He simply walks away, back toward the craft table. When he reaches for the knife to scoop out some cream cheese and put it on half of a poppyseed bagel, his hand is shaking.
A hand lands on his shoulder. It’s Char. “Hey,” he says. “Brush your shoulders off, bro. That was sick stupid.”
“I guess I’ve been fucking naive,” Mateo says. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Ruby giving Tanzina a polite but firm talking-to, Tanzina holding her tablet at her side, as Ruby’s obviously taken her off the record.
“I guess I really should’ve been ready with something a little smarter than that,” he says. “‘I wish Jared Traum the best, I really respect his work,’ and all that kind of stuff.”
“Fuck it,” says Char. “You don’t have to be ready with anything. You’re here to make a piece.”
“I’m fucking terrified of making contact with them, Char,” he says. “I haven’t talked to them in, like, ten years.”
“Dude, you don’t have to deal with that now,” Char says. “You’re here to make work.”
Mateo watches Tanzina bop away, putting her tablet back into her bag, ready to go back to the office and package up her piece of bounty.
“What a pretty little sneak, huh?” he says to Char, nodding with his chin toward Tanzina.
“Why the fuck’d you think I came over?” Char asks. “I wasn’t gonna let you have all of that!”
Mateo and Char crack up a little. Ruby walks over to join them, frowning.
“I am sorry about that,” she says. “I didn’t see that coming. I was caught off guard because usually she’s a very work-focused writer.”
“I was naive,” Mateo says.
“No, no,” she says, putting a hand on his shoulder. “That’s not your job, it’s mine. Do you want me to keep them away from now on?”
“I mean. .” Mateo starts, then gives up, exasperated. “I mean, whatever,” he says. “I don’t have anything to hide. The situation is what it is.”
Everyone just stands there for a minute. “I just want you guys to be able to enjoy the project,” Ruby says. “It’s special.”
Over the next few days, they do, in fact, manage to enjoy the project. Char starts adding color even before Mateo’s finished stenciling. He begins to be able to visualize how the wall is going to explode like delicate fireworks behind the silver maples. He’s feeling good, he’s having good dinners in Brooklyn and Queens every night with Dani and Char and, eventually, some cute redheaded jewelry-maker girl named Becky whom Char starts bringing around. He’s managing to make a few AA or NA meetings here and there, he’s holding it together.
Then on Thursday morning, he and Dani wake up to pounding rain against the infinity windows of their rental. Mateo calls Char.
“Has Ruby called you yet?” Char asks.
“No, why?”
“Shit, man.” Char half laughs, so exasperated. “Rain is fucking leaking into our corner at the site.”
“Fuck, what?”
“Fuck yes, man! Fucking leaking into the project.”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Mateo exclaims. Dani looks up at him from the bed, alarmed. “I thought that wasn’t supposed to happen. There was all that high-tech sealant.”
“Yeah, so they thought it wasn’t supposed to happen, either, but—”
“But—”
“So let’s get down there, we’re gonna patch it up.”
He throws on some clothes, grabs an umbrella, hails a cab, and still arrives at the site half drenched, the rain is coming down so hard. Char and Ruby and two of the guys from the UnderPark Foundation office are directing a bunch of interns and technicians, covering the existing work on the project with clear tarp and sealing it up a hundred times over with industrial duct tape.
“Where’s the leak coming from?” Mateo asks the UnderPark guys.
“We’ve got the contractor and the architects down here all day today,” one of them, James, says. “Do not worry, we are going to remediate and you guys will be back to work as soon as the rain stops. So I say go home and take a breather while we remediate.”
Remediate. Mateo, Char, Ruby, and a few of the interns laugh about the word twenty minutes later when, all still damp, they’re sitting in a nearby restaurant, some cute Israeli place with whitewashed clapboard walls, having coffee and shakshuka. After that, at a loss for what else to do amid the downpour, Mateo goes back to his chic infinity-windowed sublet and takes a hot shower. Poor Dani’s out in this devil rain on a design job, sourcing carpets, so he’s got the place to himself. He flops down with his tablet, cranks up some Odd Future for old time’s sake, answers e-mails. But after a while, the loneliness and the rain shattering over the Lower East Side start creeping into his bones. These are always the most dangerous moments: when the noise of the present clears and he finds himself alone, unoccupied, staring into the abyss of the past with all its broken objects and shameful acts.
And then he tries something that’s never occurred to him to try before: instead of typing “Ysabel Mendes” and “AIDS” into his tablet, which has never yielded anything the past many times he’s done it — usually late at night, when he sometimes slips into just such a wormhole of the past as the one he’s in now — he types “Isabel Mendes” and “AIDS,” just to see. Thoughts of her come rushing back to him sometimes, in rare, lonely, unguarded moments like this. He left that photo of her behind at the Christodora, tucked inside his boyhood bed, and often he thought he’d like to have it back, which would require communication he couldn’t bring himself to initiate. But still, he spent so much time looking at it growing up, he doesn’t need to fetch it. His brain just calls it up. The leather jacket, the denim mini, the moussed-up head cocked to one side, the elbow propped up on that gay moreno’s shoulder, the sassy smirk on her face.
And there it is. Oh God. He catches his breath. There’s a link to a site called “AIDS Warriors Speak” and a bit of text underneath it, which reads: “. . and a year later, also died, a woman named Isabel Mendes, who played a very big role in. .”
Mateo looks out at the sheet of rain. He clicks the link. It’s from the transcript of a video interview from 2004, also posted, with a guy named Karl Cheling, who looks like a lefty radical version of Charlton Heston’s Moses, with a prominent forehead and a white beard and ponytail. So he clicks on the video and sits through several minutes of this Karl Cheling talking about all this old shit, about the AIDS days in New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the various surprise demonstrations and takeovers he and his buddies pulled on city hall and the Department of Health and Human Services in D.C. and various other bureaucratic places. And Mateo looks up and thinks for a moment how crazy it is that there is no more AIDS anymore — well, he knows, he’s read, that there are still people in Africa who haven’t gotten the cure therapy yet, but even there it’s being done, and some expert he read said that it would be eradicated off the globe by 2030, just like polio was. The disease that killed his mother, Mateo thinks. Wiped out.
He looks back at his tablet. The interviewer behind the camera, a woman whose voice has a thick, old-fashioned New York accent like his bubbe had, says, “And you’re obviously talking about a lot of activists who died before the emergence of Internet archives in, say, the late 1990s, so there’s very little record of them, correct?”
“Yes, correct,” says the white-ponytailed guy. He reels off a long list of people and things they did. “Particularly women and people of color,” he says, “they’ve not been archived as properly and made into heroes in documentaries and such. There were some especially amazing women. There was a black woman named Katrina Haslip who played a very big role in getting the federal definition of AIDS expanded to include more symptoms held by women, then she died very shortly thereafter in 1992. And a year later, also died, a woman named Ysabel Mendes, who played a very big role in working with Katrina. She was on the Latino committee, putting a lot of the literature into Spanish translation. And she worked very closely alongside a very, very smart treatment activist named Hector Villanueva who is still alive and actually very active with ShelterHelps — very much a part of the ShelterHelps family and a link from the past to the present. Katrina and, uh, Ysabel were very vocal, fierce activists at a time when it was still widely considered that women were not as susceptible to AIDS, when they were undercounted and under-included in research, and routine testing for them was still rare and not widely urged.”