Lord Fear

by Lucas Mann

  Caleb rides the building alone. It seems that every elderly woman in the co-op has picked this exact time to go to the store. They scream and point their crooked old fingers at him and say, Young man, what on earth do you think you’re doing? One lady just starts shrieking, no words. Eventually, Caleb gives in to the reckless hilarity of his situation. He has never felt like this before, unafraid of potential repercussions, immune to the size and the meanness of all the strangers in the world. He begins to laugh. Down and up, as the door opens at each floor, he is still cackling into tape, a screechy sound like a seagull.

  He thinks of Josh. He thinks of him standing in the hallway on the fourteenth floor, laughing until his stomach hurts and he’s gasping for air, falling down and laughing more. They are laughing at the same time, with the same feeling, with the same wildness in their eyes. Caleb is sure of it. He lets himself think that all of this has been an initiation into a way of being beyond boredom. And even if it isn’t all that, it’s still funny, so either way, success. And when finally the door opens back on the fourteenth floor, Josh is there just how Caleb imagined he would be, doubled over, laughter somehow shrill and bellowing all at once. Caleb has predicted this—what a sensation to feel. He has pictured his cousin in his mind and known him well enough for that mental image to conjure truth. Caleb hears his own laughter mix with Josh’s, the tones rounding each other out, and he doesn’t even flinch or yip as Josh yanks the tape off him and his blotched red skin snaps back into place. Caleb is happy, and pain, he thinks, right now and always, loses out to joy.

  Joy and only joy. Joy on loop. Joy like an old cartoon chase where cat and mouse run through the same set the whole time. Joy like a game of free association—hear Josh’s name and blurt out the word; hear the word and blurt out the name.

  Caleb remembers joy.

  —

  “Maybe I’m disappointing you,” he tells me. “But this is where I end.”

  It’s not exactly true. We’ve been talking for a long time, weaving in and out of decades’ worth of stories. He’s told me about a beach scene when Josh swam, naked—I knew it even before Caleb said it—to capsize a day-sailer. Caleb watched from the boat as Josh’s lithe teen body bobbed in and out of black water.

  And there was a lovingly described tableau of Josh inconsolable right after John Lennon died. Caleb watched him as he listened to “Dear Prudence” on his bedroom floor, in awe of the magnitude of his grief, how much music could mean to a person.

  There were assertions. Josh was smart, like crazy smart. In college, he gave Caleb philosophy books to read and Caleb got smarter just trying to do an impression of Josh’s smartness. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kant, all that shit. Josh really got it; Caleb just pretended, mostly.

  He taught himself to play the piano—did I know that already?

  He used to ride Rollerblades around the city as a teenager, hold on to the backs of trucks and go hurtling through rush-hour traffic. Never cared about a crash.

  He had a big penis. Objectively.

  Caleb has told me plenty, but we’ve returned to the first scene each time—how it feels to be young and helpless and taped nude to a chair.

  I like Caleb. He’s smart and has a sneaky, wry sense of humor. He laughs a lot and it’s infectious.

  We’re in a law office, his law office, high above downtown Brooklyn. It’s the end of his workday. There is rush-hour honking outside. Somebody calls somebody else a motherfucker down on the street, and we both hear it. Caleb says, “Might have a new personal injury client in a few minutes,” and we both laugh. Caleb lets his laugh run out after a while, so I do, too. He’s finishing his lunch at dinnertime at his desk. It smells like Russian dressing. He spills a little dressing on his tie, dabs.

  I have been pushing him to remember differently, or more pointedly, with a little variety at least. He’s tired and not interested in what I want.

  He finishes his sandwich, then finishes his Diet Coke, then wipes his fingers on a paper napkin.

  He says, “Look, I don’t think of the addict part of Josh. It’s separate. Whatever he became, that was somebody else. He’s still a god to me.”

  “A god?” I say.

  He says, “Oh, Jesus, it’s not that deep. I remember him how he was.”

  But how was he? That’s what I want to know. What is it that Caleb is so sure about? What’s the recipe here? One part older cousin, one part violence, two parts inappropriate nudity, a sweet dash of kindness at the end, and then shake for the perfect manifestation of a preteen destined for great things? Caleb is looking at me, and underneath his smile I think I see strain—he doesn’t want to say more than he’s said.

  He is physically small. His body would make sense on a child or an old man. Of all the men in his life who dwarfed him, the ones he loved most died, each in some way by his own hand. His youngest uncle killed himself with a bottle of Vicodin after years of taking just the right amount of Vicodin to not die. Joey, his older brother, had a heart attack a couple of years ago after a decade of on-and-off crack abuse. And then Josh. They were all, when Caleb remembers them, as large and beautiful and inevitable as shadows. There were so many things that they did, so many options that they had—smart, good-looking men who were loved, who people expected things from, not with a sense of pressure but a sense of assurance. Born protagonists.

  Caleb has always felt secondary, but he is here. He is talking to me. None of the half men he loved managed that, and I ask him if he resents the fact that they deserted him. If he wanted so badly to be them, didn’t they have a little responsibility to, you know, be? It shouldn’t have been that hard for Josh to stay alive. If he could do anything, how come he couldn’t do this one most basic thing? It’s a rhetorical question, directed as much to me as it is to Caleb. When I hear myself say it, it sounds so hollow and obvious.

  “It’s not like that,” Caleb says. “He just…he could have been a rock star so easily. Some kind of star. The kind of person people look at.”

  “Yeah, but he wasn’t.”

  “Yeah, but he could have been.”

  In almost every memory I have of Josh, he’s wearing a leather jacket. I think I’ve tampered with a good deal of the memories, since many of them are inside or on warm days when everyone else is wearing a T-shirt. Some are of me curled up against his body on the couch, watching old movies, the feel of cold sleeve studs on my cheek.

  When Josh died, I got the jacket. Wherever I’ve moved, it’s hung in the corner of my closet. It has no place in my real life; I favor comfort-fit Banana Republic denim and am not Billy Idol. But I wear it sometimes, always in performance. I wore it on Halloween in high school, when I didn’t have a costume and was scrounging my room for something absurd. I brought it to college and wore it again on Halloween, and then to another costume party, complete with one of those combs made to look like a switchblade. And once to a Brooklyn birthday because the ironic Evite said, “Dress like you’re ready to bash someone’s face in, bro.” And sometimes in the mirror, performing for myself.

  There’s always tension, because in the moment, on me, the jacket is so absurd, but it seems crucial that I retain nostalgia for the idea of it as a talisman of my brother. It covered Josh with metal scales, made photographers stop him on the street, made him smell like a cowboy and a greaser and a poet, and that’s what he was. There was so much artifice to him. He didn’t want to relate; he wanted to be ogled.

  When addicts recover and live, I think part of the appeal of the story is that they’ve been stripped of artifice and they mature as humbled, extra-honest people. Humbling is always nice to observe. They speak quietly, with both nostalgia and remorse, about their past performances. They admit everything and make rueful, self-deprecating jokes that aren’t meant to be laughed at. Josh died mid-performance, when I was still a child, when Caleb still experienced him as one.

  Virginia Woolf described her earliest memories like this: Many bright colours; many distinct sounds; some human beings, caricatur
es; comic; several violent moments of being, always including a circle of the scene which they cut out: and all surrounded by a vast space—that is a rough visual description of childhood.

  For Caleb and me, Josh is the bright color; he is the sound. He is that enormous caricature of what a human might be. He is the violent moment of being. And then there is vast space.

  Woolf’s mother died when she was thirteen.

  I should be able to see her completely undisturbed by later impressions, she writes. But she can’t. She remembers her mother’s voice, her hands, the last exhalations of her laughter, the bracelets she wore and the sound they made when she moved, her beauty and how easy it was to accept that she was beautiful. She remembers quick scenes and bits of dialogue, but so much else is context—wanting it, not having it, adopting others’.

  I see myself as a fish in a stream, she writes. Deflected; held in place; but cannot describe the stream.

  There is too much hubris in this connection, but I do feel the stream, and it is hard to describe as it moves, and that is frustrating. And it’s particularly frustrating when writing about a late-twentieth-century junkie, because, really, what character has been given more context than a Gen X dude who was cool, then dangerously cool, then dead? I’m in a stream polluted with VH1 Behind the Music specials about OD’d hair-metalers and televised interventions for strangers. The first twenty minutes are always the same—pictures of a beautiful child with happy eyes, scrolling under the voice of someone who absolutely cannot believe what happened next. Until every moment of their unaddicted life becomes a childhood memory, neon and unfocused.

  Caleb’s would be an amazing TV voice-over. Short, funny, imagistic, resisting critique. Caleb doesn’t care about the vast space. He isn’t curious about what was there. Why should he be? There is perfection in the simplified image if you trust it. Greatness, a precipice, nothing in between.

  [NOTEBOOK, JUNE 16, 1996, “UNTITLED”]:

  The dream and reality must coexist. And I must deliver. It’s not about what’s on paper or what I play. My reality must be (and virtually is…). By December, I’ll either be pricing mansions on Long Island or I’ll be in a rehab center, then working as a plebian. I must do now. And always.

  Dave is in the uninvestigated space at the edge of Caleb’s memory as Josh duct-tapes him to that desk chair. Dave is looking at his brother and thinking, I should bash your fucking face in, you fat fucking bully. He is looking at how small Caleb is and how big Josh is, and he is seeing torture. He understands. Dave, too, is small, and he, too, endures the whims of the monster. He actually thinks the word monster, because what else could you call Josh? People tell Dave he’s dramatic, the kind of boy to hiss and writhe over a scraped knee, but he’s not being dramatic about this.

  Yes, technically, Dave is complicit in his cousin’s torture. He cannot deny the feeling of his own hands on Caleb’s flesh, cannot unhear the sound of skin yanked by tape. But there is a crucial distinction: Dave has no desire to be doing this. His nature isn’t cruel. His nature is thoughtful, self-aware, the opposite of his older brother, who is so far from understanding the calibrations of how he makes others feel that he might as well be a goldfish swimming into the glass of its tank, over and over, learning nothing.

  The people who only experience Josh for a few hours at a time, once every couple of weeks, can see him as precocious. But what seems precocious in manageable doses takes on a heavy awfulness when you go to sleep feeling it, wake up to it, are unable to live a life that isn’t tainted by it. Dave is the chronicler of the moments that nobody else sees.

  Caleb is in the chair now, strapped in, kicking his legs, and making a sound behind the gag that, amazingly, seems to be a laugh and not a scream. Dave watches his brother smile at what he’s done. His smile is cold and blank. To call it sinister would be giving it too much credit. It’s just teeth, big, white teeth with no connection to any human feeling, any shared experience. Dave watches his brother’s back as he grabs the chair and wheels it down the hall. Dave lingers behind. He imagines the sound of the elevator door closing, then the sound of something snapping, then a crash. He lets himself feel relief.

  Revenge fantasies carry through the years, and now Josh is a teenager and Dave almost is, and nothing has changed except their father moved out so there’s less protection. Josh has just slapped Dave across his face for no reason. Dave was standing with the fridge door open looking for leftovers. Then Josh entered the apartment, walked up to him, smiled his pointless smile, and swung.

  He’s strong. Dave reels and ends up on one knee. Josh leans down.

  “Don’t ever fucking look at me again,” he says. “What makes you think you can look at me?”

  Dave looks at the wall. Of course, something happened in the outside world that led to Dave getting hit. Something has always happened outside Dave’s view that he must then take the brunt of. It has never not been this way. Dave has been attacked in every room of their apartment, at every time of day, alone and in front of company. He’s been punched in the nose, kicked on the ground, choked until it was hard to trust that Josh would stop in time. And Dave has always known why.

  Josh is bad at life. Josh is isolated. Josh walks around by himself for no reason, just loops of Roosevelt Island, going nowhere, building up directionless rage. Dave knows Josh has been in therapy for years, has watched the worried looks on his parents’ faces after returning from a session. He’s seen Josh wail, seen him swaddled by their mother in a way that no child over six should be, as she turned to Dave and said, “He can’t help it.” When Dave is feeling bold, too angry for restraint, he reminds his brother of these things—you have problems.

  Beth heard the slap and now she’s standing in the kitchen doorway.

  She whispers Josh’s name, as though preparing herself to eventually say it louder. She walks up. Dave sees the bones of her knuckles as she reaches up to rest her hand on Josh’s shoulder.

  “Stop,” she says. It’s a question, not a command.

  Dave sees the back of Josh’s head as he turns to face their mother. He stands up straight, puffs his chest out. Beth shrinks from him like he wants her to. She is backed against the stove, almost resting on the burners. Her raised hand drifts down to rest on her thigh.

  “You’re a stupid bitch,” Josh says to his mother.

  Dave begins to cry and he hates that. He closes his eyes and tells himself to stop crying.

  “You bitch,” Josh says. “You cunt. You can’t tell me what to do, you cunt.”

  Then silence. Dave opens his eyes. Josh has leaned closer, teeth now only inches from the top of his mother’s skull. He waits a beat, lets her helplessness sink in, and then walks to his bedroom.

  Beth is a noiseless crier. She stands in the middle of her kitchen and shakes. From behind, if Dave didn’t know her, he might think that she’s laughing. The silence feels profane, and Beth won’t look at Dave no matter how much he glares. She walks to the sink and begins to wash plates with a bright green sponge. Dave watches her hands move in tight, controlled circles until they disappear into suds. Her head dips into her chest.

  When my father still lived here, he used to lie and say that one day Dave would feel a love for his brother so full and right that it would be impossible to question. You’ll grow up, time will pass, everything will soften, he used to say. You’ll lean on each other.

  Dave doesn’t believe that, because time has already passed. He walks down the hall, doesn’t pick up his feet, lets his socks slide. He passes Josh’s room and stops. The door is open a crack. He hears drumsticks beating on one cymbal with no real rhythm, until it sounds like a rainstorm. He takes a breath and shoves the door open. Josh stops beating the cymbal and says, “What?”

  “You shouldn’t be like that,” Dave says. He’d hoped it would come out deeper.

  Josh raises his eyebrows and says nothing.

  “Why are you like that?” Dave says.

  Josh stands and walks over to his brothe
r. The floor creaks. Dave keeps his eyes on a poster of John Bonham, sticks blurred, tongue out. He expects to be hit again, but he isn’t.

  “You don’t get to know,” Josh says, which is such a stupid, self-important answer, and then he closes the door in Dave’s face.

  Down the hall, Beth has made it to her own bed. Her door is open, too. Dave watches her next. She’s curled up, her face almost on her knees, taking up just one corner of space on the mattress, like she’s trying to make herself even smaller than she already is. Dave still feels the heat from his brother’s fingers on his face. He lifts his own fingers up and swears to himself that he can feel grooves on his skin where Josh hit him, grooves that will never fill or fade. He turns his cheek so that Beth might look up.

  She stares past him. She’s looking for Josh—even if it’s just the sight of his white door closed, knowing that he is on the other side of it. Dave’s face burns fresh. He looks at his mother, rumpled in the middle of this room that feels too big now. His blood is on her bureau from the time Josh chased him in here and shoved him in the back, sent him careering too fast to put his hands up. He spots a bit of it, reddish speckling that would be unnoticeable to anyone who isn’t looking. Her eyes meet his, finally. They are brown and wet. They ask him not to say anything because there is nothing to say. They ask him to let her curl up and worry for her eldest. To let her watch his closed door until finally he opens it and that moment feels like a victory.

  —