Lord Fear

by Lucas Mann

  We are Roth’s grievers again, the way we are every year on his birthday. We are stiff with responsibility. Nobody wants to be the first to ask when we can leave or why, in the grander sense, we keep coming.

  The registering once more of the fact of death that overwhelms everything, is how Roth put it. Yes, that’s right.

  There are six of us. Sofia is part of the group for the first time, which feels significant in a way that I’m embarrassed to think about, this reveal being the greatest intimacy I can offer. Dave’s ex-wife went through the same process at the beginning. We stand in a sticky semicircle, and Beth passes around a tissue packet so that everyone is prepared for crying time. My father looks down at his son’s headstone pressed flush against his mother’s, does not comment on the bad arithmetic of the image.

  I turn and admire the scope of this place, a cemetery so large that it has named streets within it, maps delineating neighborhoods by the front gate. I try to quantify, the way I always do, how many headstones I can count before my eyes cross on themselves, and I imagine the same image, a mouth of shark’s teeth that have punctured flesh. This is just the Jewish cemetery in a town that is mostly cemeteries. The Catholic cemetery that we mock each year, with its plastic roses and giant marble crucifix headstones, is across the road, its ostentation looming on our horizon.

  We stand for ten minutes, maybe. It’s hot.

  Then my father says, “He did not deserve this.”

  We all concur. No he didn’t, nope, not at all, each of us tripping over one another to say it, even Sofia, who never met him, who has no idea what he did or didn’t deserve, agreeing with perfect confidence. Then there’s a pause.

  I think this is where the story begins again for me. What I mean is that this is the moment when I decide to dig. Something infinitesimal changes in the way I grieve. Grief becomes, just for an instant, not enough. I hear myself saying that he didn’t deserve to die, and I realize that this is all I know for sure about him, or all that I think I know. I have a nasty suspicion that my sadness is born from only this fact, and the vagueness of the platitude is heightened by the shark’s-teeth headstones, rows and rows of deaths that should all be mourned that way, and are by somebody, by everybody. Nobody deserved it. It goes unsaid for the thousands of graves around us. But we’re not grieving so much as defending him, I think, until defending him becomes the only act of remembering. We work to separate a good life, a good man, from a bad death. Once, he was young and sober and beautiful. He was pure then, and innocent, and just a regular guy, or maybe something better, and he definitely didn’t deserve what came next.

  “I’m losing his voice,” my father says. “I can’t hear him.”

  We all listen to the wind for a while, hissing through trees, making no noise at all as it slices between the headstones. I want thunder, but it’s a clear day, a day of parched, silent sun. There is sweat running down the backs of my knees, and I reach down to scratch. Dave tries to impersonate his brother. That’s not it, my father tells him, and Dave gets defensive, says it’s pretty fucking close. Josh always sounded like he was going to cry on the phone; we all agree about that. You always had to ask, Are you okay? Then he’d get annoyed and say, Yeah, what the hell are you talking about? We laugh at that until the laugh dies out. “He sounded like Andre Agassi,” my father says, and Beth says, “Who’s that?” “A tennis player,” he tells her, and she shrugs.

  As we walk back to the car, Dave tells me that he has a tape of Josh’s voice. It’s a fake talk show that Josh used to record as a teenager, with himself as a Johnny Carson figure, Philip Goodman, the future funeral emcee, as his guest. Josh would write these long scripts, lists of questions. When Philip came over, Josh would put the tape recorder on before he even got his coat off. The tape has been sitting in Dave’s desk, nestled into piles of pennies and bent index cards.

  “You don’t want it?” I ask.

  “No,” Dave says. “And don’t get your hopes up. It’s sort of pointless. I just figured you’d want it because you weren’t there. And it seems you like to listen.”

  —

  I take the tape home and put it in an old Walkman. I stare at it for a few days, and finally, alone, I sit down and hit Play. His voice sounds like I remember it, but that sound is disappointing, just a voice. I remember the sound, but I remember no thought or feeling to attach to it. I pause, wait, then start again. This time I go through the only motions I know how to go through. Somebody is real, true, verifiable, if they speak into a machine and then you write their words. I’ve been taught this rule. He was real. He spoke, it was audible, and I want to prove that to myself, even though I shouldn’t have to.

  Dutifully, mechanically, I transcribe him.

  [CASSETTE TAPE, UNDATED, “THE JOSH SHOW, VOL. 1”]:

  [Static. A click.]

  Okay, it’s back on.

  [Sigh]

  Great.

  Welcome to The Josh Show. Are you happy to be here?

  [Pause]

  Okay, hey, Phil, I have a question. Do you like rubbing clitori?

  [Giggling, from Dave in the background; no answer]

  Phil, Phil, Phil, can I ask you a serious question now?

  [Sigh]

  I dunno, Josh, can you?

  Do you like doody pie?

  Come on, Josh, what kinda questions are you asking me?

  [More giggling]

  Okay, okay, okay, Phil, serious question. What do you think of Toco Lewis?

  What do I think of Toco Lewis? Who’s Toco Lewis?

  Oh, he goes to my school. So, do you ever eat titty?

  [Unintelligible, frustrated exclamation]

  How often do you wank? What does your dick cheese smell like? Do you eat dick cheese? How many pubes do you have, Phil?

  3,000, Josh.

  3,000? You counted? How many are you gonna have by the time you die?

  3,001.

  Okay, okay, okay, okay, Phil, can I ask you a serious question now?

  No, Josh, clearly you—

  Do you like to eat titty?

  All right, interview’s over. Dave, turn the thing off.

  Dave, if you touch it, I’ll fucking kill you. Phil, Phil, Phil, come on, your readers want to know. Phil, please. A serious question. Do you like pussy juice?

  [Sound of chairs moving]

  Phil, Phil, wait, hey, Phil. When was the last time you rubbed clit?

  The last time you asked me, so like a year ago.

  Wow, so that’s a long time. What did it smell like?

  Like cod, Josh.

  Or haddock, what about haddock? That’s a nice fish. Did the clit smell like haddock?

  Josh, when was the last time you rubbed clit?

  I never rubbed clit.

  So instead of talking to me, why don’t you go rub some?

  [Pause, breathing]

  Phil, Phil, Phil. Did the clit smell like haddock?

  [Click]

  It’s tough to find nobility in the raw data, but I’m willing to try.

  There is more on the tape, a few sessions’ worth. I keep listening. I transcribe it all. Every page looks the same.

  I try to remember something, a moment like from the tape—Josh’s voice and laughter, me present this time. But memory is a hard thing to force, and, as usual, the memory I find of him centers on his absence, on the imagined. Instead of his voice, I remember The Lord of the Rings because the first time my father tried to explain Josh to me, he did so with a fantasy. I read the books when I was ten, eleven maybe, right when I started seeing Josh less. I was an easily frightened kid, and I couldn’t sleep when I got to the Gollum passages. I imagined him hissing to me, Precious, a cold, gray hand snaking out from under my bed. I fled my room and found my father in the kitchen eating a banana. I told him I was scared of monsters that wanted one thing so intensely, monsters with sallow skin and no personality beyond the want, skulking around my closet. He paused, put a hand on my head, told me he had something important to say.
The connection was an easy one for him to make—when a hobbit ceases to be a hobbit and becomes a creature that nobody can really know, when an addict ceases to be the person that you loved or maybe is still that person somewhere, but on the outside, the part you have to interact with, nothing remains.

  It was the first time I learned to look for explanations in characters. My father sat next to me, and his arm was around me, I think. Outside, there was no moon. He spoke of how nothing is Gollum’s fault, or Sméagol’s for that matter—Gollum is fault and Sméagol is helpless. He asked if I understood, and I said I thought so.

  Josh’s voice on tape is not that moonless memory or that wilted character. There are funny bits to what he wrote and spoke. The part about haddock, that was good, the specificity of it. Josh was funny. I remember that, and the haddock line confirms it, at least a little. Also the part about Toco Lewis, how he just says the name like anybody should know who Toco Lewis is. I laughed at that.

  On my last birthday when Josh was alive, he didn’t see me and he didn’t call, and my father, in lieu of giving me a talk on the birds and the bees, handed me a paperback copy of Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. I read the first chapter. Portnoy masturbates in a movie theater, into his sister’s bra after school, into a piece of raw liver. I remember that part the most. I read it in bed and tried to imagine what it would look like. I wondered about the pleasure of it, smooth, raw meat on me, moving at my own direction. I thought for the first time of my father’s lust. I asked him if Portnoy’s childhood was his own. He laughed and said, “Sort of, you?”

  It lent continuity, the grossness of knowing that once my father had the same shrill questions and unfulfilled desires that defined me. We were of the same type. Now, for a moment, I can see Josh as that type, as well, one with only petty shames and many questions to ask. This is an exhilarating semi-fantasy. It feels as though something, a part, has been reclaimed. He moves, briefly, away from a Tolkien brother, all morality tale and inhuman broad strokes. He fades, briefly, into a Roth brother that has to be at least a little bit closer to the truth of him.

  —

  The next night, Sofia and I have dinner with my parents, and when we leave I’m still thinking of Josh’s voice.

  We like walking through the city at night. We walk on quiet blocks, lined with old trees. We pass thick, square buildings and talk about the bones of them, how the beams have lasted for so long with interchangeable people moving in and out. We talk about ourselves as those people. A man moves toward us, leading a schnauzer that prances along the curb, sniffing. We crouch and it stops for us, licks my palm. We tell the man so cute, and he thanks us and looks really proud. He tells me that the dog likes me, that he rarely licks a stranger’s hand, and now I am proud. When the man moves down the block, we talk about owning a dog, and that dog curling at our feet on the hardwood floor of our hypothetical apartment in one of these looming buildings with potted plants on the fire escapes.

  This is a new way to experience New York, the place where I’ve always been a child. Years ago, I spent nights at Josh’s apartment on the East Side, and it felt like the only time I ever really lived here, in this whole city. He lived on the second floor, and we’d crawl out his window together onto the fire escape, watch all the strangers moving beneath us. The scope overwhelmed me, so many people. It helped me to think of every one of them as him. I used to think about him walking, neighborhood to neighborhood, unafraid, the top of his head floating below all the eyes on all the fire escapes in the city.

  Sofia and I stop by the river and listen to it. I tell her about that image of Josh that I used to have, the one from the fire escape. I tell her how everybody used to move like him from a distance, how every face in New York was his until right when they passed by me. She smiles at that.

  The noise of a motor rumbles from the south and then a police boat passes slowly, spotlight reaching out onto black water, looking for someone. I watch the light, and I know that we’ll go home tonight and lie in bed together, windows open for some breeze, music, faint and broken, coming from below. I will put my headphones on and crawl onto our fire escape. I will see the tops of heads moving, and I will think of being a child. I will listen again, grinning as my brother, a child unencumbered, bombards Philip Goodman with his questions. I will wake up wanting more.

  —

  [NOTEBOOK, AUGUST, “MY BANE BECOMES MY POWER”]:

  Those who have had happy childhoods—me not being one of them—are the ones who do not ask larger questions. When you grow up a sickening wretch with CHRONIC anxiety, you develop the means to eschew foolishness.

  [NOTEBOOK, UNDATED, “DREAM NARRATIVES”]:

  When I was a little boy, I was afraid of the dark.

  [NOTEBOOK, UNDATED, “MANIFESTO”]:

  In my childhood, I studied warfare.

  A long time ago, in a bright, over-cluttered apartment, Philip Goodman watches my brother prepare to torture his pet cat. Philip loves all cats, and this one, Wuzzy, is so old and pitiful that he provokes extra care. Philip is angry as he watches. He grips a pillow on the couch until it feels like he’s going to rip the fabric.

  “Hey, come on, quit it,” he says.

  But Josh’s body is already coiled. Wuzzy is sleeping on the TV console, and Josh is watching him inflate and deflate. He’s taken off one shoe, and now he holds it like a rock and assumes a sprinter’s starting crouch, ready. He is smirking under his soft David Cassidy bob.

  Wuzzy apparently does not remember, but this is what always happens when he falls asleep on the TV. Josh likes to hurl things at him. He can’t throw for shit, so usually he misses and the projectile smashes into the wall behind Wuzzy, sending the cat into a panic, screeching. Which is still, Philip thinks, a kind of emotional torture.

  The shoe is a brand-new Adidas, the one every kid wants. The shoe is irritating enough on its own—parents shelling out money for flashy artifice. It’s easy to get frustrated. To think about how, if a kid is shown no limits, only rewards, of course he’s going to use overpriced sneakers to torture creatures that are smaller than him.

  Today, shockingly, Josh’s aim is true. The Adidas flies as though an invisible foot far more coordinated than its owner’s is controlling it. It strikes Wuzzy in the ribs, and Philip watches orange eyes open in cartoonish horror, watches the body fly into the white wall. The cat makes a feeble sound, something between a mew and a real child’s cry, then falls. Josh’s laughter is high-pitched. He runs toward the cat, ready to kick with his now-bare foot, really get some elevation, but Wuzzy is already hurtling himself desperately under the radiator and Josh has to settle for the pleasure of seeing him hide. He lies flat on the floor, and he pokes at his cat’s face to hear the hiss. He is eleven years old, almost twelve.

  Philip explodes.

  “Is this the kind of person you want to be?” he says. He hears his voice rising, feels his neck hot. “You want to be a little shit?”

  He is standing and pointing in Josh’s face.

  The boy stares back at him. He smiles. It’s a hard smile, or at least it wants to be. Philip has the feeling that it’s a practiced smile, something copied from hours watching TV villains with narrow mustaches and getaway choppers and cleavaged Russian mistresses. Josh shrugs. I should smack the shit out of him, Philip thinks. He imagines a pimpled cheek jiggling with the force of his smack.

  Friends often ask Philip why he spends so many afternoons on Roosevelt Island, this quiet, homogenous cluster of middle-class high-rises. Why he is so willing to sit on a creaky floral-print couch babysitting a petulant loser while everyone else is perfectly high, lying in a circle on a carpeted floor in Brooklyn, listening to Zeppelin and drumming on their chests. The answer is complicated. Philip is loyal and he’s known this family for most of his life. He grew up in Midwood, best friends with Beth’s youngest brother, and remembers the feeling of being welcomed into their home, of Beth’s mothering kindness toward him long before she was ever a mother. And he comes to protect Dav
e, too, to stop the bullying for as many afternoons as possible. Dave is a gentle child, and Philip has always felt the call to protect those who need protection.

  What he tells his friends is that this is the right thing to do. Josh is fragile; his parents crave a break. It’s the right thing to do to help. And there is definitely a satisfaction in feeling essential. In hearing about his essentialness, too, like he’s the keystone to a building that would crash into a pile of unrelated stones without him. He can see the strain in Beth’s neck when she tells him sincerely that he’s the only one to get through to Josh. He loves you, he wants to be you, he will listen, he needs you.

  And it’s true. This cat-torturing boy does need.

  A couple of months ago, Philip watched him stamp his rich-kid sneakers and weep, the kind of ugly weeping where your eyes almost close and your mouth twists in on itself like you’re about to puke. Philip stood in the doorway of the apartment. It was wintertime. It was snowing. My father and Beth, after all the awkward silences and the nasty whispers, were going to take a vacation. They were going to salvage things and leave the boys with Philip so that he could provide his own kind of salvaging.

  The phone rang from the airport—all the flights were canceled because of the snow; the parents would be stuck at home. My father went to put his coat away. Beth sat on the couch, turned on the television, and tried hard not to look anyone in the eyes. Philip was silent but relieved, already thinking of a weekend free of forced father-figure bullshit. Dave gave a disappointed shrug and sat down next to his mother, asked for the remote.

  Plans had been changed; everybody would go on living.

  But when Philip looked at Josh, there was darkness. He really thought that word, darkness, a metaphorical shadow on the kid’s face, so apparent that it became visibly real. It felt too big and melodramatic a word to describe a cranky preteen, but what else? He was like an old clock spring, winding tighter, tighter.

  Josh began to howl, a strange mimic of the wind outside as the storm picked up. When he ran out of breath, it seemed like it might be over, but then he gasped and howled again.