The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (37 page)

So a lot of us knew what to expect when the Stonewall gave the signal. A lot of us screamed, high theatrical exaggerated wails, and laughed, and faked swooning, and to be honest I heard myself laugh. Kind of a crazy laugh, though, because I could finally feel the sadness start to ebb out of my rage. I didn't want to run. I wanted to fucking kill somebody.

The sparkplug, on the other hand, wasn't laughing.

“Fuck,” he said, looking around in a panic, looking for another way out. Of course there wasn't one, because the fucking Stonewall was a death trap with no fire exit. He turned around. I saw his face.

“Hi,” I said, absurdly, cheerfully, finding room in my rage for more laughter, because it was the bearded one of the twins from the gym.

Ben Lazzarra, NYPD beat cop

Nobody told me that the flashing white lights meant a raid. I thought there was a fire, or somebody won a raffle I didn't know about. It took me a while to pick up what was happening from what people were saying around me.

“What do we do?” I said, to Craig, except he wasn't Craig then, he was just the weirdly friendly black dude standing behind me.

“We wait, and keep our fingers crossed they don't take anybody in.”

But I knew they'd be taking us in. An unscheduled raid, less than a week after the last one, meant this was more than just the shake-up each precinct was obliged to give from time to time. And for a minute I was fine. Relieved, even. When the worst thing you can possibly imagine happens, you're free from the fear of it for the rest of your life.

But sometimes the worst thing you can imagine isn't the worst thing that can happen.

“Everybody up against the walls,” said a loud scary cop voice, and then repeated it, and the second time I knew who was speaking.

Quentin led the brigade into the back room, two rows of cops, each with a dozen sets of handcuffs at the ready. The dance floor emptied out, but I couldn't move. He stopped, five feet from me, snarling with rage at having to repeat himself, because someone had not immediately obeyed. And then he saw who it was.

“Benjy?” he said. His face, that perfect cop blank slate, cracked under the weight of what he was seeing. His twin brother, the man whose side he'd hardly ever left, the man with whom he'd joined the police force and struggled valiantly to fight the forces of evil, who now stood before him in a sweaty tight T-shirt in a den of iniquity, had been keeping from him a secret so terrifying that it threatened to strip the flesh from both our bones. The man who he knew better than anyone, he had not known at all.

Some lady with a gruff voice beside me hissed, “Oh,
hell
no.”

Quentin said my name again, no question mark now, and that was the last word he ever said.

Shelly Bronsky, bookstore owner

Those gay boys parted like the Red Sea for the boys in blue. The cops marched in and men fell over themselves, running for the walls. One guy didn't, and that's what gave me the courage to pry myself free from the crowd and step forward. The scary-mustache cop who led the brigade stopped short, not five feet from me, and I saw something like fear come over his face.

“Oh,
hell
no,” I hissed.

Someone behind me yelled, “Yeah!”

Some black gay protest queen, who I'd been seeing around since forever, stepped forward to join the two of us. “Hell no!”

The shouts spread.
Oh no, honey, no, you won't,
and
Ain't you got no real criminals to arrest.
I thought of the beautiful boy I knew from school, whose father pressed his face to the burner on the stove to make the men leave him alone, and the cigarette burns on my own upper arm where my mother tried to burn the lez out of me. We'd been swallowing fire for so long, fire and violence and hate, and in that moment of panic and fear and anger everything fell into place to feed the fire back.

And that's what we did.

Sergeant Abraham Asher, NYPD 6th Precinct police chief

I was born and bred in the Bronx, but I went to fight in Europe during World War Two. As a Jew, I felt I had to play my part in ridding the world of the fascist menace. Later on I'd join the police force for the same reason, because I felt it was my duty to make my city safe.

In the war I saw some rough things, went on some scary missions. And I've never in my life been more frightened than I was in that fag bar.

I'll tell you what I've told everyone else: It was too dark and too full of screaming and the smell of cooked flesh for me to say one way or another whether a wave of devil fire really shot out of nowhere to murder my men. If some of our boys who survived said that's what happened, I'm not going to call them liars.

Accounts of the uprising have been unsurprisingly whitewashed. All the major news outlets have blocked any mention of multipsionics—or whatever you want to call it. My own articles have been rejected by dozens of papers and magazines because I've refused to take out what they call “supernatural elements.”
Time,
for example, is the least biased of the bunch, and their most enlightened pronouncement on the subject of sexual difference is that “homosexuality is a serious and sometimes crippling maladjustment.”

Responsible parties have conducted exhaustive experiments. They won't talk about them publicly, but through my connections to the Stonewall veterans, I know that almost everyone who has gone on record about that night has subsequently been approached to participate in studies by the U.S. government, foreign governments, defense contractors, pharmaceutical companies, and leading organized crime families.

While the phenomenon has since been observed in hundreds of minor and major incidents, it simply refuses to submit to science. Studying individuals or groups, with or without duress, in labs or on the street or in the still-smoldering remains of the Stonewall itself, no one has been able to replicate those events, not so much as the lighting of a lone candle on a birthday cake.

—Jenny Trent, Editor (formerly of
the
New York Times
)

Ben Lazzarra, NYPD beat cop

Fire sparked in the air all around us. It hung there like the burning of invisible torches, and then it spread, like fire does. It moved, writhed, twisted into a ring, surrounded the three cops that had led the battalion into the back room. Three that included my brother Quentin. The flames rushed in, fast as floodwater when a levee breaks, and incinerated them.

The rest of those cops ran. Fifteen of them, but the door from the back to the front rooms only let them out one at a time, and the anger of my fellow queers was quicker and smarter. Somehow, so swiftly, they had learned to control the flames. Without saying a word, the crowd turned its full rage on them—and the fire lashed out with such white-hot hunger that ten men simply vanished from this planet. Flame broke them down into the atoms they were made from, and carved a huge hole in the stone wall between the front and back rooms, too.

Everyone was screaming and yelling by then, rushing out into the street after the rest of the cops. Streaks of fire zinged and whooshed through the air around them. They left me alone with the charred heap of my brother.

Tyrell James, security specialist

I was there. I felt it. I know what we did. And I've been going all over the world, training people who've been pushed too far for too long, telling them how to fight back when the moment comes when their backs are up against the wall. And one day very soon, the people who like to push other people around are going to wake up and find out everything's changed.

Sergeant Abraham Asher, NYPD 6th Precinct police chief

I find it offensive, what those people are saying. They expect you to believe all you've got to do is get a bunch of people together who are mad and scared and then fire will rain down on the evildoers? So, the Jews who went to the gas chambers weren't scared enough? The slaves weren't mad? It's a bunch of manure, if you ask me.

I'll tell you this much. Cops are a pretty cynical bunch, and we don't buy ghost stories. But there isn't a man or woman of the 20,000 on the force that doesn't know in our guts that something really real and really scary happened that night. Finding a couple fairies in a park and ticketing them for disorderly conduct used to be an easy count toward your quota, but to this day most officers will think twice before they do it. And we don't ever raid gay bars.

Craig Perry, university administration employee

It's not that no one in the whole history of human oppression was as pissed off and fucked over as we were that night—I think it's happened lots of times, except we're reading history the wrong way. We read it the way The Man wrote it, and when he was writing it, I bet he didn't know what to do with multipsionics. But I've studied this shit. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising happened on Passover, after all, and the Haitian Revolution began with a spontaneous uprising at a
vodoun
religious ceremony. When people come together to celebrate, that's when they're unstoppable.

Ben Lazzarra, NYPD beat cop

People say the world changed for us that night, but I'm not sure I buy it. The world is the same, only more so. People still hate and fear us, they just hate and fear us
more.
People still bash and kill and lobotomize us, they just do it more. And we still know in our hearts, under the shame and self-loathing and all the other shit society has heaped on us, that we were born blessed by God with an incredible gift.

I've steered clear of all the scientists and scholars and reporters trying to turn that night into a research paper, but there's one thing I do know. It was
us.
The heat of us, of all those bodies full of joy and sadness and anger and lust, and the combination of the three of us: Me and Craig and that dyke. I can't explain it, that's just what I felt in that moment. We were the match and the sandpaper, coming together. All I know is it was
us.

Craig Perry, university administration employee

We all went a little mad that night. Nobody knew what the hell had happened, but we knew nothing would be the same again. People danced and whooped and hollered and laughed. Three men skipped into the distance with their arms locked, singing,
We're off to see the wizard.

I don't know why I didn't want to be with my people, then. I felt empty. Like I'd put my whole self into wanting something, and now I had it. I'd licked envelopes and organized protests and screamed at the top of my lungs for a decade or several, and the revolution had finally come . . . but answered prayers are always terrifying. What are you, when you get the thing you've built your life around trying to get?

My rage had burnt itself out. So instead of joining the jubilant crowds, I went to the Day-O Diner, where the Meatpacking District meets the Hudson River, where the coffee is strong and cheap and nobody goes there but bloody meat men ending their shifts, or clean meat men beginning theirs.

The twin sat by himself. His back was to the door, but after what had just gone down, I would have known that rugby-wide neck anywhere. I strolled past, pretending to be selecting a barstool, to confirm that he wasn't sobbing. His face was blank, staring into scalding black coffee for answers we both knew were not there.

“I'm sorry about your brother,” I said, cautiously.

He looked up. “I know you from the gym,” he said.

“He didn't know,” I said, “did he? About . . .”

He shook his head.

“I'm sorry. I can't imagine. I just wanted to say—but you must want to be alone—”

“Don't go,” he said. “Being alone is what I'm worst at.”

He began to weep then, with his whole body. I sat and ordered refill after refill of black coffee, for both of us, until the sun came up.

I've interviewed Craig Perry a dozen times since Stonewall, and I don't think he's ever recognized me, ever made the connection. But he had come to see me, two weeks before the fire. He visited me at the office of
the New York Times.
He came to demand we stop printing the names of gay people caught up in vice raids and decency arrests. I think he thought I was merely the secretary, which is why my face didn't stay in his mind, but I was not. I was the one who wrote those articles. I had been writing them for eight years by then. Later on I went through all my old clippings and did the math: Thirteen hundred names, thirteen hundred people whose deepest darkest secret I spilled. If I put in the time, I could probably track down how many of them killed themselves, how many got fired or dishonorably discharged or institutionalized, but that wouldn't help anything but my own guilty need to suffer. Telling the story, the real story, is a much better way to pay off the crippling karma-debt I built up in the years before I knew better.

Craig before Stonewall was a different person. His rage was enormous, overwhelming, cutting him off from the rest of the human race. He wanted the revolution, right away, wanted it to come with fire and brimstone and the blood of every heterosexist son/daughter of a bitch to be spilled in the streets. I don't want to speculate on what changed, what he had after that he didn't have before, what aspect of what went down inside the Stonewall broke down his old anger. I don't know him like that. Journalists tend to write about people like they know what makes them tick, why they do the things they do, and at the end of the day it's the stories people tell about themselves that matter.