“Esther,” Karl booms into the tablet. “I have someone here I very much want you to meet.”
“I was just about to go out.”
“I’ll be quick,” Karl says. “This is too good to miss.” He turns around his tablet and props it up on his desk so that it’s facing Mateo and Hector. Mateo is staring at a sixtysomething woman with a steel-gray crew cut and black-framed reading glasses, shelves messily crammed with books and papers behind her. Karl comes around his desk to wedge himself between Mateo and Hector so that the three of them are facing her.
Esther finally cracks a smile, spying Hector. “Oh, hello, Hector,” she says. “How are you, honey?”
“Hello, Esther,” Hector says, grinning.
“Who’s the handsome young man with you?” she asks. “Is that your new boyfriend?”
Karl and Hector both giggle. “No,” Hector says. “That’s Issy’s son.”
Esther pauses, looking blank. “What?” Then slowly her face blooms open. “Issy Mendes?”
“Issy Mendes,” Karl repeats.
“My old friend Issy Mendes?” The woman is scrutinizing Mateo through the screen. “Well, oh my goodness,” she says slowly, then she starts to cry. Mateo doesn’t understand why his presence today is reducing everyone to tears.
“Oh my goodness, you’re the baby she — oh my goodness, I have goose bumps all over!” Esther laughs. “What’s your name?”
“Mateo,” he says. “Mateo Mendes.”
“You have her name!” Esther says delightedly.
“I took her last name later in life,” he says. Shortly after he started working with Char, when he needed a professional name, he took it. “Mateo Heyman-Traum” no longer sat right with him.
“My God,” she says, brushing tears from her cheeks. “I can see her now in your face. Guys, it’s so strange, isn’t it? It was thirty years ago!”
“We were just babies,” Karl says.
“We were babies!” Esther echoes. “We’d never get away today with what we did then. We live in a fucking police state now. Three people can barely ding each other before the fucking NYPD-slash-FBI is shutting you down.”
“Ping, Esther. Ping,” Karl says. “Get with the program.”
“Right, ping, ping!” She looks back at Mateo. “You don’t know what it was like back then,” she says.
“I don’t,” Mateo says.
“You must have no memories of your mother,” she says.
“I don’t.”
“Well, let me tell you. Wow. She was a scared little girl from Queens, where nobody knew she had HIV, when she first came tiptoeing into the meetings. But she kept coming. And within about a year or two — wow, Mateo. She blossomed. That was the thing about the movement, wasn’t it? People came thinking they were dying but they ended up finding out how powerful they really were.”
Karl nods soberly. “It’s true.”
“So your mother—” Esther continues, then: “Oh, wait! Oh my God, you guys, I have the tape!”
Karl and Hector start laughing. “That’s why we voiced you, Esther,” Karl says.
“Hold on, Mateo, I wanna show you something,” Esther says. The tablet screen goes green but she keeps talking through it. “The winter of 1990, Mateo, there was a very, very important demonstration at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta to get the government to expand the definition of AIDS so that women would be included in it, because they weren’t. Because at the time the symptoms and illnesses the CDC used were mostly seen in men, so women weren’t being counted and they weren’t getting the money and attention and care they needed. And the people who led this particular demonstration were the women in the group, and especially the women with HIV. So watch this, okay?”
Mateo stares at the green screen, his heart beating fast. “This is when, again?” he asks.
“Nineteen-ninety,” Esther says. “Thirty-one years ago. When were you born?”
“Nineteen-ninety-two.”
“Well,” she says, “this is your mom before she was pregnant with you and also before she got really sick.”
Suddenly Mateo’s watching old pre-digital video footage of a bumpy camera panning around some huge demonstration taking place, in pouring rain, outside the bland suburban offices of the Centers for Disease Control. Hundreds of men and women, some of them with their faces painted a ghostly white, most of them wrapped in black garbage bags to ward off the rain, are massed in front of the CDC’s main entrance, blowing whistles and shouting, “Women don’t get AIDS, they just die from it!” The camera pans upward to the office windows, where workers in shirts and ties are frowning at the demonstrators, then back down to a round-faced black woman with short bursts of dreadlocks on either side of her head, holding aloft a megaphone.
“My name is Katrina Haslip,” the woman says. “I’m from New York City and I’m a woman living with AIDS.” The crowd roars. The woman goes on to talk about the health problems she and other women have had that the government doesn’t include as markers of AIDS that could help her get treatment or disability benefits. Then the woman says, “Now I want to introduce you to someone to tell you that it’s not just white women or African American women who get AIDS, it’s Latinas, too. And you do not mess with an angry Latina!”
The crowd laughs. As Katrina hands off the megaphone, the camera pans left to a woman — a short woman, also wearing a wet black garbage bag, her rain-bedraggled black hair pulled back under a black baseball cap with a pink triangle on its upturned rim.
“That’s her, Mateo,” Esther says. “That’s your mom.”
“That’s her, for sure?” Mateo asks. He’s craning forward, studying every detail of her face, trying to make matches with his own.
“That’s her,” Esther says again.
“Thank you, Katrina, my sister,” the woman on the tape says with the same accent Mateo always used to hear around the Lower East Side growing up. “My name is Ysabel Mendes and I am a thirty-one-year-old Latina from Corona, Queens, living with HIV/AIDS!”
The crowd erupts, some people shouting, “We love you, Issy!”
A broad smile breaks out on her face. “Woooo!” she cries, holding the megaphone aloft.
“I’m here today,” she continues, “because the CDC doesn’t want to count me, even though I was diagnosed with this disease two years ago and my T cells are around one hundred when the average T cells are around one thousand. Even though I’ve had more small infections the past few years than you can count, including — and I’m sorry to maybe gross out the boys here — more vaginal yeast infections in a year than most women get in a lifetime. There!” She laughs. “I said it!”
The crowd laughs with her.
“The CDC doesn’t want to count me, doesn’t want to say that I have AIDS,” she goes on, “and that goes for me and all my HIV-positive sisters here today. And if you don’t count us, we can’t get disability benefits, we can’t get research, we can’t get treatment — we can’t get a chance to save our own lives!”
The crowd goes wild again. She looks so strong up there, Mateo thinks, soaked in rain but triumph and anger flashing in her eyes. Those eyes he keeps staring into, that voice he keeps parsing, trying to see and hear echoes of himself. But even as he listens to her, he’s forced to admit — he talks mainly in the cadences of Milly and Jared, the people who raised him, not this woman’s. She’s from another world.
“So I want to say to you, Dr. Curran and Dr. Roper and all your staff,” she continues. “I want to say to you, we’ve been trying since 1988 to get you to change the national AIDS definition to include us women. We’ve invited you to come meet with us. But you’ve ignored us. So that’s why today, even in this downpour of a rain, we’ve come to you! And we’re not going away until you hear us!”