People in Trouble (31 page)

She pressed her face into his chest.
 
His shoulders were like guard rails.
 
She was surrounded by him.
 
She had no air.

"That girl means nothing to me," he said.
 
"Nothing.
 
You give up yours and I'll give up mine.
 
Then we can be exactly like we were before."

She placed her fingers flat against his chest.
 
It was a wall.
 
It moved.
 
There was hair underneath his shirt.
 
She wanted to dig her fingernails in and tear him apart.

He spoke again.
 
What did he say this time?

`17

The New York Times obituary said that Scott was "survived" by two daughters, a wife, mother, father and sister in Kansas City.

Then Kate found a privately placed notice at the bottom of the obituary page.

Scott Yarrow died in the arms of his lover, James Carroll, with whom he shared a vision of freedom for lesbians and gay men.

When she went to the site of the funeral, Kate discovered that it was the same church where she had watched Molly and Pearl months before.

Now she too was a mourner.
 
There were so many people it was impossible to even consider getting into the church.
 
Once inside, what would they do there anyway?
 
"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust" had no place here.

There was only fire.

Kate looked closely at the crowd.
 
There were some people she knew from Justice meetings.
 
Fabian and Bob were there.
 
So were Cardinal Spellman and Trudy and Daisy.
 
But most of the faces were unknown to her.
 
These people did not greet one another.

There were no words.
 
They did not touch.
 
There were no embraces, only anger and a shared determination that passed between them.

Six men emerged carrying Scott's coffin.
 
It seemed to be as light as air.
 
They began passing the box over the heads of the -crowd as each one reached out to touch the wood like it was the Torah.
 
His encased body passed through the hands of his people on its way to burial.
 
It was placed in the hearse without eulogy or speeches.

As the car inched away the crowd parted and then, like one person, began walking silently to Fifth Avenue, turning up it toward the library.
 
They walked in the street against traffic.
 
Kate -could feel the exhaust of idling cars against her calves.
 
Her lungs -were filled with it.
 
She climbed over cars, disregarded them.

-When there are that many people the traffic can't move.
 
When -that many people walk together the traffic has to stop.
 
At first the drivers cursed, but soon rolled up their windows and sat still -in disgust listening to their radios.

The men and women arrived at the library and stopped there in front of the old granite lions.
 
Everyone looked up at the huge stained-glass windows that once let in light on halls of free books and old wooden reading tables.
 
They stood very, very quietly.

Horne had already started speaking from a raised platform, - I where he sat on a pile of cushions dressed as a raja in accord with the India-themed decor of the renovated library.
 
Now it would be a health club for businessmen working in midtown.

-The main reading room had become a large sauna and the rare book room, handball courts.
 
Horne was speaking into the microphone, it didn't matter what he was saying.
 
The edges of the stage were guarded by some young white thugs in brownface with guns in their pantaloons and walkie-talkies under their turbans.
 
But five guns couldn't kill a thousand people.
 
Kate saw plastic boa constrictors and college students hired to be dancing girls.
 
Everyone on the stage was just working a job.

Horne stopped for a moment to look out at the solid mass before him.

He had an expression on his face that Kate recognized from television.

It was a practiced glibness.
 
He was searching for just the right throwaway comment to invalidate all the people in front of him and at the same time make great copy for the front page of the next day's New York Post.
 
But nothing very clever seemed to come to mind.
 
He started sweating a bit, then, and took a drink of water.

Kate saw James climbing up on Bob's shoulders.
 
The contrast of black skin and silver hair made a momentary impression on her.
 
James turned toward the audience and spoke evenly, not trying to outshout anyone.

The crowd was pretty antsy anyway -and looking for some direction, so they kept still and listened carefully.

"If you instigate chaos," he said, "make sure that it is to your advantage or that you have no other choice."

Then they roared.
 
The black T-shirts with pink triangles swarmed over the equipment, smashing it.
 
They trampled the press section, throwing the cameras into the street and stomping on them.
 
There would be no observers this time.
 
Everyone would participate or run.
 
Kate climbed up on top of an overturned Cable News Network van and was surprised by the sight of her own artwork, spread out behind Home's platform.
 
The private body--guards were jumping off the stage, flying against the background of her collage, leaving Home alone, retreating until he was wrapped by her images.
 
Reinforcements started arriving from the police department and were beginning to surround the crowd.

The cops were still on the outside but there was very little time left for someone to act in a large way.
 
People were already at the edges of the platform, leaving Horne and her pictures trapped.

Then he pulled out a gun.
 
The men who had begun climbing up on the stage pulled back, quickly, and hovered on the wood, swinging their legs over the sides.
 
Kate pushed harder than she had ever pushed and clawed her way to the front of the stage, catching and tearing her flesh on the splintered police sawhorses that lay mangled everywhere.

Then she climbed under it, crawling on the dirt and garbage over wires, rags, cans of paint and turpentine.
 
She watched her own hands turn black and her arms cake with dirt and blood surrounded by the moving spikes of pants legs bobbing around her.
 
Dragging the cans and power lines to the base of the collage's wooden frames, she looked back at -the chaos behind her.
 
Each gesture was too large and so unusual -that the action passed before her like a high-speed silent film.

-Only there was no silence.

R0LAND Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Channel Z News.

I'm Roland Johnson.

SUSIE And I'm Susie Fong.

AL Al Harber with sports.

CASPER And Doctor Casper Griffin with the weather.

R0LAND All this and more when Channel Z continues after this message.

[Commercial] R0LAND Good evening.
 
In the news tonight, Ronald Horne murdered in Forty-second Street melee.
 
Congress approves new Contra aid plan.
 
Mayor goes to bat for the peanut butter bagel and Masters and Johnson warn heterosexuals: new threat from AIDS.
 
But first.

-Susie?

SUSIE Thank you, Roland.
 
Real-estate mogul Ronald Horne met a fiery death today when a freak accident occurred during a riot by AIDS victims.
 
An art installation designed for the inauguration of a new health club caught fire and enveloped the billionaire developer in a flaming collage.
 
Police are still investigating the incident.
 
We switch live to Sonny Harris on location in Bryant Park.
 
Sonny?

SONNY Thank you, Susie.
 
Little remains of today's riot except for the scattered scraps of television equipment smashed by the angry mob.
 
We are here with Chief of Command Ed Ramsey of Manhattan South.
 
Chief, can you tell us what happened?

ED RAMSEY --At approximately two twelve this afternoon, a piece of art that had been placed in the park caught on fire.
 
The artist has in -formed us that he was using polyurethane, a known flammable substance.

S0NNY -Thank you, Chief Ramsey.
 
Back to you, Roland.

R0LAND Thanks, Sonny.
 
Congress voted today to approve a multimillion dollar aid package to rebel forces in Nicaragua.
 
Frank Miller has details from Washington.
 
Frank?

As soon as Molly caught sight of Kate's hair, she'd climbed up -on a lamppost and kept her eyes pinned to that woman throughout the entire event.
 
She'd seen Kate go under the stage and then come out again on the other side and watched her slip under the framing just as the first flames began to appear.
 
Then Kate had come around to behind the police lines and watched the fire from across the street.

For a few weeks after the event Molly had vague thoughts of seeing Kate again but had never acted on it and eventually any desire toward her faded, naturally.
 
She wasn't even provoked by curiosity as Kate developed a high profile as a result of Horne's death and could be read about in an essay by Gary Indiana in the Village Voice and one by Barbara Kruger in ArtForum.
 
In fact, Kate began working extensively in burning installations and quickly got commissions from a number of Northern European countries to come start fires there.
 
She had been in Amsterdam for six months working on a blazing sculpture in honor of the people of Cambodia when Peter came up to Molly in a coffee shop on Ninth Street.

It had been a long winter for Molly.
 
She spent a lot of it alone and was relatively quiet.
 
Both Fabian and Daisy were dead by Thanksgiving.

Fabian had wanted a drug called M-Reg One.

But the FDA killed it in phase-three trials.
 
Daisy ended up on AZT, which she couldn't really tolerate and her legs went so numb that she could barely walk.
 
They both died angry.

"Hi, Molly, how are you?"
 
Peter said, being friendly.
 
Then he sat down next to her at the counter and started talking about the new play he was working on.
 
He also mentioned that he -wasn't getting the recognition he deserved and wasn't getting paid what he was worth.

Molly tried to ignore him.
 
Then a pretty woman came into the coffee shop and kissed Peter on the mouth.

"Pete, hold this for a minute, I have to make a phone call.

I'll be right back."

"Is that your new girlfriend?"
 
Molly asked.

-"Not so new," Peter said.
 
"We've been together for a while "Since before the fire?"

"Yep," he said, after thinking back for a minute.

When Daisy had started dying, Trudy became more and more belligerent, finally getting beaten by a cop with his nightstick at a demonstration at Macy's and then getting kicked in the back a -few months later at the Stock Exchange.
 
Around the time of her second beating, her sister Sam got off drugs for two months and later for two weeks.

ii"Are you kidding me?"
 
Molly said.
 
"You mean all this time that Kate and I were running around protecting your ego you had another girlfriend?"

"Well, you've got to take care of your own needs," Peter -said.

"Thanks for the advice."

After his death the bulk of Horne's holdings had been purchased by the president of a major chemical company who was himself assassinated by a man dying of cancer.

"Well, I gotta go," Molly said sliding off her counter stool.

"To a demonstration?"
 
he asked, smiling.

"As a matter of fact, yes.
 
I'm going to Saint Vincent's Hospital, where a man dying of AIDS was called `fucking faggot' by a security guard in the emergency room.

"Well, good luck," he said.
 
"You approach the world your way and I'll approach it mine.
 
`Let a thousand flowers bloom,' said Mao Tse-tung, right?"

Molly went into the cold toward James's house.
 
She had been rather soft-spoken lately.
 
She was conserving her energy.

She didn't hang out much and liked to read People magazine, listen to the radio and sleep in her clothes.
 
It was a saturation therapy.
 
On the way to his apartment, she was thinking about how sometimes the city gets so beautiful that it's impossible to -walk even one block without getting an idea.
 
The idea she got was to try to remember the truth and not just the stories.