Chapter 264

He heard the knocking in the afternoon, when they’d made love to the point of exhaustion and collapsed. Pushing away Gezar’s face as he rained pecking kisses on the sweat-soaked nape of his neck, Yuri Berec rose from the bed.

“Come here. If we don’t respond, they’ll stop knocking.”

Gezar raked a hand through his tousled hair as he spoke. Someone was still pounding on the door outside, yet he showed no sign of throwing anything over his naked body, as if daytime lovemaking held no shame at all.

As a drop of water becomes a grail when thirst is extreme, Yuri didn’t want to miss even a moment of Gezar’s lewd beauty. But with a calm face hiding their heat, Yuri answered the man seducing him.

“I can’t ignore it. Who would come all the way here and keep knocking like that? It’s not an ordinary matter.”

Yuri chose a sky-blue piqué shirt, cream linen trousers, and luxury leather slippers to match, then stepped out of the room. Even as a fugitive, he couldn’t give up elegance.

He exhaled a tense breath and opened the door. On the porch beyond the threshold stood a middle-aged woman smoking hard and two young brothers holding each other’s hands. Strangers.

“Was that your voice?”

Her skin was sun-browned; her curly hair was tied back any which way with a rubber band. She cocked her eyebrows impishly.

“I mean, was that your moaning? Fine set of lungs.”

Fluster washed over Yuri’s snow-white face, coloring it like red maple leaves. He was the second son of a venerable, wealthy Philadelphia family and had been drilled in etiquette by tutors from childhood. Even if meeting Gezar had pulled up his life by the roots and jammed it into some swampy corner of rural Louisiana, that didn’t change what he was at bottom.

“The children can hear.”

“Gay sex in broad daylight—so you do know what shame is.”

She dragged deep on her cigarette until the filter nearly burned, then blew smoke like a steam engine and flicked the lit butt into an herb bed.

On June 30, 1986—just a week earlier—the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld Georgia’s law criminalizing sex between men. In the world he lived in, making love to a same-sex partner was a crime beyond constitutional protection.

He had never seen this woman before, but nameless as she was, she knew Yuri was a homosexual. America was groaning under the terror of AIDS; everyone who knew him treated him like a potential vector, a germ that might transmit the disease. Yet in her gaze there was no trace of disgust.

“Well, whatever. That’s not the point. Do you like children?”

Only then did Yuri realize she was the cousin who had managed, with difficulty, to get in touch with Gezar. She radiated the relieved lightness of someone who’d found a porter to shoulder an unwelcome burden. She pushed the gloomy kids who had been hiding behind her forward toward Yuri.

Six, maybe. The boys were identical twins, uncannily alike. He had never seen photos, but he knew at once who they were: the children left behind by the Bazelli family’s eldest son, who had died young a few months earlier.

Yuri Berec and Gezar Bazelli lived in a salt marsh where the Gulf of Mexico lapped from the south and fresh water from the mountains flowed down from the north. Their house stood on high ground like a little island that didn’t flood, unlike the soggy marsh around it. In Louisiana’s wetlands, such low islets dotted the landscape like an archipelago. On that harsh land, African- and Caribbean-descended communities, immigrants from Vietnam, and all manner of outlaws lived out their separate, unmixed dreams.

By nature, Yuri and Gezar were people of the deep interior. Much had happened before they ended up illegally on this coast where river and sea water commingled. They stayed at each other’s side even through the worst things—things they would never have endured but for love—and like migratory birds that give up the sky to overwinter on a river delta, they settled in the marsh.

They first met through an early-admission college program. Gezar was thirteen; Yuri fourteen. Among a nationwide cohort of prodigies, the two boys—unusually young and brilliant even in that group—were quickly drawn to each other.

Their minds were keen, but their bodies and hearts were still unformed. Without knowing it was love, they thought of each other day and night as the object of a burning friendship. During the one-year gap allotted before declaring a major, they spent their time in endless reading and reflection, their childhood heat mixed with unease.

Gezar chose a field early. To cure the genetic illness passed down through his line, to escape the death that might arrive any day, he chose the path of genetic medicine.

In the Bazelli men, regardless of age, symptoms would manifest once unknown conditions were met: they would slowly lose bodily functions, their spells of unconsciousness would lengthen, and in the end they would fall into a quiet sleep like patients in brain death.

Yuri, by contrast, had no need to choose for such practical reasons. The Berec family, devout Christians whose forebears had amassed immense wealth through oil exploration, saw their assets swell by God’s blessing; for Yuri, the second son, study was merely a tool to hone his quick mind.

Instead of theoretical physics, which most interested him, Yuri stepped into genetics to follow his dearest friend. He was only fifteen, yet he already understood that Gezar sat at the center of all his intellectual striving.

Two years later, the boys took their master’s degrees and entered Ph.D. programs early; when their peers were just shedding the world of minors, they were wrestling with supercomputers at a pharmaceutical lab, achieving dazzling results. At that time, their greatest concern was neither drug development nor the genetic disease that might fell Gezar at any moment.

More than the undiscovered micro-world of the human body, they wanted to know each other’s thoughts and bodies more deeply. Even if the universe were laid bare as lucid truth, the two of them would remain each other’s eternal unknown. As young men, Yuri and Gezar wanted to explore that unknown—each other—forever.

Madly in love, they rented a cozy house in East Philadelphia and moved in together. Nothing hindered their indulgence. Yuri wanted recompense for the years he had wasted denying his love for Gezar. Their keen intellects were of no use in making love. All they needed were each other’s bare bodies. They tangled naked and loved fiercely.

The Christ whom Yuri, a devout Christian, had trusted all his life was not there. Paradise was wherever Gezar stood, so clad in flesh on the screaming earth of the living, he lived tasting heaven.

Then, in 1982. GRID—the so-called Gay-Related Immune Deficiency—washed the world in fear. With the arrival of the new disease, their world flipped over.

“Did you see the paper?”

The autumn sky outside the window was cloudless, yet the air in the street felt heavy as lead. Gezar dropped a newspaper on the coffee table. At the bottom of page one, bold type declared: “Anal intercourse, primary driver of immune disease spread.” The article reported that GRID—what would later be called AIDS—had surpassed six hundred cases nationwide.

The world’s going to treat us like a sack of germs, Yuri thought as he read.

As he feared, anti-gay hate crimes broke out everywhere. Yuri and Gezar, who had never bothered to hide their relationship, weren’t spared those looks of hatred. In conservative, affluent Philadelphia neighborhoods, a young gay couple made easy prey, a perfect target for violence.

One day they were targeted by a hate crime: assailants broke into their home and left them seriously injured. Before word got out, the Berec family stepped in. A classic scene unfolded—an eminent family reining in a child mired in scandal. With only the family’s consent and a psychiatrist’s note, Yuri was very swiftly committed to a mental hospital.

After a year of forced hospitalization, having convinced his family that his homosexuality had been “cured,” Yuri fled to New York with Gezar on the eve of an engagement to a devout Christian nursery aide whose family needed money.

They made their second home—and a lab—in a converted garment factory on the outskirts of Brooklyn. The high ceilings and broad windows were airy, but in winter a vicious draft cut cold to the bone.

That cruelty of cold was just another sweet excuse to seek each other’s arms. The hard weather stitched them tight together like layered cloth worked through with needle and thread. But there was no paradise in the world they’d run to.

Their lovemaking was cast as the origin of a plague; their thrusts became the links of contagion. People treated them as death itself. They were, in the world’s eyes, fit objects of disgust.