And how, then, Hector’s lover was dying, then died, and Hector cut everybody off and eventually split off into a group that all but moved to D.C. for three years, and how in that time, Hector got a call from the hospital that Issy was dying, she hadn’t been able to beat pneumonia again, and Hector said good-bye to her over the phone even though she wasn’t able to speak back to him.
“You didn’t go to the funeral or anything?” Mateo asks.
“I couldn’t leave D.C.,” Hector says. “We were so busy that year.”
Mateo looks at him skeptically. “You knew about treatments that could have saved her?”
Hector flashes an alarmed look at Mateo. “Oh, no, my friend, oh, no,” he says. “You have no fucking idea, you need to read your history. Everybody who was looped in, who wanted it, got the best that New York had to give, but it didn’t fucking matter until ’96, ’97, when the big guns came along.”
Mateo is confused. His face must betray it, because now Hector says, “You need to read your history. We were rushing to get drugs made to save her. Everybody. But we couldn’t get to everybody in time.”
Mateo sits there silently, not knowing what else more to say or to ask. Hector strokes the cat with his large, brown-flecked hand.
“How’ve you been these past ten years?” Mateo finally asks.
Hector shrugs, gestures around the room. “I’m still here,” he says.
“Me, too,” Mateo says. “I’m still here.”
Hector laughs quietly. “You’re better than here,” he says. “I read about you in the paper. You’re a big-time artist now.”
“Not big-time,” Mateo says, embarrassed. “Like, small-time big-time.”
“Small-time big-time,” Hector echoes, laughing. “You finally got your shit together. Good for you. How’s the lady from the Christodora who adopted you?”
This catches Mateo off guard. “Uh,” he begins. “I don’t know. I haven’t really talked to her in a few years.”
Hector’s eyebrow cocks. “Why not?” he asks. “She was always looking out for you when you were a little negrito.”
This line of questioning makes Mateo distinctly uncomfortable. “I dunno, uh. We just needed time apart, that’s all.”
“We? Both of you?”
Now Mateo sits up a bit, defensive. “Well,” he says, “me. I needed some time out west to myself.” Hector regards him skeptically. “What about you?” Mateo asks to change the subject. “How have you been?”
Hector looks down again. Finally he says, “What can I say? I don’t have the energy I used to. Mostly now, I sleep.”
They fall back into silence. Mateo glances at Hector, who’s staring down into his lap, stroking the cat. Mateo realizes that the druggy, adrenaline-charged fear he felt on the way here, coming up the stairs, has passed. This is where, in the end, Hector’s madness had left him: in a group home in outer Brooklyn, with a little room and a cat. And yet this man knew his mother, the woman he never knew, and that means something to Mateo, makes him feel differently about Hector than he did back when he never much thought about his mother’s past as an activist.
“Anyway,” Mateo says now, “thank you for taking care of her. I mean, when she first came to you when she was all scared.” He stands up to leave. “I wish I’d known her. I’ve only had this one picture all these years. From, like, 1984. Which I don’t have anymore.” He laughs. “She looks, like, so eighties in it. Her hair is huge.”
“Just like yours,” says Hector. He braces his hands flat against the bed. “Hand me my crutches. I wanna take you down to Karl.”
Mateo hands him his crutches, holds him up while he fits himself into them. “Why?” Mateo asks.
“I think we maybe have something to show you.”
Hector instructs Mateo to go down the stairs ahead of him slowly, walking nearly backward, so that if Hector falls and tips forward, Mateo can break his fall. So Mateo does, all the way down the narrow flight, until they’re in the hallway of the first floor. Mateo walks by the sitting room, where the fellows stare at him pitilessly through the doorway. Hector leads him back through the kitchen to a messy little office with a single window, where that guy in the video, Karl, the lefty-Moses white-beard-ponytail guy, is sitting before a tablet, tapping away furiously, sipping an espresso and listening to public radio through the tablet. Just like every other room in this house, his office seems to be a shrine to all the dead AIDS people, old photos and posters everywhere. It looks like all those people ever did all day was get arrested, Mateo thinks.
The Karl fellow looks up. “Hey there, Hector,” he says. He sounds a bit professorial or preacherly, Mateo thinks. “Who’s this?”
“You know who this is?” says Hector, out of breath. Now, to Mateo’s surprise, he sees there’s half a gleeful smile on Hector’s crazy, craggy face. “This is Issy Mendes’s son.”
Karl fixes his eyes on Mateo, confused for a moment. Then his mouth pops open. “Issy Mendes’s son?” he loudly drawls. “Good Lord, that’s right. I’d heard somewhere she had a baby before— ” He stood up. “And it’s you?”
“It’s me, sir,” Mateo says.
Stunned, Karl looks Mateo up and down. “Well, holy fucking Jesus, no damn way!” He comes around from behind his desk. “Come here!” Mateo steps toward Karl, who embraces him passionately. Karl steps back, looks Mateo up and down again about three times, looks at Hector in wonder. “The grown-up son of Issy Mendes! My God, I hope she’s witnessing this. Where have you been all these years?”
“I’ve been living in Los Angeles.”
“He’s an artist,” Hector says.
“Do you know the role your mother played?” asks Karl.
“Not much,” Mateo says. “I found something online, an interview you did. That’s how I found you. And Hector was telling me a little.”
“Oh my goodness,” Karl suddenly says, idea-struck. “Esther’s videos.”
“That’s why I brought him down to you,” Hector says.
“There is a woman,” Karl says. “She was in the movement, Esther Hurwitz. She put together that website that you found me on, the AIDS Warriors website. She has thousands of hours of tapes, of interviews and demos, that she hasn’t put online yet. She just got a Guggenheim grant for the project. And she was very good friends with your mother. So I’m voicing her, okay?” He motions for Mateo and Hector to sit down in chairs opposite his desk while he taps on his tablet. Mateo helps Hector down into a chair.
“Hello, Karl,” comes an old-time New York voice, that now-nearly-vanished accent, out of the tablet speaker. “What’s going on?”