by Lucas Mann
Dan asks if I’m the same kind of guy as my brother.
“Not the whole, you know, drug addict part, but just being, you know, one of those people?” he says.
I consider lying, but it doesn’t seem like a believable lie, so I say no.
“Figured,” he says. “Most people aren’t like that. Most people are like me. I got this feeling you were kind of like me.”
This is so simplifying and stupid, yet so simultaneously true, that I can’t get a handle on how to be offended by it. I nod at him.
He asks me things.
Do I have a girlfriend? Yes.
Do I love her? Yes.
Uh-oh. Marriage? Oh, well, I mean, who knows.
“It’s not so bad,” Dan tells me.
He gestures out, maybe to his wife in Queens, but also to everything around him in his universe. He describes his routines, breaks them down in hour chunks—the commute, the job, the mortgage, a kid, something about buying a grill. He speaks as though he is welcoming me into this, each segment of his life.
It’s hard at this empty conference table not to dichotomize real-Dan and remembered-Josh into figureheads—two distinct models for how to grow into a man, with no room for subtlety between them. One did it with slow, unremarkable dedication, plodding progress that was hard for anyone to notice; and one achieved the alternative—he simply didn’t do it at all. That’s how Josh became a myth. Which can be great for a while—me and Dan laughing at the memories, talking about Josh being a crazy bastard with the kind of head-bobbing emphasis reserved for when the phrase crazy bastard is used by the uncrazy. A myth is so much better than a person, but as we repeat the myth again and again, different versions, closely scrutinized, the form doesn’t hold. It’s too inhuman.
My brother, Dan’s friend, has become a series of predictable, if reassuring, patterns in our conversation. Even his death feels expected, a variation of burning out instead of fading away, that old line. I don’t think Dan has ever mourned him, just mythologized. Maybe I’ve done the same.
Dan has to go, he tells me in the middle of another conversation about anal sex that neither of us had. Dinner. It’s four p.m. But he has to get home and then shower. Friends are coming over, his wife’s work friends. It’s one of those dinners that will end up being a whole production. The kind where you almost forget to eat because there’s so much to be done, you know? I say I don’t know, not really, and he says I will.
We stand and shake hands like one of us just sold the other a car.
Josh, or his memory, the guy who felt nothing but freedom and bliss, then death, is the most interesting character either of us has ever known.
I interrupt Dan mid-story, waiting for the elevator. I want to clarify something.
“So, this was about twenty-two or twenty-three?” I say, trying to confirm the timing of one of Dan’s memories.
“Oh, no, it was way more girls than that,” he says.
I start to explain, but stop short.
“With all the stories I’ve got on that fucker, it’s got to be way more,” he says. “I mean, right? And that’s just counting the regular girls, not even the whores. Did you know about that?”
He gives a short wince; then it’s gone. I didn’t know about that. I lie and tell him I did, so he grins.
“I told him, why pay? You can get any girl you want,” Dan says. “And he told me, Hey, it’s cheaper than taking them out to dinner. That’s funny, huh? And pretty true.”
I want to say something combative to give Dan an indication that we’re not in on this last joke together. I want to tell him I don’t believe him, but I’m not sure if that’s true and I’m not sure if it changes anything anyway. Instead, I feed the myth. I hear myself blurting out a memory of my own, a last dirty anecdote for us to smirk at.
Josh took me to the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square once. It was me and him and an Indian woman who made me blush every time she looked at me. And she brought along her little brother, too, who was my age. I think we were nine.
The boy and I became friends for the evening, staring with one unified gaze. We were old enough to want to know what our siblings did to each other. We were waiting for something to happen. Josh’s knuckles brushed her arm. She laughed. He smiled. I liked the accent that she spoke with, how her mouth formed so wide and circular around her vowels when she responded to him, like everything Josh said was a surprise. There was a shining stud in her left nostril, and I kept looking at it, thinking how much it must hurt to pierce your face.
Josh beat out a rhythm on our table, and I watched the ice in my Coke bob in the current he created. He whispered something to her that made her smile. Her teeth were white like they’d been painted.
They left us. Josh’s hand found her back pocket as they walked, and I watched the outline of his fingers in tight denim. My new friend and I giggled.
Time was slow for us. We waited for our siblings until we couldn’t wait anymore. The boy raised his eyebrows at me, thick eyebrows on a small face. I remember the hot blush on my cheeks as we crept toward the bathrooms, past signed head shots and V-shaped guitars, past a waitress crouching carefully in a miniskirt to tie her shoes.
They were in the handicapped bathroom. We didn’t see but we heard.
It was breath, mostly. Her exhalations were like strands of music, reaching us under the crack of the closed door. There was something like a growl from Josh. I wondered if I would ever make such a noise, what it would take to produce it.
Oh shit, oh shit, in his voice, and I held my hand over my mouth to shove laughter back in. Her voice wasn’t profane, just overwhelmed. Oh, oh, oh, oh.
“That’s awesome,” Dan says when I’m done. “I bet I could figure out who that girl was for you. No, sorry, not now. Dinner. Sorry. Man, I could do this all day.”
He shrugs and offers me another Pepsi for the road, but I say no, too much sugar. I hold my gut, jiggle it. He says, Don’t I know it? Then there’s another handshake, the last one, and the vague promise of doing this again over beers. Dan is smiling as the elevator door closes.
—
Josh never wrote his erotic legends. He never described a flirtation, a date, an orgasm. He never described the feeling of standing on a stage or the buzz of a party where he was the star. The tone of my talk with Dan, the details he gave me—it all fades almost instantly against what Josh left behind. He deemed nothing Dan remembers worth recording. There are women’s names, yes, references to rage and regret, the ways that they hurt him and the ways he planned to hurt them back. But he never recorded the routine glory that he described to his friend. Either it wasn’t important or he was ashamed or he was lying.
The closest thing I find to sex writing is a poem that’s more about intimacy, that thing that Dan and I never really got to see:
[POEM, UNDATED, “THE LITTLE GIRL”]:
Little girl
Who looked up at me
Knowing nothing.
Oh underdog triumph
I am you! I swim in you,
Never wanting to break free of your awkwardness.
I live my life as the hunter,
But I am also hunted.
Like you little girl.
Like you.
One day we’ll mesh.
Not prosaic lust
But real love.
Love is understanding.
Love is doing back to you.
Because you will never leave.
Feel me, what little there really is.
I will be there as the hermit, as the warrior.
And you will teach me magnificence.
—
When Josh died, I focused my thoughts on his snake. Because when I thought of him, I thought of danger and fear and power and appetite and joy. I thought of those things all swirled together, impossible to distinguish, and it was too much, too fraught, so I shut off the complexities and just remembered the snake.
The snake was named Percy. Percy was a boa constrictor and P
ercy was eight feet long and Percy could kill a grown man in four minutes. I remembered the frantic questions in my head as a little boy—I’m not even a grown man, so how fast could Percy kill me? I remembered being seven, eight maybe, when Josh held up a tube of toothpaste with no toothpaste left in it. He said that’s what your body would look like if Percy held you tight. I thought of the pressure making my head pop open, my mouth a hinge. I thought of my intestines squirting out, a green-and-white spearmint froth.
There were little scenes that I focused on in memory. Not even scenes so much as images that would reoccur, always in Josh’s apartment, just the two of us and Percy. Josh kept the lights low so Percy could sneak up on you. One time, Percy wrapped himself around the pull-up bar by the front door. He dropped his face down in front of mine and his eyes were gray, I think. I screamed and Josh laughed and Percy slid onto him, curled himself around my brother’s shoulders.
Josh looked happy with the snake on him, so I was happy, too. I pet the snake’s scales and we went to watch TV.
It was Percy’s fault when I wasn’t allowed back into Josh’s apartment. There was a specific moment that I used most to explain his steady removal from my life. My mother came to pick me up from Josh’s, and Percy was wrapped two times around my waist. We’d been watching a Rambo movie and taking turns holding the snake, pretending he was a belt of ammunition. My mother walked in and found me splaying my legs, holding one hand against my hip like an action figure, one hand gripping Percy. I laughed and Josh laughed, but she didn’t, and I thought maybe that was because Percy was so tight on me and she could see my soft stomach indent every time he breathed.
Josh’s speech was slow and slurred, which I knew, but didn’t really know.
“Are you scared?” he asked me.
I said no, of course.
“Good, you shouldn’t be scared of things,” he said to me.
“See, he’s not scared,” he said to my mother.
She reached out for my hand, and he threw his arm heavy across my shoulders, and Percy kept his grip around my stomach.
Josh said, “We’re just two guys and a snake,” and I laughed at that. My mother did not.
I got an iguana for my ninth birthday because I wanted something cold and prehistoric, like what Josh had. My iguana was a compromise. He had no teeth. He was safe and mostly I hated him. We fed him banana slices and he couldn’t hold them in his mouth. He jerked his head around, epileptic. He ran in place on polished wood floors because he couldn’t get traction. He was useless, but he kept on living, and later, when I wasn’t allowed back into Josh’s apartment, I’d watch my iguana sit perfectly still and I’d pine for the snake.
The last night I slept at Josh’s, we watched Godzilla in the dark. I lay across his chest and his heart beat slow and heavy.
He said, “Look at those little pussies,” and he pointed to the Tokyo citizens screaming in black-and-white on-screen. He pulled his eyes slanty and said, Oh, no, me so scared! So I did, too. We laughed at the Japanese for being so frightened of a monster, as Percy slid silently across the TV console. Josh fell asleep, and I kept my head on his chest.
In the morning, we dangled white mice over Percy’s tank. Josh dropped his in, and it paced in panicked circles until it seemed to resign itself to what was coming and leaned its body against the glass to wait. He dared me to drop mine in, so I did, and then yanked my hand back as though there would be an instant repercussion. We didn’t watch the squeezing or the eating, although in the story I would tell at school, the squeezing was brutal and awesome, little mouse eyes popping out and sticking to the glass. Percy was the size of a fire-truck hose in my story, and he had fangs.
When I was eleven, we left my iguana with Josh and went away on vacation. The iguana never came home. The claim was natural causes, but I wasn’t fooled. The iguana had gone to a place that was far too great for him to survive; I should have anticipated this. Josh called and the phone was passed to me. He said he wished there was something he could have done; the little guy just stopped breathing in the middle of the night. It had always been a fragile creature, he reminded me. I agreed, yeah, totally, a pitiful thing.
“When you’re sad, listen to ‘Dear Prudence,’ ” he told me, and then he hummed a bit and I liked the sound. “It’s about how Mia Farrow’s sister is too scared to have fun, but she shouldn’t be.”
I wasn’t sure who Mia Farrow was, but I said okay.
My parents treated me with special, restrained care for a week or so because I’d lost my faithful companion, which felt ridiculous and embarrassing. I was talked to gently, but gently never made it better. I wanted to feel the bad things. I wanted to see the body. I imagined the outline of my iguana’s face fossilized, pressing against Percy’s stomach. I imagined blood on leather. I wanted to be worthy of witnessing a casual death, quick and vicious.
I don’t think anybody ever knew what happened to Percy. As the needle became more constant and obvious, Percy seemed of little consequence to my parents when they talked in hushed tones about Josh’s apartment. An eight-foot-long muscle, he was comparably benign, and that made me angry because, hello, there’s a snake, a dinosaur, a man-eater just slithering around the kitchen and everyone wants to whisper about something else? I felt bad for Percy then, his magnitude no longer respected. Sometimes, when Josh was discussed over dinner, I’d interject.
“How’s Percy?” I would ask.
“What?”
“He means the snake.”
“The snake is a snake. The snake is fine.”
Percy stopped being altogether at some point before Josh did. I’m pretty sure I just assumed that because he wasn’t mentioned when my father returned from the scene of his son’s death, whispered to my mother that the body was cold. So I figured the paramedics didn’t complain of a monster dropping on them from a pull-up bar when they entered the apartment. I thought of my brother’s home devoid of Percy, his slow slither, his constant, alive threat, and that’s when the grief felt actual.
Percy must have starved for a long time before he finally died because boa constrictors do not die as easily as people do. I thought about that often in the first months post-Josh. When it was just me and my father in the house, nobody talking, I thought about Percy starving and never brought it up. I thought about how Josh must have become tempting to his snake, a year’s worth of nourishment and almost too easy. I thought of Percy curled atop the TV console, watching, hungry. I thought of Josh’s face fossilized against Percy’s scales like a dead iguana, and how massive a lump he would have been inside that body. I let it feel like there was choice, respect even, in that snake’s decision not to eat that man. Josh had tamed him and he remained unafraid for as long as he remained. That was an important thing to think.
I became afraid of everything. I slunk toward extreme self-preservation. I waited like a tourist for the light to change before venturing into the street. Sometimes I stood still and looked both ways until the light changed back. Weekends were frightening, all that time and expectation. I fled from friends and novice parties filled with harmless indiscretion, giving stories about a strict curfew that did not exist. I begged my father to call parent-free apartments and demand, with believable drama, that I return home at once. I liked to sit alone and watch movies. I liked to fall asleep. I got an acoustic guitar and I tried my hand at writing songs the way Josh wrote songs, but all of my songs were about not leaving the house or they were about him, the mystery of the things he did, Percy wrapped around his shoulders in the dark.
There was a tattoo parlor down the street, run by two guys with earrings so big that goldfish lived inside them. They had a Komodo dragon as the store pet. On hot days, they let the dragon sit in a kiddy pool on the sidewalk, and they strolled him up and down the block on a dog’s leash. Sometimes they let me walk the dragon, and I allowed myself that indulgence. I thought of Josh when I felt the looks of passersby as the dragon pulled the leash tight. I reached down to pet its scales, and
I liked the way they felt against my palm.
—
At a dinner party full of my parents’ friends, Sofia is telling a story she heard about a woman and her pet snake. And so of course I’m thinking about Percy and his scales. She’s a good storyteller and she’s reaching the dramatic climax—a vet tells the woman that her snake sleeps next to her like that because he’s sizing her up, seeing if she could fit in him once he unhinges his jaw. The whole time she thought he was bonding, but he was plotting. Dinner party attendees are squealing.
One friend of my mother’s says, “No. No. That did not happen,” which may be true.
I think we got to this story because people were doing the cats-versus-dogs argument and then the idea of which animals really care about you, really connect with you, came up, so somebody started talking about weird pets, the kind that can’t love at all, and then Sofia jumped in with the snake anecdote.
I’m proud of her when she finishes. This is a room full of near strangers for her, and she’s charmed them, which I think is a positive reflection on me. I like hearing her tell stories, but sometimes I feel nervous as she starts them. I look around at whatever group we’re in and worry about the humor missing, until somebody laughs, and then everyone does, and I feel the gentle slackening of relief.
She likes snakes. She has a snake tattoo that curves around her left hip and heads toward her ribs. She got it on her eighteenth birthday. She says she regrets it but I don’t believe her. Once, when an exotic petting zoo set up in a parking lot at our college, she let the carny teach her how to milk viper’s venom. She let him put a boa constrictor around her shoulders. She held her arms out, did a weird Christlike or Britney Spears–like snake pose, and some of our friends took pictures for Facebook. The carny was so impressed he gave a pervy whistle. He said, Man, chicks never do that. I was proud and terrified and then, later, jealous when we lay on her dorm bed and she said there was something cool, like primordial cool, about a man handling a snake. I got flushed and she said stop and I said, “Stop what? I’m not even doing anything.”