The Great Believers

by Rebecca Makkai

“the world is a wonder, but the portions are small” —Rebecca Hazelton, “Slash Fiction”

Yale’s image of it was slapstick: Richard stuffing a man into the closet when his wife dashed back for her Chanel clutch.

Asher Glass had claimed his body would revolt at setting foot in a Catholic church. (“I’d start yelling about rubbers. Swear to God.”)

“That one. The black gentleman with the glasses.” As if there were another black guy in this church, one with perfect vision. That woman wasn’t the only one who kept glancing back throughout the service to observe, anthropologically, when and if this gay black specimen might start weeping.

it. He remembered being eight and asking his father who else in the neighborhood was Jewish (“Are the Rothmans Jewish? Are the Andersens?”) and his father rubbing his chin, saying, “Let’s not do that, buddy. Historically, bad things happen when we make lists of Jews.”

The foggy, ridiculous idea came to him that the world had ended, that some apocalypse had swept through and forgotten only him.

If you learned new details about someone who was gone, then he wasn’t vanishing. He was getting bigger, realer.

This was the aunt, then, that Fiona was talking about last night. The coincidence of it unsettled him. That she should mention it months after the letter was sent, and it would instantly land on his desk. Would Teddy Naples land on his desk now, too, conjured from Fiona’s drunken mind?

“You get afraid of one thing, and suddenly you’re afraid of everything.”

This old woman didn’t look much like Nico, but she was beautiful, and Nico had been beautiful, and wasn’t that enough?

acted. He was so embarrassed for her that he wanted to say yes, to snort coke right here off the bar. But lately his heart couldn’t handle more than one coffee a day.

Charlie had once sworn that if Reagan ever deigned to give a speech about AIDS, he’d donate five dollars to the Republicans. (“And in the memo line,” Charlie said, “I’m gonna write I licked the envelope with my big gay tongue.”)

He’s good with animals, you know? I don’t think you can hit women and be good with animals. Animals would sense it.”

Terrence said, “So. Hey, what do you call a black guy who studies rocks?” Fiona was the only one who made any noise, a startled giggle. Then she said, “I don’t know, what?” “A geologist, you bunch of racists.”

Fiona remembered Richard implying it was a gay neighborhood, although she also thought she remembered this was where the Arabs lived, or maybe it was the Orthodox Jews. Surely not all three together, that would never work, would it?

He looked for Terrence, to see how he was holding up, but he wasn’t in the chair by the wall anymore. Nico must have taken him home. No. No, Nico had not taken him home.

“But his work is on Balthus!” Yale said. “Do you know who that is? All these naked young girls. Really controversial.” “Exactly.” “Exactly what?” “You have one confused turnip on your hands.” Yale, because the street was completely empty, swung Charlie around to kiss him.

“Blessed be the dykes,” Charlie said, “for they shall inherit all our shit.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? Attacks are up threefold. You should try reading the paper you draw for. Threefold, Nico.” They’d all imitated him the rest of the night. Threefold! I shall now consume threefold beers, forsooth!

Charlie said, “I don’t deserve you.” He was looking into the fridge like it held King Tut’s treasures. Yale said, “Remember that, next time I leave the window open and it rains.”

“Listen, you get the Fuck Flu? You been sick? Stomach flu, fever, like you got steamrolled but the steamroller was full of wolves, and the wolves were made of salmonella?”

They meant well, all of them. How could she explain that this city was a graveyard? That they were walking every day through streets where there had been a holocaust, a mass murder of neglect and antipathy, that when they stepped through a pocket of cold air, didn’t they understand it was a ghost, it was a boy the world had spat out? Here, in her hand, a stack of ghosts.

“You’ll never know anyone’s marriage but your own. And even then, you’ll only know half of it.”

A gay-friendly church right off Broadway, and thus—recently—Funeral Central.

Well, here it was, then: longing, missing. The most useless kind of love.

“Nicolette. I didn’t see her, but she told me.” Fiona’s whole face stung. “Her name is what?” “Nicolette.” He enunciated. “You want me to spell it out for you?”

How beautiful, the doomed love! How gorgeous and ambient, the ways we abandon each other! The lovely wars we die in, the poetry of disease! He wanted to be able to call Terrence up, to say, “You were like Romeo and Juliet! Romeo and Juliet die puking their guts out. Tristan and Iseult at ninety pounds with no hair. It’s beautiful, Terrence. It’s beautiful!”

She had some horrid, febrile vision of a mother animal smothering its young, eating it.

“Good God, Yale, I don’t either. This is what women have lived with since the dawn of time. Babies can kill you or ruin your life. And all kinds of shit gives you cancer if you’re a woman. A guy, you get some jock itch, they give you a powder. A woman, you get cancer. Or you get something that means you can never conceive, or if you can conceive, your baby goes blind because of something some jackass gave you at senior prom. And it’s not like we can’t get AIDS. It’s not like that’s not an issue. Oh, Yale. What. I’m sorry.”

“And I’m like, I have honestly never even been in a fender bender. And she goes, ‘Yes, but sometimes we forget.’”

Lots of reasons you could have a false positive on the ELISA. Syphilis, for one. Drug use. Multiple pregnancies.” It wouldn’t have been funny if Dr. Cheng’s delivery weren’t so deadpan, but Yale found himself looking up, smiling. He could deal with this guy at his sickbed.

We’d been through something our parents hadn’t. The war made us older than our parents. And when you’re older than your parents, what are you going to do? Who’s going to show you how to live?”

But when someone’s gone and you’re the primary keeper of his memory—letting go would be a kind of murder, wouldn’t it? I had so much love for him, even if it was a complicated love, and where is all that love supposed to go? He was gone, so it couldn’t change, it couldn’t turn to indifference. I was stuck with all that love.”

Ranko Novak was worth seventy years of devotion. Ranko Novak was irreplaceable, a hole at the center of Nora’s universe. And this was it? A face, two eyes, two ears. Well, try telling that to someone in love.

Stupid men and their stupid violence, tearing apart everything good that was ever built. Why couldn’t you ever just go after your life without tripping over some idiot’s dick?

“It’s always a matter, isn’t it, of waiting for the world to come unraveled? When things hold together, it’s always only temporary.”

The sun, the moon, the sky, the stars. — The end of every story.

“I think that’s the saddest thing in the world, the failure of love. Not hatred, but the failure of love.”

He fed him water, drop by drop. He could feel it, all around him: how down the corridor, and down other hallways of other hospitals around Chicago and the other godforsaken cities of the globe, a thousand other men did the same.

“I used to worry about Reagan pressing the button, you know? And asteroids, all that. And then I had this realization. If you had to choose when, in the timeline of the earth, you got to live—wouldn’t you choose the end? You haven’t missed anything, then. You die in 1920, you miss rock and roll. You die in 1600, you miss Mozart. Right? I mean, the horrors pile up, too, but no one wants to die before the end of the story.

And was friendship that different in the end from love? You took the possibility of sex out of it, and it was all about the moment anyway. Being here, right now, in someone’s life. Making room for someone in yours.

What would happen to Chicago, she wondered, if they covered it with things like this? If they filled up Clark Street Bridge with painted padlocks?

these nurses knew what they were doing; they’d held hands for hours with many men dying alone.

But here it hung, and it was an artifact of love. Well—of a hopeless, doomed, selfish, ridiculous love, but what other kind had ever existed?

As he got sicker, it was more and more often how he thought of people—of Charlie, certainly, and of everyone else here or gone: not as the sum of all the disappointments, but as every beginning they’d ever represented, every promise.

“If we could just be on earth at the same place and same time as everyone we loved, if we could be born together and die together, it would be so simple. And it’s not. But listen: You two are on the planet at the same time. You’re in the same place now. That’s a miracle. I just want to say that.”

I keep thinking of Nora’s stories about the guys who just shut down after the war. This is a war, it is. It’s like you’ve been in the trenches for seven years. And no one’s gonna understand that. No one’s gonna give you a Purple Heart.” “You think I’m shell-shocked?” “Just promise me you’ll take care of yourself.”

Dr. Cheng had stood outside a patient’s door reading through his notes, looking deflated. It wasn’t an expression Yale had ever seen on him before. It occurred to Yale for the first time that Dr. Cheng was only around his own age. And then he lowered the notes, drew himself erect, took a breath Yale could hear from yards away, and transformed himself into the Dr. Cheng Yale knew. Then he knocked on the door.

But wasn’t it close? They were back on Broadway now, and the year 2000 was very close. That was why everything was ending. New Year’s Eve was the deadline. The dead line. The last gay man would die that day.

And because he felt very, very hot now, so hot, like he’d been knitted into a thousand blankets, and because the heat was filling his lungs even as something inside him was cold, was turning, in fact, to ice, Yale chose polar bears.