He’d gone off on a tangent in his head. He trained his attention back on the queen.
“—much more work to be done,” she was saying. “We have winners and losers right now. We must, must”—she pounded a jeweled fist into the palm of her other hand—“work to make sure that everyone around the world who needs these drugs gets them. Because we know the cost of these drugs is exorbitant. But in the meantime”—she raised her glass—“I want you all to toast yourselves, you wonderful people. This is a good year.”
Chris turned to Hector, his glass raised. “Did you know it’s a good year?” he asked.
Hector smirked. “I’ve heard that.”
The amfAR functionary led the queen around the room, introducing her. When he brought her before Hector, Chris, and Maira, her amazing eyebrows flew upward.
“Good for you,” she said with a conspiratorial satisfaction. “Good for you for disrupting their little game!” She cackled, full of mirth. Then her eyes fixed on Hector. She brought a jeweled hand to his cheek.
“This one looks like Fernando Lamas,” she decreed, looking him tenderly in the eyes. “Thank you for your work.”
She sailed on. Hector, Chris, and Maira suppressed flabbergasted titters.
“Was that the guy on Falcon Crest?” Chris whispered.
“I think it was his dad,” Maira said.
“Oh, yes, he was hot,” Hector conceded, putting the name and face together in his head. “You think they fucked?”
Chris tipped his head in the queen’s direction. “I think that was your invitation to visit her hotel suite tonight.” But even as he said it, his face flushed and new beads of sweat broke out over his upper lip. “And now I’m hitting the toilet,” he said, slipping away.
“You want me to follow just in case?” Maira asked. Hector knew why she was asking. She was thinking about the incident last week in their tiny office in SoHo, when Chris had not made it all the way to the bathroom and she’d found him in the hallway, crying, before running back inside for a roll of paper towels. The new medications had power far beyond their intended purpose, alas.
Chris shook his head curtly and stepped away.
“Wait a minute,” Maira said to Hector, tracing Chris’s steps and peering out the door a few seconds. Shortly, she returned. “He made it,” she reported. “I just wanted to make sure.”
Hector nodded. “So, dinner?”
“Where?”
They found the local activist and made a plan to meet up at eight for Thai food in Davie Village. Chris and Maira stayed behind at the reception but Hector was beat; he wanted a nap before dinner. More to the point, he wanted to cocoon himself in solitude in his hotel room for an hour or two; he couldn’t understand the dull itch of rage he was feeling just underneath every conversation he’d had that day, as though a deeply immersed part of himself wanted to suddenly sigh aloud and say, Oh please, shut the fuck up. He’d managed to quell that inner bitch all day, but he felt that if he didn’t get an hour or two alone, she’d surface and he’d regret it.
He wended his way through the vast conference center toward the exit, ducking his head down to avoid encounters with anyone he knew.
“Hector!” he heard a voice behind him. He turned to find David, a fellow Boricua, from the Chicago chapter of the movement, hustling toward him, his lanyard swinging from his neck. David caught up with him and threw an arm around his shoulders.
“Fucking crazy day, huh?” he asked. “Can you believe Liz?”
“We were just at a little reception with her,” Hector said. “She’s fucking amazing.” But he felt suddenly hollow saying it, by rote, as though he were following the standard worshipful script about the queen.
David beamed. “She fucking slammed Chrétien!”
“She did.”
“You got dinner plans?”
“Thai in Davie Village. You guys wanna come?”
David nodded. The two walked along in silence for a moment. Hector felt burdened to make conversation but couldn’t bring himself to it.
“You think you’ll be in Chicago for our conference next month?” David asked him. “We’d love to have you guys.”
“I think I’m getting out of the AIDS biz,” Hector said, surprising himself. Had he just said that? And then he added: “Before this whole circus falls apart.”
David stopped. “What do you mean?”
Hector released a contemptuous snort. “This whole circus! There’s no cure coming. Look at the resistance data so far. Look at the failure rates. All these meds are gonna fall apart in about four months and then we’ll be looking back on today embarrassed at ourselves for partying.”
David stared at him, then laughed awkwardly. “Are you doing a Larry Kramer to entertain me?”
“No.”
“But that’s not what the data is showing. We get the fundamental concept now. We have other agents coming down the pike. Merck’s got a compound. Yeah, sure, cure, maybe not. But suppression.”
Hector felt himself soften. What had just happened to him? He put an arm around David’s shoulders, continued walking. “Now you know why I gotta get out.”
“You’re burned out!” David offered. He seemed relieved at Hector’s turnabout. Here was something he could understand. “Everyone’s burned out. It’s been, like, eight fucking years of this. Take some time off, go somewhere warm. Go see your family. But you know you can’t leave.”
Hector laughed. “Is that, like, you reading my mind or some kind of a threat?”
“It’s a threat!” David smiled. “You know I need you.”
Hector glanced sideways at him. “How are you doing? Are you pooping all the time?”
“Not as bad as I thought it’d be.”
“Chris is having a fucking hard time.”
“I know.”
They parted ways outside with plans to reunite at dinner. Hector went back to his hotel room, closed the drapes, took a melatonin, stripped down to his underwear, tried to sleep and could not. He thought of what a naysaying bitch he’d been the entire conference, thought of his own anhedonia amid the hope and joy, and, deep down inside, finally admitted it was because of Ricky. He was watching lovers who’d lived in agony the past few years, waiting for one or both of them to die, realize they were getting a second shot, waking up to the reality-of-life shit that wasn’t going to go away — bills, mortgages, disability payments, employment prospects. They were cursed with the divine gift of having a messy life to go on living. They would suffer through that debt, that paperwork, that uncertainty, and at the end of a day with all its trials, they would meet in the same bed, they would grasp reassuredly at each other’s bodies, however thick around the waist or wasted around the limbs or butt; they might even find their way back inside each other again. They would go on, they would have more; they might not even appreciate, amid the stress and fear of putting a life back together and managing dozens of nauseating medications and insurance calls, how lucky they were that they’d won the AIDS lottery, made it to the finish line, run out the clock.