The Great Believers

by Rebecca Makkai

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

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

“This is the American habit,” Serge said to Richard. “You exaggerate.”

Everyone born in some godforsaken shtetl, and then there they were in heaven.”

He’d heard a woman ask another woman if she should keep going to her gay hairdresser. Ridiculous, but better than feeling like you lived in some alternate universe where no one could hear you calling

Now it was like people could hear and just didn’t care. But wasn’t that progress?

Ageism is the only self-correcting prejudice, isn’t it?”

no family and no health insurance,

Well, everything about AIDS had been better all along in France, in London, even in Canada. Less shame, more education, more funding, more research. Fewer people screaming about hell as you died.

Yale lay on the couch that night, listening as Terrence tossed in his sheets, as he whimpered through his night sweats. Yale closed his eyes and watched himself, the night of the memorial, from high up in Richard’s house near the skylight. He watched himself talk to Fiona, talk to Julian, sip his Cuba libre. Again and again he watched himself take in the beginning of the slide show, then turn and put his foot on the first step. He watched himself climb the stairs.

Being sick and alone

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?

“This disease has magnified all our mistakes. Some stupid thing you did when you were nineteen, the one time you weren’t careful. And it turns out that was the most important day of your life. Like, Charlie and I could get past it, if he’d just cheated. I’d probably never find out. Or we’d fight and make up. But instead, an atom bomb went off. There’s no undoing it.”

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

And how had he left without making Charlie apologize, beg forgiveness, explain? He got angrier as he walked. He’d felt deflated in the office, but the cold air, the sun, every step away from Charlie, filled him again with indignation.

Charlie had not, for an instant, expressed concern for Yale, for his health.

“the family you choose,”

He’d become used to the PCP cough, a dry bark he’d heard on the

streets and in the bars, a cough that made him think of a more medieval type of plague.

He wanted Charlie there to shout at the TV that what Reagan would “surely address” wasn’t always so logical. A handful of dead astronauts and Reagan weeps with the nation. Thirteen thousand dead gay men and Reagan’s too busy.

Yale thought of apologizing. But it could plant the seed that he had abused his power. And worse: It would reinforce whatever notions Roman had that sex was something to be ashamed of, apologized for. It could put the kid back five years.

Was it Roman’s inexperience and guilt that had sucked Yale in? Or would he have succumbed to anyone in that moment?

And on top of the war, there was the flu! Sometimes

I like how they referred to pass illness pandemics

In the hospital, when Claire was born, Fiona had been so flooded by hormones and panic and grief and fear and guilt and revulsion that when Damian brought her the baby, impossibly small and alien, its body a lurid pink, Fiona told him to take it away, to keep it safe from her. She had some horrid, febrile vision of a mother animal smothering its young, eating it.

living in its aftermath. That the best they could hope

Motherhood in the middle of hustle

for was good scarring.

Marina City towers up close, the way each flower petal projection was really a curved balcony. And now, from the inside, he was terrified by how low the balcony railings were, how easily someone tall might lose balance and pitch over, how easily someone could step up and jump.

Perspective of the world according your circumstances

No, really, it is. I’ve learned this recently. When you’re a sad sack of shit, no one feels anything for you but pity.”

That I ever thought I could have a really good life.”

mean, there are warmer places. I’ll say that. If I’m gonna die, I want to die with the sun shining on my face.”

“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. Wha...

The next generation of baby gays, when we’re all gone. But maybe they won’t, because they’ll be starting from scratch. And they’ll know what happened to us, and Pat Robertson will convince them it was our fault. I was living in the golden age, Fiona, and I didn’t know it. I was walking around

six years ago, living my life, working my ass off, and I didn’t know it was the golden age.”

But there was something so alone about her, her gloved hands tucked into her armpits, the wind batting her hair into her face. He’d felt guilty about calling her, about leaning on her, but maybe it was a good thing. Maybe he was doing her a favor.

“He was really good to Nico, and he does all this great work, and he’s, you know, he’s important. I think he’s one of these people where—he’s just so there, and people respond to that. But I never feel like he’s listening to me. He’s always just waiting

to talk again.”

In her arms she held what looked like a deflated stuffed animal. A fur pelt. Roadkill. “He’s still breathing,” she said. “I think.”

He cared about the car but no one else

Was it so bad to let her do right by him?

She thought she didn’t do enough he thought it was helpful

“Well—yeah. And Terrence. Here’s what I don’t want. I don’t want you to adopt me next, and then whoever else gets sick, and then the next guy, and before you know it you’re fifty and you’re living in a ghost town surrounded by all our old clothes and books.”

“What are you afraid will happen if you open yourself up to him

completely?” And Fiona, already crying, had shouted: “He would die!” It clearly wasn’t what the therapist had expected to hear. He hadn’t been a very good therapist.)

You know, when they call us the Lost Generation—Was it Hemingway who said that, or Fitzgerald?” Roman said, “It was—sorry—it was something Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. But, I mean, he was the one who wrote it down.”

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.” “This is what you’re doing with it,” Yale said. “The collection, the show.”

Just as she’d been in the middle of a story about divorce when the towers fell in New York City, throwing everyone’s careful plans to shit. Just as she’d once been in a story about raising her own brother, growing up with her brother in the city on their own, making it in the world, when the virus and the indifference of greedy men had steamrolled through.

She thought of Nora, whose art and love were interrupted by assassination and war. 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 trippi...

“whatever, a hundred dead people, I don’t care. That could have been a bus crash. What I care is, now they elect right wing across Europe. And then, yes: You, me, all of us, we’re screwed. Everyone

acts from fear, the next year, two years. What happens, you think, to people like us?”