by Lucas Mann
It’s common, too, for everyone to leave with their own memories and assumptions, to put them away in some metaphorical sneaker box in a metaphorical closet, thought about only when drunk or bored, late at night, the dead man stretching out into their kitchen, standing with them for an isolated moment before vanishing again. And I suppose it’s common for the baby in the story to feel restlessness instead of sadness. To want the life remembered to be less common than every sign points to. Maybe that’s the most common thing of all, embarrassingly common: my impulse to want to know more only to confirm to myself that there was someone worth knowing, worth feeling for in the way that I feel, the dull ache of my certainty that a life of importance ended unjustly.
My brother never meant to die, or at least not explicitly, so there is no note of explanation to refer to. There are only stories. The ones we tell. The ones he told. He was a writer, self-identified. He wrote songs and poems and scripts and rants and mantras. In the days after the funeral, his apartment was cleaned and all the writings he saved were collected. They were given to me, I think, because I had the fewest stories of my own to fall back on. I still wanted to know more, so maybe I would read them.
He made a lot of promises on paper, like if he wrote them down they had the greatest possible chance of coming true. His promises are, at least, a place to start.
[TYPED SHEETS, UNDATED, “SELF-INTERNAL MEMORANDUM OF JOSHUA”]:
(Carrots)
In 2–5 years, I will have my “Valhalla” on Long Island, complete with everything—bomb home studio, a bulldog, etc. I will have created an empire (publishing, music, education, and more), press galore (celeb status), mother will be “paid back” more than she ever dreamed. I will hold tremendous power in every way and will go to Paris on a whim at least six times a year without question. I will have “shown them all,” old employers (“The Fag Fascist”), etc. Money (tens to hundreds of millions), fame, and power. I will go even further with my creativity in prose. Women. Candy.
Rules
– There is no such thing as “no.”
– There is no such thing as “impossible.”
– There is no such thing as “fear.”
– Knowledge and art are power.
– I am in control (destiny).
– Success is never a matter of “if”;
– Only “when.”
I Will Be…
– Always working (12 hours daily) Target Oriented IN CONTROL of all (Including the drug situation) NO FEAR Just People (all are).
THIS IS MY SELF-AGREEMENT! THIS IS LIFE!
—
The first problem with remembering Josh is that his death immediately set to eroding the legacy of his life. Legacy seems like way too strong a word to use, but I cannot think of another. What I mean is that the vast majority of my memories of my relationship with him occur upon leaving the funeral home, when he was already boxed, then burned and buried. His life became increasingly overshadowed, with each passing day and then each passing year, by the only sure fact: that he died awfully.
The days after the funeral were slow. It was nearly June, and hot. I stayed home from school, sat around in my underwear, and ate leftover funeral pastries.
“You’ve got chocolate on your face,” my father said, passing me hunkered over the kitchen table. “I’m going for a walk.”
I went to watch daytime reruns, and somewhere in the middle of the eating and the watching, I began to cry for the first time since Josh’s death.
My father came home and found me, tear-streaked. He’d been gone for hours and he was sweating.
“What’s wrong?” he said, and then winced.
I said, “Where’d you walk?”
“Around,” he said.
He went to take a shower. When he was finished, I did the same. I stood under the water for what felt like a long time. When I turned the water off, I got out and stood, disappointed, in front of the mirror, pushing at my flesh and wishing it didn’t indent so easily.
Down the hallway, through the closed door, I heard my father make choking howls that he’d never made before. His sounds started low, more of a sad grumble, but then I heard his crescendo. He sounded cracked, underwater, like a broken police siren that couldn’t properly warn anybody about anything. I put my head against the bathroom door and wondered when he would finish. I felt the walls vibrate, and I tried to figure out what part of his body he was slamming and what he was slamming it into. Then I heard him gasp, exhausted.
I sat on the cold tile floor and wrapped myself in a towel so that my whole body was covered, or close to it. I used to do that as a small child, pretending that I was a baby squirrel abandoned in a tree pit in a rainstorm. I used to sit, cold, squirrel-like, and wait for somebody to find me. There was no longer anyone looking. I realized that, and sat with the realization. I closed my eyes. I lay fetal and I listened to my father wind down. There was a final sound, almost a squeak, and then there was nothing. I stood and dried myself and tiptoed down the hallway to get closer to him. I leaned against the door to my parents’ bedroom and I listened to him breathe.
—
My father had changed in one day. Though I wasn’t sure of the specifics of the change, I was certain that one had occurred. I was impressed, maybe jealous, too, that Josh had the power to rearrange something in how our father was. Dave and I changed along with him, maybe for him, and though nobody acknowledged it outright, Josh’s absence, the force of it, made a new family.
Dave became my big brother, full stop. We were, instantly, each other’s only brother, each alive, and that small truth made us believe that our relationship was realer. It began when my father came through the front door on the night he found the body. He’d called ahead so we were all ready for his entrance. When he walked in, we stood like he was a TV judge. He surveyed the room and found Dave and me. He lurched at us. He caught each of us around the neck, and I think I got his left arm. He pulled our heads into his collarbones and he smelled curdled.
He spoke in a strange teapot hiss. My boys, he dubbed us in that foreign voice. My boys, my boys, my boys. And so we were.
That summer, and then every summer after, we went on vacation like a nuclear family.
Dave and I roomed together, and I remember us lying on identical, fluorescent teal bedspreads in a hotel room when I was fifteen. Our bodies pressed flat, our toes pointed, we wanted to prove who was longer.
“Stop pointing your fucking toes,” he said, and reached across the space between beds to slap at my chest.
I said fuck you, but didn’t hit back.
I tried to imagine us like we were both young, children of eight or nine or ten, never separated. I guessed that my father imagined the same thing every night when he popped his head into our room quick enough to see only outlines—twin beds and two boys that he made. We were all trying to stop time, or reverse it.
Really, I was a mid-growth-spurt teen, with fast-sprouting armpit hair that wouldn’t stop itching and pimples like anthills on my back. Dave was balding and lumpy. He held his body with dissatisfaction, and his skin seemed to sulk, aware and ashamed of the fact that it was dripping through his thirties. The night before, I’d watched him tilt his head up and pluck nose hairs by the bathroom mirror as droplets of blood fell into the sink. Three days earlier I’d heard him shriek when he over-flossed and cut a groove in the gum skin next to one of his molars. You can’t take dental hygiene lightly, he’d said. He’d become a man who lived by warnings, slathering himself in sunscreen, checking for ticks in his leg hair.
From his bed, he began to taunt me the way a brother should. He called me things that maybe he used to call Josh. Chubby boy, and then chubby boy escalated to fat boy. And then dumb, fat, little pussy. He told me I had a baby dick, and when I tried to say he’d never seen my dick, he said he saw me coming out of the shower and it made him want to laugh. I screamed that I was going to kill him.
We stood up in the middle of our room and tried to fight. He
told me that if he wanted to, he could still kick my ass. He told me I was soft. I told him, bullshit, he was old.
I didn’t know how to fight. I hit him with a pillow. The cotton slid across his face and made his cheeks jiggle. He swung a pillow back and I caught it, and then for seconds or minutes we were in the midst of a mighty, childish struggle. We grunted and wheezed. I felt spittle start to slide over my bottom lip, and I slurped it back into my throat too quickly, so I coughed. I managed to get an elbow into his ribs, and it felt good to know that his body was trying to recoil from mine. We spun together and we rattled the TV console, knocked a plastic-framed sailboat print off the wall.
My father threw the door open, and we looked up with sitcom guilt.
He said, “What are you, morons?”
Dave said that I started it. I disagreed, shrill.
My father began to yell, and, at first, I was frightened on instinct. But when I looked at him again he was grinning. I felt Dave’s grip ease on my arm. I heard him laugh. I laughed, too. There was closeness in this tableau, no matter how bumbling it was, how ridiculous. To be wrapped in such insular, brief hate, to bruise each other until the patriarch commanded we stop—it felt like just the right kind of conflict. Boys will be boys and then they will stop and grudgingly embrace. In the morning, they will wake up and start over.
That night I couldn’t sleep. My eyes were closed, but I was thinking about my imagined first sexual encounter, and about Josh—two topics that ran together easily, both so desirable and out of reach. Often, he acted out my fantasies.
Dave couldn’t sleep either. I heard him kicking his sheets and I asked him what was wrong. He told me it took him twenty minutes just to get a hard-on, and sometimes it wasn’t worth the effort. I lay silent, unable to empathize, still a hormonal spring trap, scared to wear sweatpants on a windy day. The pills, he said, made it like he couldn’t feel.
Dave had become the most wholly dependent drug user I knew. Each morning, I watched him run his fingers through a stash of lithium, Paxil, Klonopin. The pills made his body inflate and the muscles of a young man disappear from his calves and his forearms, the way I’d seen Josh’s body mutate at the end. But Dave’s weren’t the drugs that killed you, they were the ones that kept you alive, even though that seemed like a subtle difference.
Dave stopped talking. He blew his nose and tried to sleep. I heard him kick his covers all the way off. Then I finally dozed, thinking of Josh’s arms and a woman with big eyes and no mouth. I woke to the sound of Dave screaming. I said, What?, and kept my eyes on the ceiling. He told me he’d had a bad dream.
“Don’t you ever think about living a day and then a year and then a decade?” he asked me. “And doesn’t it ever not seem worth it?”
“No,” I said, not stopping to think about whether that was true.
He said he’d dreamed of a day that never ended and the sound of a motor underwater, and Josh’s face hanging in the sky, laughing at him. Dave asked me if I remembered how mean Josh’s laugh was. I didn’t remember that. I didn’t respond.
“You don’t know anything yet,” he said.
—
I think we all became quieter, though that seems impossible. It’s not that we spoke less, or softly, but, still, I remember a hush.
In the years that I lived with him after Josh died, my father watched at least part of every Yankees game played. He sat on his couch, ate grapes, and watched. My mother walked past every few innings, smiled at him or asked the score when she didn’t really care. Sometimes, if it was close at the end of a game, he’d tell her that and she’d sit for a few minutes before touching his shoulder and moving on.
Mostly he was alone if I wasn’t with him, so I was with him a lot.
These were moments when I saw Josh, when I thought his name. His absence was heavy as my father and I watched large men dressed as boys play in the dirt. We sat close, spoke in grunts, cheered for the kind of heroes who always listened to lessons from hard fathers as they succeeded in a game marked by clean, white lines.
On weekend nights, I walked past him on my way out and stopped to look in. I remember it—many nights distilled into just one. A room lit only by a television, his outline half in shadow, half glowing, a reflected image of Derek Jeter’s face shimmering on his cheek.
I paused. My plans were to meet friends on a dark street to smoke a poorly rolled joint and talk about being stoned. And then there would be a party. And maybe there I would kiss somebody, and she would rub me over denim, though probably not. And then I would walk home late, chewing gum, looking up at streetlights like buoys in black water. My father saw me and made a sound. I saw his hands and the things that they did without him noticing. His palms turned up in a silent question as he leaned toward me.
“You going?” he asked. “It’s tied still, no score.”
The TV light was a wave breaking. I went to sit next to him. I put my legs up on his knees. He put his hand on my ankle. Everything was quiet and safe and still and heavy. Those were the words that I felt most, that best described growing up after Josh overdosed, after his heart slowed and then broke, after it exploded with the blood it could no longer move.
“I wasn’t going to leave for a while,” I said.
My father smiled and turned the volume up on the TV.
He wasn’t thinking about me. I knew that. But I was there. I wondered if Josh ever sat still and silent like this. I wondered what stillness felt like for him. If it felt like effort. Years later, I would read a poem he wrote with blue pen on yellow paper, and I would picture him on our father’s couch, momentarily still, his fists clenched. But I hadn’t read it then, and his absence, like always, settled into the quiet.
[NOTEBOOK, MAY 1994, “MOTHER’S DAY DINNER”]:
It is strange when the pain is gone. Or maybe I’m just acclimated. The heavy fires have dissipated and smoke remains. Smoke—still terrible—but not the same magnitude of the former. On this day, a heavy ache. A sadness pulls down my psyche. A willingness to live here, but a yearning for another reality. Or is it? A drink and a nap hid it again. Deep down to dwell in the bowels, only to be synthesized by the love of strength and of power.
—
Time passes, nearly a decade since the death.
Our lives develop, an aging montage.
Dave marries. There is a reception at a restaurant near City Hall. Then he gets a separation and gives up custody of the cats. Beth decides to tattoo her eyelids to save time applying makeup in the morning. She never regrets the decision. My father ages gracefully. He sits in the dark less. He speed walks for exercise and counts his calories. He meditates in his desk chair every evening with all the phones silenced, and claims to be a far less angry person. I grow up. I am tall and thick, and I sport a patchy beard that’s mostly on my neck. I am as old as Josh was in my early memories of him. When I’m told that I look a little like him now, I know it’s a lie but I try to believe it. I’ve taken some of his old jackets—the grungy flannel, the studded punk leather. Sometimes I wear them in front of the mirror and attempt a sneer. My girlfriend, Sofia, watches me when I do this and she laughs. She calls me a poseur, but she says it gently. She knows when I’m trying too hard to be what I’m not. We are in love.
I’m a writer now, self-identified. Really, I intern and sometimes freelance for bad pay. I make a point of walking around with a reporter’s notepad in my back pocket, and I like to hit Play at random moments on the digital recorders I fill up, just to get the rush of hearing my voice asking a question, another’s answering me. Mine is a simpleminded, mission-driven, bleeding-heart kind of reporting. I interview people I deem sad or underserved. I valorize a local graffiti artist, triumph any and all historic preservation, generally mourn development. I stay up all night trying to talk to transgender prostitutes who work along the Hudson River, making vague promises to destigmatize them. I report on one, named Sweet Chocolate, with the cloying assertion that “standing in the solitary glow of a streetlamp, she
could have passed for a schoolteacher.”
A bad summer batch of heroin leads to a spike in overdoses, and I get sent to write an article about the junkies dying in Tompkins Square Park. I breathe through my mouth and remind myself that I’m heroic, and I go to the patch of asphalt where the crusties camp, asking timid questions. They invite me to sit with them. I get a little obsessed. After the article runs, I keep showing up in the park collecting quotes. There’s a freelance photographer at the local weekly, a plainclothes Quaker do-gooder who has noticed my grim sincerity and has taken a liking to me. Together we go to the park, bring offerings of pizza, and gently push the victims for their stories. The leader of the group, a guy named Jewels, is as old as Josh would be, has shot up for twenty years, and carries himself, deservedly, like a veteran of a never-ending war. I like him. I ask him a lot of questions. He gives me his email address and so I send him even more questions, feel a visceral rush every time I open my in-box to his chest-puffed, all-caps answers.
I AIN’T GONNA APOLOGIZE FOR ANY MOTHERFUCKING THING THAT I DO.
When my subjects ask me why I care, I tell them about Josh and watch their faces soften. They are kind to me for loving someone like them, is what I think, which is awfully paternalistic and probably not true, but feels great. I say his name and ask if they remember him, ask if he ever hung around the park and if they ever shared. Jewels is the only one old enough to remember that far back, but he doesn’t remember much.
—
On a July Saturday, I leave whatever story I’m chasing and stand with my family on the patch of grass next to Josh’s grave. We have the usual conversation. We talk about societal lack of compassion, the pains of the Giuliani era, and all those second-time offenders who got turned away from public methadone clinics. Et cetera, et cetera. We blame until it’s time to get quiet and mourn.