Free Afterlife by Paul Monette Page B

flinching in her voice. “Yeah, well, you make sure you go on Space Mountain,” he said briskly, his onyx eyes shining with intensity. “And the Haunted Mansion. I don’t care how big the line is.”
    He spoke with the same insistence, at once protective and daring, with which he had commanded her to leave the concrete blocks of Morelia—the dead-end spinster’s life, shuttling between her mother’s house and Dr. Sandina’s office. Smiling now, she swore to follow Dell’s itinerary to the letter. She wished him good dreams but didn’t embrace him. Their closeness didn’t allow them to touch; they were both too formal and too discreet. Only once had she ever held him, just after Marcus heaved his final breath, and she’d drawn away as soon as Dell released the first roar of pain.
    â€œI’ll get you a Mickey Mouse T-shirt,” she said.
    â€œThey’re all gay, you know.” He was playful now and teasing, one eye on the news, but not quite wanting her to go yet. “Mickey, Goofy, the duck—every single one of ’em.”
    â€œMickey’s not gay. He’s got Minnie.”
    â€œMinnie’s a dyke.”
    She laughed. “Don’t tell anyone in Morelia. That’s like saying the saints are gay.”
    â€œThey are.”
    â€œNow you sound like Marcus.”
    They both laughed now, remembering the caucuses in the living room on Lucile, Marcus shaking his head about some politician or bishop. The closeted ones did the most damage, sabotaging the gay rights planks, throwing a red scare around Marcus and his petitioners. Whenever Marcus heard a homophobe spewing hate, he’d cluck his tongue and roll his eyes, convinced it was all thwarted desire.
    As Dell watched Linda move to leave, quick and lively now that she had his permission for the outing, she looked thirteen again, the girl he’d left behind when he first came north. The pang of love in his heart was a constant wish for her happiness. He tried not to feel too protective, even resisted imagining what this Emilia looked like. He had never seen his sister naked, never thought of her fired with passion. Such things couldn’t be spoken of. Minnie Mouse was the closest they’d ever come.
    He couldn’t seem to focus on the news anymore. The final editorial note was sounding, the anchorman reassuring the viewers that nothing more was at issue here than a crackpot prank. “We owe it to what is most decent in all of us not to panic,” he intoned, “to rise above our basest fears and ignorance.”
    Very stirring, though by noon the next day the DWP would measure a twenty-two percent drop in water consumption throughout the L.A. basin. Looking on the bright side, it was the first real stride anyone had ever made toward water conservation, but nobody looked on the bright side. For days after, there would be footage of the run on bottled water—bottled anything , as long as one didn’t have to drink disease from the kitchen tap.
    Now that he’d set it in motion, Dell had no plans to escalate the matter. By the next night’s news they would be calling it “blood-mail,” and every AIDS organization would roundly condemn the irresponsibility of the terrorist act. By then Dell would be feeling so abstracted from his own deed that they might have been talking about somebody else entirely, even after Channel 4 produced a composite based on the tape of his call: hispanic male, mid-thirties, probably gay .
    He stripped to his shorts, grabbed the spiral notebook from his bedside table, and sprawled in bed with the phone on his chest. The first few numbers he tried were busy, for these were the midnight callers, restless and wired. Then he left an identical dirty message on two machines—calling on a CB from an eighteen-wheeler, looking to find some action at a truck stop. Not his scene especially, but according to the spiral notebook