at the wedding where she’d told Nora to get in touch with Yale, where she’d written down Yale Tishman, Northwestern, Brigg on a cocktail napkin. It was her cousin Melanie’s wedding, north of Milwaukee, and Melanie had specifically invited Nico and Fiona but not their parents. She didn’t include Terrence—it would’ve been a step too far, maybe, for 1985 Wisconsin—but her loyalty was to her own generation. Fiona and her brother had walked in together, like dates.
Nico had lost weight, but Fiona thought nothing of it. He danced with Fiona, and he danced with the bride, and with their terrible cousin Debra, and he sat and entertained Nora. In his car on the way home, he rolled up the side of his shirt to show her a stripe of vicious red bumps, ones that made Fiona’s eyes water. “It’s shingles,” he said.
And when she freaked out, he said, “It itches like hell, but it’s the same thing as chicken pox. Anyone who ever had chicken pox can get it. The virus lives under your skin forever.”
He hadn’t been to his own doctor, she learned later, just to the ER, where they’d given him calamine lotion and a leaflet.
A month later, he and Terrence were shopping, and Terrence asked how much cash he had, and Nico spent a long minute staring at the ten dollar bill in one hand, the five dollar bill in the other hand, unable to add them together. And six weeks after that, he was gone.
She looked at the pigeon that had landed on the balcony rail. She was not ready to look at Richard’s videos, but maybe she could work her way there by looking through Richard’s photo albums. She closed the balcony, poured a glass of milk, took a few deep breaths.
There were probably twenty albums on the shelf, a fact Fiona hadn’t absorbed that first day. Rows of black leather, brown leather, colored canvas. Boxes full of slides, as well, but she wouldn’t mess with those.
When she pulled a thick red album off the shelf, though, a paper slipped out and landed on the floor. Fiona attempted to clutch the album closed before anything else fell, but she dropped the whole thing, and now there were papers everywhere. Cream-colored sheets folded in half, small cards, a lavender page with a grainy photo of a man. They were funeral bulletins and prayer cards. She got on her knees and started stacking them up. This wasn’t a photo album at all, she saw when she opened it to an old clipping from Out Loud Chicago, an obituary of someone who’d danced with the Alvin Ailey Theater.
Jesus.
She opened the album at the beginning, and tried to slide the papers back into the empty spots. A man named Oscar, no one she remembered, had died in 1984. A clipping about Katsu Tatami from 1986. Here was the bulletin for Terrence Robinson, Nico’s Terrence. How odd—she must have put this bulletin together herself, but she didn’t remember it. Jonathan Bird. Dwight Sumner. There were so many of them, so impossibly many.
In her current life, it happened at least once a week that someone would wander into the store and then, when they discovered its mission, say something like “Oh, I remember that time!” Fiona had learned to check her temper, to push her toes into the floor so her face didn’t change. “I knew someone whose cousin had it!” they’d continue. “Did you ever see Philadelphia?” And they’d shake their heads in dismay.
And how could she answer? They meant well, all of them. How could she explain that this city was a graveyard? That they were walking every day through streets where there had been a holocaust, a mass murder of neglect and antipathy, that when they stepped through a pocket of cold air, didn’t they understand it was a ghost, it was a boy the world had spat out?
Here, in her hand, a stack of ghosts.
She looked through Terrence’s bulletin. They’d read a Psalm, apparently, although the book and verse numbers didn’t mean anything to her now. Asher Glass had sung. She remembered that.
Asher would speak at ACT UP meetings with a voice like a politician from a black-and-white movie. He’d break into city council with his bloody handprint banner. He and his friend chained themselves to Governor Thompson’s fence one summer, got arrested for the millionth time. Asher was still around, Fiona knew, living in New York. She’d seen him in a documentary a while back, a