by Lucas Mann
“Finish it,” she tells me. I do and she watches.
“You really have his hair,” she says. “Did I tell you that already?”
And then, “I don’t want you to think that I’m weird for caring this much. Do you think that? I mean, it was just a few years that I really knew him, right? We never even kissed or anything.”
I say, “No, it’s nice.” I surprise myself with how fully I mean it.
“I think some people, you care for them more because they need more care,” she says. “That’s not a bad thing, needing care. Or caring.”
When we leave the bar, we walk side by side down a very different part of Flatbush Avenue from the one I live off. I keep my hands in my jacket pockets and say, “Brrr,” and she gives me a little smile. She tells me that her girls like to say brr like that. They like the way it makes their lips feel. Sometimes Lena and her husband and the girls stand in a circle and brr at each other. She says it’s silly but it’s just one of their things. I realize how much I don’t want to know about their things. Josh fades against their things. Their things don’t seem silly at all.
“I think of Josh more now than I did for a long time,” she says. “It’s because I’m a mother. I look at my girls and I think about him. When they make me laugh. I laugh and I look at them and they’re so beautiful but they’re so breakable. Sometimes I leave the room and then I rush back to look at them again just to make sure.”
She stops, embarrassed, eyes down, lips pressed. She shrugs. The wind picks up, and she snatches for her hat to make sure it doesn’t fly off. The skin of our cheeks is pressed back, and our eyes squint at each other, our backs rounded. I put my hand out behind her because it looks like she might fall.
“That was a sweet thing to do,” she says when the gusts calm.
I think I see a rat weaving across the sidewalk, losing itself in the sewer. I think I see another one, or maybe it’s two, burrowing in the slush in a tree pit.
“If anything makes sense about the overdose, it’s that he was alone,” she says. “Underneath it all, he was too tender to be left like that. I think about how that must have felt for him. Nobody touching him or hearing him or anything. Doing, well, what he was doing. I hold my girls tighter.”
In the years after Josh’s death, I spent a lot of time trying to read my way to knowing what his high felt like. It started with Nirvana lyrics, but those never made sense. Burroughs came next, and Ginsberg, naturally. Now I look further back to Thomas De Quincey. I found this passage near the beginning of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and when I first read it I didn’t like it:
Eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath; and to the guilty man for one night givest back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure from blood; and to the proud man a brief oblivion for wrongs undress’d and insults unavenged.
I didn’t like the idea of the drug having its own rhetoric. Because I had scattered memories of my brother on the nod, the way he would forget his sentences halfway through, robbing him of language that once came so easily. And I didn’t like the idea of the drug giving anything back, when all we ever talked about was what it had taken from him.
But the passage is in my head now, clear, as Lena describes her breakable little girls, the way they need her assurances to fall asleep. What did Josh want more than whispers that he was okay, no, far better than that? What did he need more than a companion, hands on his face at the bus stop, covering his blemishes? He was already alone, Lena knows. Alone when he looked like a bodybuilder, alone in a rush-hour crowd. Maybe heroin was one kind whisper in an empty room. There is no muchness in that revelation, nothing sexy, just a quiet and obvious truth: People deserve to be held by something.
We get to the subway entrance, and there’s no longer a reason for us to be together. There is rumbling beneath our feet. I’m missing my train.
“I have to go,” Lena says.
She leans her torso in for a hug. She squeezes once and says, “I’m sorry if I sounded stupid. I remember watching him at band practice in high school and him looking really, perfectly happy when he played the song right.”
[NOTEBOOK, JANUARY 23RD, 1991, “NOTES”]:
What really freaks me out is how I “fall from grace” every day. Because the mornings are usually symptom free. Most of the time, it’s lurking in the background. Then the day progresses and I’m totally in it by night. And it’s chronic then. One thing I can do is tell myself not to expect too much all at once. So when I feel good in the morning, that’s when I tell myself that I might (probably will) feel worse by the night. This way, at least I won’t feel frustrated or like I failed (just bad—really bad).
This is some of the earliest writing of Josh’s that I have, not quite his high school self, but still, missives from his unaddicted early twenties. I read looking for something as close to innocence, as far from subterfuge, as possible.
He wrote these words on an early page of a notebook that he decided would contain the story of his emotional life. The rest of the page is dedicated to a super-pouty Morrissey quote, a motif that continues until he begins writing See: Morrissey the God and then simply M.T.G. at the end of many of his paragraphs. Another motif is D.P. It pops up constantly, even on the front cover, written in dark green marker, triple underlined.
He used abbreviations whenever he referred overtly to his depersonalization—the best word a therapist had ever given him for overwhelming anxiety that he couldn’t shake, those moments when he lost control and viewed his own existence through stained glass, frozen, unable to breathe. After a childhood in and out of therapy, starting before there was really a language to put to what he was feeling, he clung to the right term when it was finally given to him. But he didn’t talk about it; I never heard the word out loud. Now, I flip through his pages, and I see D.P. hounding him, and I think of Lena next to him on the bus on those days when he couldn’t bring himself to speak.
He wrote these words right around the time he had his last accidental conversation with her, and I look for a description of that specific shame. He so rarely wrote in specifics, rarely wrote even in scene. Her name appears nowhere. Still, I’m surprised how quickly I find her perspective bleeding through every page, through each admission and plea. She saw him; his words confirm it. He wrote the sentiments that she always wanted him to express to her—how hard a day could be, how much he needed support. How he didn’t want to feel like a failure as he tried to fall asleep, and how easy it is to fail.
These are, I think, words reaching out for a voice to call back, and I imagine Lena on the other end of the line willing him not to hang up until she’s found the right thing to say. She saw him, underneath the beauty that she helped cultivate. She saw him soft and afraid and trying, but that self is soon pushed from his writing, consciously sublimated, as opiates begin to whisper, then to yell, to tell him that he is the opposite of afraid. I still read fear in the subtext, hiding, but the persona changes. A new language takes over.
[LOOSE-LEAF, JUNE 13TH, 1995, “THOUGHTS”]:
I am in my cocoon now. But when I burst forth, I will be a cobra instead of a butterfly. Never married! Fucking! Fuck women, as a race. Fuck them as I did and I do, as vengeance for my teenage years. You pathetic creatures will have to suffer your fate. I will be rich, a public figure, diesel, but these times will remind me never to sell my soul to creatures. Love? Love is hate. What most people refer to as love is for glorious pursuits and ultimate rewards. Love is the juice and the candy. Long live power and its glorious unattainable end! Long live intoxicants! Long live vengeance! Long live misogyny!
I want his soft younger writing and the self that came along with it to feel original as I mourn its loss. It isn’t original; I know that. He writes about flirtations gone wrong, about feeling like, What comes next in the grand tragedy of my life? He uses words like azure when he wants to be poetic. He quotes liberally from lyrics that, without a melody to elevate them, are just te
rrible. Even the torture of depersonalization can sometimes seem flat on the page; it was hard to express how awful that felt without reaching for language that rendered it common. Still, there is a churning underneath the pleading poetry, and that churning feels real, realer definitely than the soapbox preacher of self-reliance that took over so often after Lena knew him, the one that said he hated women and love, hated anything but strength and sensation. I can hear Lena’s voice now when I read his stoned rage—I see you in there.
She will think of him tonight as she holds her little girls until they fall asleep.
—
Way out at the end of Brooklyn, Josh is five years old, in his mother’s arms, trying to explain.
He is trying to tell her what these moments are when she feels like she loses him, when he loses himself. He settles on a word. He calls them glimpses, as Beth holds him by the shoulders and crouches to his level. She can see what the word means. It’s in his eyes, fear like an iron gate swinging shut, until he’s howling syllables but no words, punching the air. He sees shadows moving toward him, ceilings collapsing. He feels his body like hissing steam. He is outside that body, only able to peer in, not help himself. Beth has to hold him in the kind of wrap-up that lifeguards are taught to use on the drowning.
He looks like he’s drowning. But then, competing with that image, there’s the word, glimpses, and the fact that her five-year-old has the capacity to attach vivid, metaphorical language to his feelings. In the middle of this storm in him, he can stop and articulate. Beth debates telling him that’s a lovely word choice he’s made, but then a small flailing hand catches her ear and all she says is, “Ow, honey, stop please.”
Beth has spent a good portion of her life coaxing boys out of nightmares. She was a leaned-on older sister, then became a mother not long after moving out of her childhood home. She’s always been good at swaddling. But it was easy with her brothers. They woke up from what was so awful.
None of that was real, she could tell them, without lying. You were sleeping, and sleeping doesn’t count. Monsters are for sleeping. This is what’s real. Brooklyn is real. I’m real.
What do you say to a child about a waking nightmare? Josh’s eyes are open; it’s reality that frightens.
It’s noon and already she’s been embarrassed today. The phone rang while she was doing dishes, and the moment she heard that drawn-out nasal hello from Miss Greenberg, kindergarten czar, Beth knew what was wrong.
“What’s wrong?” she said anyway, and Greenberg, voice humid with disdain, said, “Oh, dear, you should probably come take a look for yourself.”
In the classroom, Greenberg trapped Beth and her problem child in the corner by the cubbyholes. Josh vibrated in Beth’s grip. All the other children stared with round eyes, every one of them as angelic as a grape-juice commercial. They seemed to already know to be silent and somber, not to tease, when Josh got like this. They were concerned, and that made the contrast even starker. Josh had been going to therapy for a few months, and Beth hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell any of the other mothers. It felt like that would be extra confirmation for the reports that she was sure these kids were giving as soon as they got home from school—that poor boy was at it again.
“Honey, stop,” she told him, as quietly as possible.
And then, “Please stop.”
And then, the words ripping from her, “Tell me what I can do for you.”
He howled down the hall of the school, and into the car, and all the way home along Ocean Avenue. He howled in the parking lot, in the lobby, in the elevator, his cries echoing off the metal until Beth felt the sound pulsing behind her eyes.
The moment the apartment door opened he ran away from her. She found him in his bedroom, just a lump under his covers, finally quieting. He pushed his sheet until it slid off him, and there was his face, eyes scrunched tight. He stood up to run again, and that’s when she got him by the shoulders, crouched to his level, asked him to explain, please explain.
Now she sits outside his room and waits for him to get hungry and emerge. After finding the right word, after giving her glimpses, he shut off. He’s offered her no more explanation or affection, or even acknowledgment. She hears him breathing in there. She thinks of all the things she’s done wrong: She crashed the car once on the West Side Highway when she was pregnant and has always worried that she broke him inside her. She ignored him when he cried as a colicky baby, let him exhaust himself because she once read something about self-soothing.
“I’m sorry,” she calls into the bedroom.
He says nothing back.
“It’s my fault,” she says. “Whatever you’re feeling is my fault. I’m sorry.”
Still, he says nothing. She can’t see him and she can barely hear him, but he looms. He expands; he fills the hallway. He is all around her. How can she not think about her son, who she made this way?
—
He never stops looming.
On the deck, in the backyard of a house in Rockland County—cedar-shingled, two-car garage, hedges bought full-grown—he looms. My father’s business partner lives here, and when the family visits, the countryness of the place is still a novelty to Beth. They sit in a circle and talk about the countryness—trees, yes, look at all of them.
The partner and his wife have sons, too, around the same age, and so all the sons are expected to play with one another among the trees, that most basic social arithmetic. It’s the companion equation to that of young Jewish fathers, who grew up with nothing, pointing at lot lines and planning all the things they will one day own. And young mothers cutting watermelon slices, saying nothing about themselves. Beth has already been shown the kitchen again, agreed again that such counter space is impossible to find in the city.
The four boys are running, and Beth sees Dave fall, coltish legs folding over a tree root like a wooden puppet suddenly abandoned by its master. She makes a little involuntary oh noise and takes a step toward her son, but before the worry can even peak, he’s up, running to catch the others, pretending to fall again to make them laugh.
She calls to him anyway, at his back, “Honey, are you okay?”
He doesn’t hear her and the words settle into the lawn. The other mother smiles at her, recognizing the impulse to worry for no reason. All of this, Dave’s fall, his rise, the understanding smile of mutual motherhood, is to be expected. Beth knows that. It’s relieving, or at least it’s supposed to be, the notion that every role here is preordained. She is meant to over-worry and her son is meant to defy her fears. But Beth likes to worry, and this is where Josh does his looming.
A minute after Dave runs away from her calls, Josh materializes behind Beth’s chair. She doesn’t have to turn around to see him. She feels him linger. He’s already nearly as tall as she is, taller now that she’s sitting. He casts a shadow on her torso. Nothing needs to be said. A scene that was normal has been made not. There were four boys, feet clomping, and four parents, stationary, and Josh has made the numbers uneven, crowding in on the adults, already at the fraying edge of what should be a limitless tolerance for play.
My father is mid-sentence. He is always mid-sentence. He’s talking about a movie, one that he swears they saw together, but Beth can’t remember it. He’s making loud and certain statements about this movie. He’s saying something about how one cannot really understand this movie until one understands its influences. Beth must time her interjections. His words are like fan blades, and she is a little girl trying to stick her finger in the fan, pull it out before she feels a sting.
She says his name once, a whisper. Then once louder. Then almost a yell.
He doesn’t turn his head toward her or their son still lurking. Only his eyes move, and they stab at Beth—Could we please not have any fucking embarrassment? Just for an afternoon. Please?
Beth pulls her eyes like a hitchhiker’s thumb. We need to leave. He needs to leave. He has been trying so hard for you to behave like he’s having fun.
A full and vicious fight happens without any words or movements. Beth wants my father to look at their son. He won’t. She is a nag. He is an asshole. Josh is fine. Josh is breaking. Beth looks down at her boy, now so close that he could rest his chin on her lap if he wanted to. He looks up at her. He is saying please, again and again. He is always saying please, though it’s a word he never speaks out loud. A silent word keeps her awake into the early morning just in case, gives her a sense of purpose stronger than anything she’s ever known.
“Fine,” my father says out loud. And then to the hosts, “We’re going. Apparently it’s time to go.”
That night my father sleeps, sunburned and snoring, and Beth watches him until it becomes clear that he will not open his eyes. Then she walks down the hall to Josh’s room, past family photos that show no detail in the dark. She finds Josh awake, sitting up, feet tapping on the floor. He sees her looking through the doorway and stands. She begins to say something that might come out like an apology or at least an excuse for him—It was so hot out there today; I think that wore us all down—but all she manages is a short, wordless noise as Josh grabs a picture frame off his wall and holds it high above his head. He waits for her to say, “Don’t,” and then as soon as she does he throws it down with all his strength.
The smash isn’t as loud as she expected. Shards of glass plink across the floor. Josh gives his greatest defender a defiant look. Beth goes to find a dustpan. She returns to kneel beneath him, ignoring the sting on her bare knees. She’s done this before. The littlest shards catch in broom bristles, so she uses her cupped hand to scoop. She stretches for each sharp fragment. She won’t let him cut his foot and bleed in the mess he made.
—
Years later, there’s a drum set sitting on the same patch of floor where she once cleaned broken glass. It’s not brand-new anymore, but Josh cares for it, and it’s still cellophane-shiny. Josh is on the stool that came with the drum set, and he’s smiling a full, real, mesmerizing smile.