and young, I danced and fucked and loved. Stayed out all night, snorting just one more line, ordering just one more round. Now, it’s all vitamins and juices, pills and pretend treatments.

It’s impossible to understand or explain what it feels like when you’re told you’re going to die. Back in New York, some days I wanted to breathe in every single second. I’d notice little things—like a scrawny tree pushing up through the cement—and feel grateful I was a part of the city I loved. Other days I was a sobbing mess. Still, other times I burned up with anger toward everyone who was not me—because they were alive, living their goddamn lives, and, I was sick. And people knew it, especially other gays. I had that look—I know because I’d seen it in others: a haunted, hunted look. My body once turned men on, but now they turned away. Now here I am. Alive, in Ohio, where we do not speak of the dead. Let us pretend. Where are all my beautiful men?

I hardly remember how things felt during the Before: when I never had to think about breathing or walking or running any more than I did about eating or sleeping. Those were just things the body did—without pain, without effort. Now the shortness of breath comes and goes. My body—I want the old one back.

I felt relieved to see him go. I can’t explain it, really, the sudden, sticky shame—it wasn’t about being queer, not exactly. I felt disappointed in myself. I left this town so I wouldn’t have to live this way, and now here I was, back in the closet, walking around in skin that’s not my own.

I’ve been avoiding him as much as possible. I thought this would be the missing puzzle piece snapping into place, but it doesn’t feel like that—I just have more questions and nowhere to turn. Sometimes I feel scared, like I’ve been left behind in a stranger’s house. Other times, I’m enraged—at him, the lies, the illness. The anger is better—sharper, like a barbed wire wrapped around my hands. I try to hold on because it makes me stronger. But then he starts talking to me, and everything in me gets twisted up and confused. I wish I didn’t feel anything at all.

Maybe all the sadness will build into a tsunami of rage.

I have moments where I forget. Until my body reminds me—and, like an eclipse, everything darkens.

I stare at my reflection. Not me, but someone else: a girl with electric-blue eyelashes, rouged cheeks, and full, red, glistening lips. I look strange and new, and even pretty. For a few seconds, I don’t recognize myself. Then, the moment passes, and I see myself underneath the makeup. You can disappear and never disappear. Heavy in your skin, but not here at all.

“Yeah, like if we save the whales from extinction, we can save ourselves. Activists can change things,” Annie says. “I believe that. I’m just not a very good one.”

For Annie, telling the truth is the only way to live. She isn’t like my family. Every word out of her mouth is hard and shining like her eyes. I’ve been thinking about what it means to be brave, and what it means to be weak.

I grew up believing in God—it wasn’t something anyone ever questioned in Chester—but as a teenager, I started to have my doubts. I honestly don’t know what I believe anymore. It’s hard to believe when we’re all dying and everyone’s telling you this is part of God’s plan. I prayed Shawn wouldn’t die. I prayed I wasn’t infected. It wasn’t really prayer—just words, desperate hope.

I used to be scared I was going to hell. I’d have terrifying nightmares where I was screaming for help and my mother was sobbing and my father was walking away. Shawn would gently shake me awake. You’re tearing yourself up, baby, he’d say. You’ve got to let go of this shit or you’ll never be free.

Shawn wanted me to bring him here, to show him the places that made me and undid me, the hills and trees and dirt.

In the darkest moments, it’s hard not to blame past lovers. You want to lay blame. You want to feel innocent. I probably was infected one of the first times I had sex—maybe that first guy, even. There is no reason that explains AIDS, Shawn told me, You’re not being punished. But it’s a hard thing to let go—you hear all the shit people say, like Jerry Falwell gloating that homosexuals will be annihilated and there will be a celebration in heaven. I’ve heard, more times than once: AIDS is a cure for fags.

People think death is this peaceful glow, softness, dreamlike, but it’s ugly, dirty, smelly, lonely, painful. I don’t want to suffer, who does? You hope it’s painless—go quietly, die in your sleep during a dream, loved ones gathered around you, all reconcilement and forgiveness. But, the truth is, AIDS is never painless. And there is nothing profound or beautiful about death.

It’s hard to stay mad at someone who looks so weak.

I lower my hand over hers, fitting our fingers together like Legos. Our bones know each other, they come from the same place.

Sometimes I forget how young he is, and other times I still think of him as a child with the whole world ahead of him.