“Thanks,” Mateo says. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the four of them watch him as he gets up to leave. Halfway up the flight of stairs, it occurs to him that he could simply leave now. He still has that choice. He knows this is not the way Sponsor Gary would have him do this: impulsively, without consultation, seeking out his former number one using companion. But beneath that mild panic, a quieter voice tells him to go ahead, and he does.
He comes to the second floor, where the smell of pot has grown thicker. He walks down the hallway. He hears old R&B, maybe Mary J. Blige, coming from one of the rooms behind a closed door. The last door down, with a big Puerto Rico flag pinned on it, he peers in.
And there he is, lying barefoot in bed with his back to Mateo, reading a tablet, rain pounding on his closed window. Mateo’s heart throbs, his head spins. He tries to make out the old smell, which was always so rank and earthy yet strangely comforting. He glances around the room — it’s plastered in posters and photos that are, variously, of near-naked musclemen, Puerto Rico, and the old demonstration days, all the shots with the hand-lettered posters and the cops and the handcuffs and the megaphones. The room looks like how Mateo remembers his derelict basement apartment: a mess. Clothes, magazines, and books everywhere, sprawled out on an old-fashioned woven carpet. A pot haze hangs over the room.
Mateo knocks on the open door lightly, and Hector twists around in bed, looks at him. Oh God, Mateo thinks. His face is so, so worn, so much more creased and hollow, than the last time they saw each other, that nightmare in the L.A. apartment. Hector looks about half his former size, swimming a bit in his old jeans and a faded, pilly T-shirt that says, in black block letters on a white background, STOP THE CHURCH. Mateo notices two crutches propped against the bed. He must be, what, now — Mateo roughly calculates — sixty-five? Older?
The two men just stare at each other. Mateo can feel his eyes filling with tears, which he blinks back firmly. “Do you remember me?” he finally asks.
“Negrito, right?” Hector says. Oh God, that voice. It is all hurtling back to Mateo now so fast, so fast. That last psychotic night. Oh, shit. “Yeah, I remember you, kid. From the Christodora.”
“Right,” Mateo says. He realizes his right hand is trembling, so he shoves it in his coat pocket.
With great difficulty, Hector sits up in bed, swings his feet around. “Come in,” he says.
So Mateo does. He steps into the small room with its sink and mirror in the corner, his eyes blinking a bit from the pot haze. He spies a Siamese cat curled up in the corner of the bed. The cat raises herself, stares at Mateo evenly.
“That’s Dulce,” Hector says, reaching over to stroke away her concern. “She’s everybody’s here.”
Mateo nods.
“You can close the door,” Hector says.
Mateo does, then just stands there by it.
“You can sit there,” Hector says. He points to an old armchair by the window that Mateo hadn’t noticed, it’s so covered in clothes. “Just throw those clothes on the floor,” Hector says. “I’d help you but I can’t get up fast. I just had back surgery.”
“It’s okay,” Mateo says, pulling clothes off the chair. As he does, that scent — leather, sweat, cigarette smoke, an outdated cologne — comes unmistakably back to him, sends him reeling into those days and nights nodding in the basement apartment, strangers’ feet passing by the window.
Finally, Mateo sits. “I wanted to come see you,” he manages to say.
Hector sits up in bed. “Why’s that? Do you wanna talk to me about some information you got?” He looks at Mateo narrowly, which unnerves Mateo, until he realizes it might be partly because he’s stoned, with heavy-lidded eyes.
“Actually, there is some information I got,” Mateo begins.
Hector holds out a flat palm to stop him. “I gotta tell you something first. I didn’t know, okay? I didn’t know until the very last minute.”
Mateo frowns in confusion. “Didn’t know what?”
Now Hector withdraws his hand. He looks at Mateo for a long moment, searchingly. Then his shoulders droop. “Don’t fucking listen to me,” he finally says. “My head’s fried. What did you wanna ask me?”
“I wanted to talk to you about my mother,” Mateo says. “Ysabel Mendes. You knew her, right?” He’s surprised to find that his voice is getting hoarse, that he feels like he’s going to cry, but he gulps and carries on. “From the AIDS movement, right? You guys were friends, right? I found it online today. Why’d you never tell me?”
Hector’s eyes have grown wide. “Negrito, I didn’t know she was your mother,” he says. He seems agitated despite his pot haze. “I didn’t even know she had a baby. She stopped coming around to the meetings. Then I was in D.C. all the time. We lost touch before she died.”
Mateo sits there, staring at him, absorbing all this. “I always knew her name growing up,” he says. “I knew she died of AIDS and I knew she did stuff for AIDS. But I never tried to look that shit up until just recently. I didn’t want to know. But then I found this stuff online, this interview with this guy that runs this place—”
“You mean Karl?” Hector asks.
“Yeah, yeah, Karl. And he said in this interview — he said you and my mother were close, you worked on stuff together. Like, on the Latino committee?”
Hector leans back again in bed, closes his eyes, and sighs. “We did,” he says.
“But just like that you broke off with her and didn’t see her when she was dying?”
Hector opens his eyes, looks at Mateo with a face full of shame, then looks away, saying nothing.
Now Mateo’s crying quietly and wiping away tears. “Hector,” he says. He realizes it might be the first time he’s ever called him by his real name instead of Fagfunk or Freakshow or something. “Can you do something for me?”
Hector doesn’t look up at him, but manages to say, “What is it?”
“Can you just — tell me about my mother? Tell me what you remember about her?”
Hector doesn’t look up. Mateo wonders if he’s fallen asleep. But then Hector makes a snuffly, creaking sound, and Mateo realizes that he’s crying as well, his creased face balled up tight.
Mateo watches him, paralyzed. He’s scared the guys downstairs are going to hear Hector and come running up and accuse him of harassing their housemate. Eventually, Mateo gets up and goes to sit down next to Hector on the bed. He puts a hand gently on Hector’s knee.
“Hey,” Mateo says. “Hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. I’ll go, okay? I’ll go.”
But as Mateo is about to stand up, Hector reaches out and pulls him back down. “No, no, don’t go,” Hector says. He draws in a deep breath and sits up straighter. “I’ll tell you about Issy.”
Mateo’s eyes widen. “Issy?” he says. “That’s what you called her?”
Hector nods. “That’s what everyone called her.” Then, with Mateo sitting close by him on the bed, the cat climbing up between them, Hector tells Mateo about a night in, oh, he thinks it was 1988, 1989, a typical Monday night at a meeting of the movement, and Hector had just given a presentation, and he was out in the lobby having a breather when a woman, a short Dominicana with a huge head of hair, crept in and asked him, Is this the AIDS meeting? And Hector said yes, and said, Why? and she broke down and said she had AIDS and thought she was dying, and she was so scared, so scared, nobody knew, her family would turn her out if they knew, and she was going to die just like her friend Tavi had just died.
And then he, Hector, remembered that, yes, he had met the woman, Tavi’s best friend, at a club, oh, say, five years before when it was only first breaking out that there was an illness going around. And how relieved this woman, Issy, was when she realized that, yes, they had met before. And how, he thinks, they all went out later that night, how it had felt good to dance together. And how this shy, awkward Issy did not know anything about the disease, but how she started coming to meetings, week after week, and how they formed a Latino caucus, and how she gained confidence that she was certainly not going to die any time soon, and maybe not die from this disease at all, because here they were working on new treatments — government-researched treatments, but also all sorts of experimental treatments, too — and it was very likely they would beat the clock. They — well, a lot of them — thought that, together, they would beat the clock. And he watched this insecure girl from Queens, a dental hygienist, become a very, very effective speaker and communicator and organizer and motivator of other women, Latinas, living with AIDS, and how, oh, she came to a very prominent place in the group going into 1990, 1991, along with a few other women.