Gossip (34 page)

But the strangest dreams were mundane ones indistinguishable from my waking life, information dreams of newspapers, radio broadcasts and telephone calls.

“Hello, Ralph? This is Hillary Clinton.”

“Mrs. Clinton?”

“Yes.” She sounded so sweet, so kind, so unlike her reputation. “I just want to thank you for killing the man who wrote that awful book about me.”

I was overjoyed by her call; the First Lady would save me. Then I realized her mistake and said, “Thank you very much, Mrs. Clinton. Only you should know, I didn’t kill Bill O’Connor.”

“Do I have the wrong number? This isn’t Ralph Eckhart?”

“It is. But I didn’t kill anyone.”

“Then who are you?”

“I am Eckhart.”

“But you can’t be. Because Eckhart killed O’Connor. If you didn’t, you’re someone else entirely. Who are you? Really?”

The dream was so convincing that even when I found myself tangled in blankets in the gray light of my apartment, I was furious with the real Hillary Clinton for refusing to help me, and hurt that the dream Hillary had insisted I was someone else. If only people knew who I was, I thought, they’d know I couldn’t have killed Bill. But the reverse was also true: Only when I proved that I hadn’t killed him could I be myself again.

My real phone rang shortly before midnight on a Wednesday.

“Quick. Hang up and plug into Gayworld. Now!”

“Peter? What is it?”

“Just do it. Before he disappears. Then tell me I’m crazy.”

Peter had an extra line and could use his computer while on the phone. I didn’t. I hung up, unplugged and plugged in. My screen lit up on words twitching over phosphor-coated glass.

“What you should read is Best Little Boy in the World.”

“No. Closet case book. Read Dancer.”

“Prehistoric. My first gay book was …”

I couldn’t understand what Peter wanted me to see. The gang was eagerly advising a newbie on books to help him be gay.

Then the newbie replied:

Thersites: Thank you for your help.

It lurched off the screen just as I understood what I’d seen. I was about to hit the command that would list who was here tonight, when Shanghai Lily asked, “Thersites, darling. May I introduce Sergeant Rock. Or have you met?”

The others chimed in: “Hi, Sarge,” “Long time no read,” “Surfing elsewhere, Rock?”

“Hi,” said Thersites.

It was him. His ghost. The ultimate ghost in the machine. My fingers fumbled out, “Don’t you know me?”

Long pause. “Should I? (Gentle laughter.)”

My heart raced, my ears hummed. Did anyone else use stage directions? “I’m sure we met,” I replied.

“It is possible.”

“You don’t remember my handle?”

“No.”

His entries were delayed but short. Maybe the dead type badly.

“Perhaps you’d like to be alone,” offered Shanghai Lily. Peter was thinking more clearly than I could.

“Can we go into a private room?” I suggested.

“Why not?” said Thersites.

I brought down a sidebar and entered our handles. An empty box filled the screen and remained empty.

“Are you with me?” I asked, afraid I’d lost him.

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” he replied.

“Where are you?”

The long pause before his answer added to the eeriness.

“With you.”

“Where in physical space?”

“Nohwere and everhwere. (Hysterical laughter.)”

His nervous fingers made mistakes. But I’d seen photos of the corpse. I was charged with his murder. He
was
dead. But this had to be his Powerbook, still programmed with his handle and stage directions. I was talking with a dead man’s machine.

“You are Thersites?” I asked.

“Correct.”

“Then I met you F2F.”

“Explain.”

“Face-to-face.”

“You think?”

“I know.”

“What do you know?”

I took the question literally. “I know that you are dead.”

No response.

Realizing that I’d gone too far, I went all the way. “You were murdered.”

No response.

“Who are you?”

His handle flickered in the border of our box; he was gone.

I unplugged the jack, plugged in my phone and called Peter. He answered immediately.

“Is he back in the main room?” I asked.

“No. What happened?”

“I scared him off. Whoever he is.”

“It’s not him?”

“No. But someone using his machine. That’s the only explanation.”

“God, I thought I was hallucinating’ when his name popped up and he started asking Homo 101 questions. Sorry, but I didn’t think to save anything until after I called you.”

I cursed myself for saving none of our private talk either. It was too late now. The words had evaporated in electronic ether. “But we both saw it,” I said. “His handle
was
there.”

“Oh yeah. And I couldn’t help thinking: It’s all make-believe, there was no murder. He’s still alive.”

“But it wasn’t him,” I said. “It’s somebody else.”

“His killer?”

My stomach lurched. “No. No killer would be so stupid as to use his victim’s handle. He sold Bill’s machine? Or maybe it is the killer and he’s too stupid to know he’s giving himself away.” After my glimpse of a dead-eyed child in jail, I should not expect cunning of killers. “I’ll tell Diaz tomorrow and see what he makes of it.”

“Let me ask Nick about it.”

“What would Nick know?”

“I don’t know. Nothing. Probably nothing,” he said, suddenly fed up with the whole business again, despite his call.

I got off the phone, plugged back in and E-mailed the monitor. I doubted the chatline had been monitored tonight, but I reported that the handle of a man I knew to be deceased had appeared. Maybe they could tag and trace the call the next time he popped up.

When I was done, when there was nothing else to do, I sat at the computer catching my breath, my stomach fluttering, my nerves firing in all directions. Why couldn’t Bill be alive? Why had I explained away his return so quickly? I’d been unable to enjoy even for a minute the illusion that Bill wasn’t dead.

“Very interesting,” said Diaz after I described the encounter. I waited for him to talk through his surprise to what had to be good news for us. But the reappearance of Thersites produced more questions than answers. It might be connected with the killer, he said, but could be dismissed as the computer equivalent of a crank call. He would request a log of telephone calls for that night, just as he’d requested records for Bill’s phone from the night of the murder, but it was a complicated, time-consuming process. He told me to get the E-mail addresses of people who’d been in Gayworld last night, as possible witnesses.

“You’re saying this means nothing?”

“Oh, it means something. But less in court than you’d imagine. Even if we connect it to the Baltimore robberies, bring in your witnesses
and
an expert who’ll explain how chatlines work, all we can do is add more reasonable doubt.”

He’d spoken with Detective Williams. Yes, there’d been a set of gay-related robberies in Baltimore, but only four and nothing to indicate the suspect had expanded his territory to Washington. Victims described a short, blond fellow in his twenties, an overly friendly white Southerner who called himself Tim, Jim or John and claimed to be in the navy or marines or just out. He’d beaten one man unconscious when the man resisted. Williams had not yet sent files with the full particulars, but he said the pickup took only money, never goods.

“What we get,” said Diaz, “is a tool to challenge the competence of the police. Why didn’t they look at a connection with the Baltimore robberies? Talking about that, and bringing up this appearance in cyberspace, we
might
make a few people on the jury think Tim-Jim-John did it.”

But even I couldn’t believe in the existence of anyone so ethereal and convenient. Diaz and I seemed to have invented him out of pure necessity.

S
UDDENLY I WAS ALL
over the street. A chorus of “Free Eckhart” cried from alley walls, derelict buildings and the sidings around construction sites, multiples of our poster slapped over the glossy crust of movie, music and underwear ads. I disappeared a few days later under a sleepy bodybuilder in boxer briefs, but reappeared over the weekend. Teams of strangers went out after midnight with buckets of paste and rolls of me.

Nick reported that the campaign was bringing dropouts and burnouts back to activism. I spent an evening with Nick and a half dozen volunteers at the apartment, folding and stamping flyers, a backstage extra in my own show. The others were flustered to meet me, surprised I wasn’t in jail, disappointed by my reality, except for one earnest, overweight man who courted me with pitying eyes that made the smirky cool of people like Ned Wing seem preferable. Peter hid himself in the bedroom, reading.

I grew frustrated with how little there was for me to do. Nick worked to line up more interviews, but could get only the gay press. A man from
The Advocate
met with me over coffee.
The Washington Blade
questioned me by phone. The media apathy was especially aggravating now that I had something to say: The real murderer was still at large. We’d seen signs of him in a computer yet an innocent man remained stuck in legal tar.

The fund-raiser was scheduled for a Monday, a slow night for clubs, which was why we were able to use Tarantula. The
Voice
came out the preceding Wednesday, the newsstands displaying a whole new set of ads for us. I was the front page, a quarter of it anyway, sharing space with Bosnia and designer water. A washed-out color head shot showed me with new hair and a soulful or sulky frown—all in the eye of the beholder—against white bars. “Caregiver; or Killer?” asked the headline. “Did This Man Murder the Author of
Regiment of Women?”

The article itself was titled “Strange Bedfellows”—the press never tired of the phrase—with the subhead “Love and Death in a Time of Political Cholera.”

“They met in cyberspace, made love in Washington, New York and Miami, and ended their affair on the six o’clock news. One could say that William O’Connor and Ralph Eckhart had a very nineties relationship.”

Smart-ass yet better written than I’d expected, it began with the public version of the crime, then cut back and forth between me and Bill. I should have been inured to reading about myself, but the tabloids had given only a shadow of me, an empty cutout. Maura included pieces of flesh. I’d wanted to use her article to tell people who I really was. Despite everything I knew, I read it half hoping that she would tell me.

“Defense attorneys like to say that there’s no such thing as an innocent defendant. Yet Eckhart appears to be innocent, in all meanings of the word.

“Currently free on bail, he spoke to me in his cramped East Village apartment. A North Carolinian with a slight, denatured drawl, Eckhart comes across as another gay wannabe who fled to the bright lights and freedom of the North. Despite the ethnic-sounding name, he has deep Southern roots. He is a strange mix of the cool and the uncool. This typical-seeming queer is an unashamed Anglophile. His bookcases are full of Dickens and Trollope. Friends call him an example of Tory Grunge”—Peter once said that as a joke—“which might explain how a politically aware yet half-committed gay man could fall for a Shakespeare-quoting mouthpiece for the far right.

“Eckhart does not apologize for the affair. ‘He was a better person in bed than in print,’ he said.”

Her portrait of Bill was based solely on print. She quoted an op-ed piece he wrote attacking his own Generation X and another ripping into “victim chic.” She called his book “a pathological whine of heterosexual male terror; or it seemed heterosexual.” She described his appearance on
Nightline.
“He was not the dyspeptic middle-aged crank one expected but a bespectacled, baby-faced boy next door, if you live in Pat Buchanan’s hood.” When Ellen Goodman attacked his book, he “cleverly used his homosexuality to turn himself from basher into bashee.” Maura assumed he’d been in complete control.

Despite the errors and constant sniping—the misogyny “prevalent among gay men” made them natural allies for the right—I continued to give her the benefit of the doubt, until her conclusion. She spoke at surprising length about the effect of AIDS on my life, from sex to ACT UP to what I’d done for Alberto.

He expects no praise for this. “I did no more than others have done for their friends.”

Which is true enough. The gay male community is not one of warriors but of caregivers and mourners. White gay men continue to treat the epidemic as their own private tragedy, not recognizing how it affects women and people of color.

“What I feel is too deep and cold to be called anger,” he said cryptically. “Anger is an overrated emotion.”

Why isn’t Eckhart angrier? He clearly resents finding himself impaled in the jaws of prejudice. Under that, however, is an emotional and political autism. He seems split from what has happened to him. Or is he split from what he did?

Talking with Eckhart, I bought his story completely. I still do. Yet thinking about it afterward, suspicions set in, the feeling that half of this man was missing. Could thirteen years of epidemic, right-wing attack and the false hope of Clinton give gay men a split personality? Could it create a violent unconscious? Is it possible that Eckhart actually did kill O’Connor, out of personal guilt or political rage, then blocked it out completely?

I doubt it. Sadly enough, we are “a gentle, loving people.” But it’s a wonder that queer men and women aren’t more desperate, schizophrenic or dangerous. Because then the world would have to pay attention.

“So what the hell’s she saying at the end?” I demanded from Nick. “That I could have killed Bill? Or that I should have?”

“She just wants to leave some mystery. Don’t worry. Few people are going to read it to the end. The important thing is we get them thinking about you.”

I was angry but not surprised. Maura had turned her own discomfort with illness into a posture of toughness. It was the radical-politics version of the fantasies in Gayworld and Juice: Murder was more exciting than passive virtue.