“She’s in labor,” she said. “She’s going to have a beautiful, healthy baby. I’ll let you know as soon as we get the news.”
* * *
—
He was aware that he was dreaming, but it felt like a dream that would never end.
Fiona, alone on the street. Only sometimes he was Fiona, looking down at the stroller she pushed, a stroller that was empty at first and then held twins and then again was empty. After a while there was no stroller. And sometimes he was looking at Fiona, following behind her, above, reaching out to touch her hair.
Fiona alone on Broadway, walking south. A hot, thick summer night, windows lit around her, but the streets were empty. The windows were empty, the parking lots. Broadway and Roscoe. Broadway and Aldine. Broadway and Melrose. Broadway and Belmont.
Airplanes crossed the sky, and far away there was traffic, but here there was no one. Fiona shouldered her way through clots of cold air. She felt the wind on her neck, and she said, “They’re breathing on me. They’re all around.” She caught a glimmer of a teenage boy sitting on a bus stop bench, writing in a journal with a blue fountain pen. She turned and he was gone, and she said “Oh, he was only—” and Yale—because he was there now, was somehow behind her—tried to say that no, she was wrong, this boy had died all the way back in the ’60s, he died in Vietnam, and there were other, older ghosts here too. But Yale could make no noise because he wasn’t really there.
Fiona was on School Street now, a street Yale didn’t really know, but he’d always liked its name. Streets that carried their histories with them: He was fond of those. Was there still a school on School Street? Well, sure. There it was, abandoned and mossy. It stretched for blocks and blocks and blocks, and Fiona looked down at the stroller, at baby Nico. Because yes, it was Nico, she’d given birth to her brother and he only had to start again. He was swaddled in his orange scarf. He wore a crown of paper clips. She said, “He’s not old enough for school yet.” She said, “You have to wait until the year 2000.”
But wasn’t it close? They were back on Broadway now, and the year 2000 was very close. That was why everything was ending. New Year’s Eve was the deadline. The dead line. The last gay man would die that day.
What about baby Nico? “We’ll smuggle him through,” Fiona said to no one, “like Baby Moses. But he’ll have to play baseball.”
Broadway and Briar. Broadway and Gladys Avenue. Poor Gladys, lost in the wrong part of town. A statue of President Gladys.
Fiona pulled fliers off the telephone poles, loaded them into the empty stroller. It was her job to clean the streets. She stripped posters from windows, signs from stores, menus from restaurant entrances. She walked into an empty bar and sniffed the half-filled pint glasses still on the counter.
And although she was still alone, Yale could talk to her now. He said, “What are they going to do with it all?”
When she looked at him, he saw that the real answer was that she would live here forever, alone, that she would clean the streets forever. But she said, “They’re turning it into the zoo,” and he knew this was true as well.
She sat down in the middle of the empty road, because no cars would ever come this way. She said, “What animal gets your old apartment? You’re allowed to choose.”
And because he felt very, very hot now, so hot, like he’d been knitted into a thousand blankets, and because the heat was filling his lungs even as something inside him was cold, was turning, in fact, to ice, Yale chose polar bears.
2015
They were greeted at the entry to the Galerie de Photographies by a man with a tray of champagne glasses. Fiona plucked one like a flower, but Julian passed. He smiled at Fiona. “Twenty-four years and eight months sober.” They were early; only two dozen people in there and half were lugging huge cameras and lighting equipment, snapping eager photos of the earliest guests.
Serge had posted himself near the entrance, and Fiona double-kissed him, but she didn’t see Richard.
She held her breath and followed Julian, making sure Claire was still behind her, although Claire was going straight to the wall, straight to the giant mouth photo