by Lucas Mann
Dave remembers the fake prescriptions they used to write, the pad that Josh stole from an old friend’s divorced doctor dad. He remembers the closest they ever were in their lives, those frantic hours spent practicing signatures that were not their own, taking turns hitting different pharmacies so as not to be recognized.
What Dave doesn’t remember is the exact moment when the trajectory of his usage veered off Josh’s course. Moments like this are always imperceptible. Dave felt fear, the way you’re supposed to, stopped hitting pharmacies, and slowed the habit. Josh sped everything up, packed his apartment with pills that were all quickly used or sold, rushed to replenish. Then there was that night when Josh came through the door, breathing hard, saying that a pharmacist recognized him even under the unseasonable winter coat and pulled-down cap, called him a fiend, and then called the cops as he sprinted out into the street.
“Jesus, how often are you doing this?” Dave asked.
Josh said, “Just shut the fuck up.” And then, quickly, “Listen, do you have anything?” So much gentler than Dave had ever heard him.
Dave remembers all the nights when he couldn’t force himself to leave. Josh would say stay, and so he did every time, watching and breathing until it was too late to stumble to the subway and return home.
Dave remembers willing himself to fall asleep on the couch, jeans still on, forcing his eyes to stay closed. Josh fell asleep first and Dave fell asleep frightened, the way it always had been and always was, like they were back in Sheepshead Bay as little boys, Josh lording on the top bunk.
And now it’s needles. Josh pulls a bag out of his pocket, chunky powder the color of dirty snow. Dave doesn’t want to stay to watch.
“Josh, I can’t just sit with this,” he says. “This is bullshit. What do you want me to do with this information? I can’t forget it.”
Josh waves his hand and calls his brother a drama queen. Dave gets mad, says, “Fuck you,” and leaves. Josh doesn’t say anything to stop him.
Dave walks to the pay phone on Lexington Avenue and roots around for a quarter. It smells like piss in the phone booth. Everything smells like piss all over this city, and Dave vows to leave and go somewhere green where nobody he knows has ever been. He finds a quarter. He holds the receiver to his ear, determined to share the burden of knowing what Josh is. He tries to think of who to call and what the person on the other end of the line might do, and there is nobody, there is nothing. He hangs up.
—
The last time Dave visits, the apartment stinks of sweat. The windows are closed and the air-conditioning unit is shut off. Dave looks over at it with longing.
Josh sees him looking.
He says, “No, no air.”
He can’t get warm.
“It’s ninety degrees in here,” Dave says, and Josh doesn’t bother to disagree.
Josh lies along the couch, sweated black T-shirt molding to leather until couch and shirt are indistinguishable. How old is that couch? Dave can’t think of Josh not on it anymore. Josh walking in the neighborhood, Josh standing in the kitchen making eggs—these are unbelievable images, fables. Dave’s memory is already altered. It’s like a Beckett play, he thinks, just a whole lot of scenes of two brothers in a barren wasteland with one couch, unexplained and never dragged offstage. Dave thinks of all the bodily fluids that Josh is potentially lying in—come and spilled blood, the runoff of satisfied vaginas if any of his stories are true, snake piss if snakes do, in fact, piss. Everything that he once celebrated rendered sticky and unwashable.
The image pairs well with the thrilling weakness of his brother’s pose. Josh is lying down because he can’t manage anything else. If Dave wanted to, if he was mean enough for it, he could stand above his brother and rain down on his face with fists, leave imprints of his knuckles on Josh’s cheek, a long overdue payback for every day of their childhood. But he doesn’t do that. Bullies leave you forever unsatisfied. You fear them and hate them and wait for retribution, and then the moment they lose their power they’re too pitiful to treat the way they treated you.
Josh’s belly button peaks out from under his shirt, and it looks like a sad mouth. Dave stares at the track marks on both of his brother’s arms, bloody doodles, all the care to cover them in makeup, to pull his sleeves down, gone. He looks away and then is drawn back. He tries to find shapes in the pocks, order, finds nothing.
“I’m quitting,” Josh says. “I’ve decided I’m done with it, so I’m stopping. It was fun, but now it’s over. I just need company, you know. That’s why you’re here.”
Of course. They watch TV together until it’s dark out. Josh has rented The Baby Sitters Club. Dave calls him a creep for this and Josh says, “Shut up, it’s calming, it’s easy.” They let the pretty faces and quick plots and bright green lawns wash over them in the dark. Dave is bored. He stops watching the action and instead watches Josh watching, his face lit only by the screen. There’s his smile, twisted, impish, staring at teenage girls having a water fight on the Fourth of July. The face around his smile is new, bloated and slackened. His breasts quiver as he laughs at the dialogue.
What do you wish for, Brenda?
Best friends, forever.
Dave watches the flab shake. He would have teased him for that when they were boys.
“Don’t look at me like that, fuckstick,” Josh says. The voice, its pitch, its anger, is still the same.
“We should take you somewhere,” Dave says.
What a pointless thing to say. Josh turns over enough to stare right at him. Dave refuses to blink.
“I’m fine,” Josh says. “I’ve got it under control.”
He dozes eventually, or at least he stops talking. Dave turns off the movie and the apartment is silent. This is the first time Dave has ever wanted to hear his brother make more noise. Jump on the pull-up bar, play the keyboard. Type something loudly, then print it. Speak. He says his brother’s name and there’s no response. He says it again. He leans his face close to Josh’s mouth to make sure he’s breathing. He is, and it sounds like a little boy blowing bubbles into chocolate milk. He smells like an old man, like vinegar and birdseed.
Dave stands to leave. He reaches out to touch his brother’s shoulder, wonders why he’s doing it as he does it. Josh doesn’t move when Dave touches him, and Dave wonders if he’ll remember that he was ever here.
—
Dave and I sit close, our knees nearly touching. I can smell bacon and eggs on his breath.
“I want to stop talking,” he says.
“Okay,” I say.
We’re quiet together for what feels like a long time but isn’t. We are never quiet together, never blank like this.
We’re at my parents’ place, and my father is in the kitchen pretending not to listen. As Dave’s marriage has become increasingly irreparable, he’s gone back to sleeping in my childhood bed, wearing my old flannel pajamas. My father has slipped into familiar routines of worry. Worry is muscle memory here. I feel it every time I visit.
When I was too young to know any better, my brothers were indistinguishable. They both dominated my consciousness. They both felt to me to be on the verge of something. They both understood that there were powerful, mysterious experiences to be had beyond that verge, and at night, in my mind, I would tiptoe forward trying to see. Then Josh sickened and died, and the precipice became simple and literal: It was the place from where he fell. Dave backed away, balanced, aged, but still they had been there together. I’m surprised at how jealous I am. I’m jealous now the way I was jealous then, though at this point I should probably know better. I want to feel what they must have been feeling in the early morning hours as they transgressed—a reckless, shared joy. Even when it wasn’t joy, when it was hate, it was visceral—the emotion of potent lives mounting before the downfall, which was the boring part, the part that I got to see up close.
As a boy, I loved the Icarus myth for the subtext that the sensation of flight is maybe worth the fall. It’s s
till the best kind of story there is, written from the aftermath with moralizing regret but full of all the sexy, shimmering details worth remembering, even if just as a warning. See: Milton, Augustine, De Quincey, Frey. Dave got the details, but he doesn’t want them. He doesn’t want to be a part of his brother’s story at all, doesn’t like the implications that story leaves behind, and so we’re stuck on how to remember.
“Look,” I say. “Please just tell me: Was any of this ever fun?”
I have chased my brothers’ transgressions since I was old enough to transgress. The first time I smashed up a Vicodin and snorted it, it was, very consciously, an attempt at inclusion. I want to tell that to Dave now, lingering on every detail. I want him to see my girlfriend at the time, freshman year of college, her long, matted hair not yet in its eventual blond dreadlock form. I want him to see how her mouth hung agape, perma-stoned. And the homemade skirt covered in tube-painted Simon and Garfunkel lyrics that spun around when she hippie-danced.
She hurt herself skiing and was overprescribed. She came to my dorm room after my baseball practice, and we sat in the semi-dark on my bed as she chopped the pills with her student ID card and shuffled the powder around her ironic Hello Kitty makeup mirror. I thought of my brothers when I leaned my face over the mirror and saw myself, pale and fat, sprouting facial hair in awkward tufts on my neck, scars of white lines running across my reflected face. I imagined that Josh was there with me, not round and tufty, but beautiful, blinking back at me. And Dave was there, too. They were both watching. I imagined that we were finally peers, that I finally understood the value of sensation.
I was overreaching. I knew it even then. Because all I felt was tired and a little nauseous. And we would never be peers—one brother was already ash and the other read education policy textbooks, ate stir-fry with his wife, talked to the cats, was in bed by ten. And once the lull of the high started to fade, I returned quickly to my truer nature, to the fear that Josh left me with. I lay awake in bed and told my girlfriend that I worried for her. I was sorry I encouraged her, and it was my responsibility to help her stop. The impulse to do drugs and the impulse to perform half-assed exorcisms were and are equal in me. The result is that lamest of party guests: the casual user who exaggerates how good everything feels and then bugs the cool kids about side effects.
Dave stands and says, “Listen, it wasn’t fun. I’m going to the kitchen, all right? I want food or something. I’m done.”
I say, “Wait.”
There’s more that I want to tell him, a long list of ways that I made up the connections I never experienced. My high school band, how I sang Nirvana covers in the most earnest Cobain impression I could muster. All the rock docs I watched and turned off at the peak of excess, before the predictable final twenty minutes could unfold. The Burroughs books I read as conspicuously as possible, picking crowded places outdoors on sunny days and holding Naked Lunch or Junky up high. I performed these readings. I pretended that I understood the sensibility. That all the meticulous descriptions of bloody needle tips and wet assholes did more than make me blush and laugh. I took the prologue of Junky to heart and imagined it narrated in Josh’s voice—the sneering description of a quiet, privileged upbringing, what he referred to as the props of a safe, comfortable way of life, all the while letting the reader know that there was something else in him, unavoidable.
I want to tell Dave these stories. I want to make him see me and how I’ve tried. I don’t. I’m not sure why, but I hear myself regurgitating an anecdote that I haven’t thought about in years. It’s something safe and rehearsed, involving a bizarre family game of musical chairs on Rosh Hashanah. Josh cracked jokes about my dinosaur underwear; the whole family laughed.
“Do you remember?” I ask when I’m done. “It was funny, remember?”
Dave raises his eyebrows, then lowers them and gives a sad squint. He sighs. What do I want him to say? Why would he remember that? Why would anybody remember that? It probably never happened and even if it did it was an aberration born out of the kind of boredom that only Grandma’s apartment could produce.
He shrugs and I snap at him. I say, “Come on, don’t fucking shrug at me.”
“I despised him,” he snaps back, and suddenly he’s in my face, neck strained, eyes awake.
“I despised him,” he says again. “Not for what he became. I despised what he always was.”
As Dave turns and begins to walk away, I imagine Josh on a black couch in a dark room, smiling a thin, threatening smile, his face in a way I never saw it. It’s the kind of image that Dave has always walked away from, that he’s always wished he didn’t have to know. He’s fleeing again, but then he stops in the doorway. He looks back at me. He returns to initiate a wooden hug, no arms wrapping, just stiff palms beating on backs. Still, a gift.
“Okay, you want to know a nice memory?” he says.
He says it slowly. He begins with, “This is stupid,” but pushes himself into the description of a poem that Josh wrote at thirteen. It got published in the middle school yearbook, Dave tells me, so hundreds of families had it sitting in their homes. And then it was entered in some citywide contest. It didn’t win, but it came close. Our father taped a copy on the fridge; Dave remembers that. It remains the most read thing Josh ever wrote.
“I thought he was so smart,” Dave says. “Really, I did. He was.”
He claps his palms together and rubs them like he can’t get warm. He goes silent and I think he’s finished, but then he recites the poem from memory. I’m surprised by how easily he recalls it, hardly any stumbling. He speaks it with care for the language, with beats where an author would have wanted them, the intended emotion whispering out from the end.
It’s a really nice poem for a thirteen-year-old. For anyone, maybe. It’s honest and it’s sad. I want it to be a clue to something, but I don’t know that it is. And, anyway, definite clues make for bad poetry.
[POEM, SPRING 1980, “LORD FEAR”]:
Behind an iron gate with a steel fence in an iron compound
There lives Lord Fear.
In his eyes is his cold, white stare.
His gun and his shield by his side, a metal sheet protecting his heart—
Lord Fear is frightened of what has never been.
Two months later, I’m at St. Vincent’s hospital on Seventh Avenue because Dave tried to kill himself but then got too scared and managed to hail a cab before passing out. My parents are on vacation, trying to get a flight back home. They called and asked me to be present until they could be. Beth is on her way. I’m alone with him. No, that’s not true. We’re far from alone, but in the crush of the hallway of an overcrowded ER diagnostic ward, we only know each other.
He looks like a Hare Krishna, body robed, head shaved, eyes dulled, and I will myself not to think that. He is writhing. I have never seen a person writhe before, not really, but when I see what he’s doing, I know that’s what writhing is. He’s strapped in, leather buckles pinching the skin on his wrists. A nurse tells me that, maybe half an hour ago, he had screamed that he wasn’t the kind of person who deserved to be treated like this, had sprung off his wheeled cot and sprinted out onto the sidewalk. He was tackled by orderlies halfway down the block, hospital gown ripping, ass out in the wind. So that’s why the straps.
“They fucking shaved my head to mark me as a crazy person,” is the first thing Dave says to me.
I say, “Uh-huh.”
We’re in the middle of a wide hallway. He yells, “Hello?” at anyone in scrubs who passes. They don’t stop moving, on their way to patients who need urgent care, and Dave curses at their backs as they go. I haven’t seen this brother before. Not out in the open like this. I’ve slept next to him and woken to the sounds of his nightmares, but the moment Josh died, Dave’s narrative became one of control and steady redemption. It had to. As I watch him, struggling against his straps, eyes feral, that has never been more clear.
A nurse stops, looks at my face, and says, �
��He’s stable, hon. Just stay with him.”
There are no seats available, so I stand above his cot and lean down. I surprise myself when I reach my hand out to touch his cheek. It feels like muscle memory, but it’s a movement I’ve never made. I stroke the sweat off his stubble and I tell him he’s safe.
He says, This sucks, over and over again, and when I keep rubbing his cheek and telling him it’s okay, he switches to saying he’s cold, it’s so cold in here. There’s a little blanket that he’s kicked to the foot of the cot. I pick it up and try to cover him with it. It feels good to care for him, but then it hurts and my fingers keep losing grip on the blanket and I can barely keep his legs warm. I tell him that I don’t want him to die. I think I actually say, “I’d be really upset if you died,” which is ridiculous but feels deeply important to hear out loud. I used to think that if I’d said that to Josh, as bluntly and imploringly as possible, the force of my care would have been enough to combat what had become biological need.
“I don’t want to die,” Dave says. “I mean I did. I wanted to die so fucking bad, but then I got too scared. I was close. Do you know the feeling I’m talking about?”
The safe answer is no, so that’s the one I give. The longer answer would be maybe, and certainly more so now. And also that it seems so easy to do the thing that will kill you because you don’t like feeling how you feel. It never occurred to me how easy it must have been for Josh to die, how much easier, maybe, than all those years he worked to stay alive.