Lord Fear

by Lucas Mann

“I want to quit,” he says. “Trust me. Do you trust me that I’m telling the truth?”

  She does.

  “There’s a devil on my shoulder. The drug is the devil. I’m not the devil”—he pauses here because this is a crucial point to get across—“I’m not the drug. But the drug is right there, always. Always.”

  She holds his hands. He lets them go limp as she holds them and they look almost dainty. She has the realization that she might be the only person in the world who gets this close to him anymore, that this closeness is crucial. She wonders about the last time somebody not her looked at him like this, leaning forward, never backing away. Who was that person? When did that person stop leaning in? She tries very hard not to blink because that doesn’t seem right. She looks down at his arms; he’s left them bare today. He lets her see the shallow holes and ruddy irritations that spread like a constellation across his skin.

  She has never been anything but sober, doesn’t understand the mechanics of any type of high, and Josh loves that about her. Often he asks her to remind him of her forever sobriety, always responds with, Amazing, you’re amazing. The holes in his arms make her think of the drug as alive, digging.

  She runs the tip of her thumb across one of the needle tracks. He flinches, but then he lets her.

  “It’s important to me that you believe that I used to not be like this,” he says. “I was crazy strong. Like feel-my-muscles strong. I wrote music. I can play you tapes. I owned this business. I told you that.”

  It’s in Sima’s nature to believe. She tells him, of course, asks him to show her that picture again, the one from when he traveled to India. He’s standing against a graffitied wall, tan and beaming, with his shirt sleeves rolled all the way up to his shoulders, arms clean.

  He thanks her with such force that they both fall silent. Then he decides to shift. She loves this about him, loves this the most maybe, his capacity for self-resurrection right in front of her, with their conversation hardly stalling. He sits up straight and waves his hand in between their faces, erasing what has been there. He says, Hey, like a dare. Hey what? she counters. She lets her torso stiffen along with his.

  “Let’s talk about India,” he says.

  So they do.

  He’s good at talking. He makes words do exactly what he wants them to, like he’s building something and she’s watching. The settings are lush when he describes them, the dirt neon orange, not brown, each person a vivid, almost glowing version of humanity. She’s from there, and it never seemed as remarkable when she lived it.

  He speaks about the past and then skips right to the future. The future is just as tantalizing as the past. Forget the present. The present is dull gray. The devil is heavy on his shoulder in the present. And her shoulders are heavy, too, weighted a little more with each subway ride and ketchup refill and silent dinner. In the present, she has one friend, this man sitting in front of her, talking about what has been and what might be.

  “I’ve told you why India is the most beautiful place in the world, right?” he asks.

  Yes, he has. “Maybe. I don’t think so. Tell me.”

  The second time he went to India, he was alone, he tells her. He just bought a plane ticket and went because he couldn’t stay away from the beauty. He had one backpack with him, that’s it. Every morning he walked through Bombay to the same fruit stand to buy a mango from this tiny kid with an oversized smile. Never has anything tasted better than that mango tasted, and the kid watched him eat and he kept saying, You like? You like? All the children were so sweet. Fundamentally kind, even when they realized he couldn’t give them much beyond high fives. He gave them all high fives. They said, Howdy Partner, like how they thought Americans did, and it made him laugh every time. No other place in the world is kind like that.

  He’s a tangle of words. Sima grins and he stops for a moment to watch her show her teeth. She looks down at her hands and then back up again, at him.

  “We could go,” he says, as she knew he would. “Just buy a ticket. We could go now. Or tomorrow. Do you miss that part of the world? Do you miss home? I’ll take you back.”

  He nods his head, urging her to do the same. She sighs and complies.

  There is, there has to be, an unspoken recognition between them that they will never go to India together. Imagine if they tried. There would be a moment in his apartment when his decision would be simple—leave the drug and instead take India, take Sima, or keep everything the same. Yes, Sima is a believer, but not so much that she thinks she would win. And what of her own life? There’s no leaving and returning on her delicate temporary visa. And even if she could, what would the conversation be in Jackson Heights as she packed? I am going. I have to go. I need to live this moment with this man so I can feel something different. Yes, a man. He is my friend.

  Outside the shop, a taxi’s honk is followed by the sound of a heavy fist beating on the hood. There is yelling.

  “It will be none of this,” Josh says, jerking his thumb toward the noise. “We’ll wake up and we’ll go play with the children. We’ll eat mangoes. Do you remember how they taste?”

  “Yes,” she says. Yes for him. “They taste so sweet like they’re still alive. We should go in May. Do you know they’re juiciest in the spring?”

  Both of their heads are still nodding. Not at the same time, but in sequence. She bobs up as he drops his chin down, like they’re connected, pulling one another forward. He is imagining the mangoes. He is imagining her eating the mangoes, juices running down her neck, tropical sunlight on her black hair. She knows he is. She thinks that his imagination works harder than anyone else’s. She told him that once. She said she thought he did drugs because his imagination was brighter, louder, more constant than any normal person’s. She could tell he liked it when she said that.

  “When we go, maybe it will be what I need to change,” he says. He grabs a sugar packet from the table and shakes it in a rhythm. “I mean, Jesus, there will be beauty everywhere. New experience. Who needs a high then?”

  Sima still doesn’t know exactly why anyone needs a high in the first place.

  “Yes,” she says. “You’ll be better.”

  Josh coughs and she watches every part of his body shake. The layer of fat around him bounces. His head swivels on his neck, a surprised look on his face like he hadn’t realized how long the cough would last or how hard the next breath would be. He gives a shamed smile. Sima doesn’t like to look at him when he doesn’t want her to. She turns and watches two of her coworkers on a cigarette break, spitting heavy globs onto the sidewalk.

  Suddenly, his palm is on her face. It’s not an aggressive move, but, still, a lunge to caress her, his fingertips tugging at the thin hairs on the back of her neck. Soft hands, no calluses, no texture. He wants her. He makes a noise, no words, just a low grunt. She feels his thumb slide down, touch her bottom lip. Nobody has ever done that to her, touched her lip like that. It doesn’t feel right that he’s the one to do it. It’s a present and physical act, his hand snatching, very real and very desperate.

  “No,” she says. She grabs him by the wrist, not hard, just enough for him to feel it.

  She is relieved that he’s gentle when she says no.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “I love you,” she says, surprised at how blunt it sounds, how true it is. “I love you, but this is not us.”

  They exist together only as what they want to be and what they were. That’s the gift that they give each other. Josh looks at Sima, his eyes wet and red. He places his hands, palms down, back on the table.

  “We don’t have to go to India,” he says. “You already know that part of the world. Paris. I can’t believe you’ve never seen Paris. I want to show you Paris.”

  He means it. She is overwhelmed by how much he means it. She asks him what the Seine looks like at night so he has the chance to describe it. He tells her it’s like living inside starlight.

  —

  When he calls late, she
snatches the phone up midway through the first ring so that nobody wakes up. When she whispers hello, he says, I love you, I love you, and that is enough. He’s breathing heavy into the line.

  “I pray for you,” she whispers into the phone.

  It’s true, and why should care be a secret? She wants good things for his soul; that is nothing to hide. And he is speaking slowly, breathing heavily enough to let her know that he is way too high to squabble with her about God. When he’s sober, he likes to ask her what could possibly make her think that there is something strong and good up there, something that cares about us. Then she says, How could it not be so? And he says, Prove it, over and over until he gives up and they both start laughing.

  She hears a happy sigh into the phone, his tongue muffling the sound.

  “I do,” she says. “I pray for you every night.”

  She imagines him with his eyes closed, savoring.

  “You know there are only three people I really love,” he tells her. She waits for him to say it. “I love you because you love me. You forgive me. You, Sima. And my mother. And Luke. I like the way you all look at me.”

  A week earlier, Sima met Josh’s mother. She felt like a teenager then. Josh ushered Beth into the shop, and on her break they sat around a table, Josh saying, Isn’t she pretty? Isn’t she sweet? Beth answering, Yes, yes. She watched Beth squeeze his hand and look at both of them with hope. She even said something like, I can’t wait to see what comes next, and Sima smiled and Josh smiled, and they sat around the table, none of them relenting and giving the true answer: nothing. Josh said he felt surrounded by goodness.

  “I just want to be looked at that way,” he says now. His breathing makes her throat hurt thinking how hard it must be to breathe like that.

  “That’s nice,” Sima says.

  He doesn’t respond. She listens to the weighted silence of him nodding off, finally says his name, gently, like he’s a little boy and it’s morning. He comes back to her, a sharp inhale and then a cough.

  “Hi,” he says. “Hi, I’m here. I’ve been here.”

  “I can’t believe you’ve never been to Paris,” he says, forcing out the final s sound, slurring it.

  “No, Josh, I never have.”

  It’s a while before he talks again.

  “It’s so beautiful,” he says finally. “The lights at night. You’ll love it so much. You’ll see. It will be so…”

  She presses the receiver to her ear, willing him to finish. She wonders what a mind on heroin dreams. She hopes it’s a better dream than her panicked sober dreams, jolts of warning until she wakes up, then instantly forgettable. She hopes that it’s a luscious continuation of his last waking thought, that it’s easy and warm. She tries to see it with him, the two of them in Paris at night. All she knows to imagine is the Eiffel Tower lit up, a snapshot from a package of postcards. She and Josh are together at the base of this image. They have nowhere else to be. They linger. Light shines on her face, and he looks at her, and he smiles, content, until the dial tone and then silence.

  —

  “Have you been to Paris?” she asks me.

  I tell her I have. The first time, I was young, too young to remember much. Josh was there; it was his first time in Paris, too, a trip he told her about many times, six days of basic tourism. It was me, my mother, my father, and Josh in a little apartment that smelled like jam that my parents swapped for.

  “I knew you were there,” she says. “I don’t know why I asked you. I knew that.”

  I try to hide how happy it makes me that she knew. It shouldn’t be such a big deal. I’m still reveling in the fact that I was spoken of, that he said my name to her when he spoke of love. We’re working together here, in our memories. She asks if I remember anything at all from the trip. I do, I say. A little. All I remember is him. I tell her that, and it makes her smile like fingers are pulling her lips back at the edges. She nods, my cue.

  I remember buying a gargoyle in a gift shop, a monkey-man with wings and fangs, baring those fangs, crouched. I remember Josh doing an impression of a gargoyle. We were sitting on stone steps, under a stone building that I only remember as old. He had his leather jacket on, or I made that part up. He was leaning over me, baring his fangs the way gargoyles do it. He was making a hissing noise like a snake, and his lips were stretched so wide that I saw the base of his teeth pushing through his gums. I was laughing.

  I remember sitting in the apartment, scared of the sound the radiator made when we turned the heat on. It was snowing outside, maybe. We were watching the only video available, Who Framed Roger Rabbit dubbed in French. Josh was pretending to be Jessica Rabbit, slinking around the living room, hands caressing his own neck, lips pouted, eyes nearly closed. Bonjour, he said, and I was laughing.

  I remember visiting Jim Morrison’s grave. I stood back and watched. Josh knelt among the flowers and handmade signs, the poems and rain-warped packs of Marlboros. He was crying. I had no idea who Jim Morrison was, but I liked the visuals—the ancient green trees, the once-bright roses lying scattered. When we left, Josh said he wasn’t crying out of sadness. He was, instead, awed by how loved the man had been, how indelible, fresh proof of his worth laid out with each arriving tour bus.

  “Yes,” Sima says when I relay the last memory. “He was going to take me to the grave. That was very important. He had a poet’s soul.”

  I don’t cringe at the phrase, though I feel the tug to do so. Poet’s soul.

  On the way back from the grave, Josh put his headphones on me and played “Back Door Man” on cassette. I don’t tell Sima that part.

  She has dressed for this occasion. Everything on her is starched—black slacks, white blouse, unbuttoned argyle cardigan. Her hair is pulled into a bun, and I look at her neck, its sloped sides. This is job-interview attire, clothing you can’t breathe in. I wonder if she works in an office now. I don’t ask. She has told me almost nothing about her present, only that she has a daughter, and she looked guilty when she showed me a wallet picture—a kid on class photo day; I can’t think of anything else to say about it.

  A decade has passed since she knew my brother. Most of her life in America has been spent without him, and so much can change for a person who seeks change. Sima is forward momentum personified, I know that even without filling in the details. I don’t want to think about what she has accomplished since he finally couldn’t manage breathing. I have a suspicion that if I prodded her through her modesty, I would get to a tale of employee-of-the-month plaques, incremental promotions, night school, the kind of resolute working motherhood referred to with folksy admiration at the beginning of politicians’ speeches. But I don’t want to ask for the specifics of how she thrived without him—I only want to know what she lost.

  I ask if she has ever been to Paris because I know she’ll say no.

  “That was for us,” she says. “It’s expensive. And it takes time. That was a place for him to show me. Paris was his promise to me.”

  Promise is as generous a word as poet. What is a promise that is made without a chance of coming true, other than a lie?

  I will take you.

  I will be better.

  We will be together.

  There is a place, Paris, that’s far from here, and lights glow off the river like lanterns floating in the sky.

  “You didn’t believe him, did you?” I say.

  There’s an undeniable scoff in my voice. I feel cruel. She half-smiles without showing her teeth and tilts her face down.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “I didn’t believe that we would go,” she says, with quiet emphasis. “But I believed in him. I believed that he thought we would. He was not a liar. He was a dreamer.”

  He was an addict. Maybe the difference is just semantic.

  After talking with Sima, every time I revisit his writing, I will think of her. Because no matter what notebook I pick up, as I flip through pages of detox journals and poems and lists of self-affirmations, so
many versions of the REASONS TO GET CLEAN heading, I will see the word Paris appear, punctuating his thoughts, a refrain that never ends.

  [LOOSE-LEAF, OCTOBER 1998, “REASONS”]:

  – Because it is harder every time.

  – Get your body back!

  – It’s either success or this.

  – Mom is gone. Dad is gone.

  – I can do three days. It’s just three fucking days. A week. I can do a week.

  – Remember, Paris in January.

  [LOOSE-LEAF, UNDATED, “UNTITLED”]:

  What it means, is that I will not lose because I can’t. The main thing is that I have an agreement with myself that if I have this (methadone) I will succeed. They will be in tandem, my methadone and my inspiration. They will not compete. Accomplished men say, “I couldn’t have done this without my wife,” etc. SAME THING. In two months, I will be in Paris at night. Two months. Paris.

  I see the word repeated at the end of a sentence: Paris Paris Paris Paris. Or it’s capitalized, PARIS, towering over all the little words around it. Or it’s the last word written for a while, butted up against blank lines until finally lucidity returns and he begins again with, I was gone too long. Coming at the end of sentences, paragraphs, lists, it is often scribbled loosely, and I imagine a hand beginning to let go before the panic or the high, mostly the high, swallows all language.

  Comforting feels like the wrong word, but, yes, it’s comforting to think of him rushing to write Paris, to put it in pen, unerasable, before the nod takes over, the same way he managed to say it to Sima on the phone before the line went silent. And Paris itself, what he knew of it, was the perfect word to say. A place ideal and far away. Just real enough to be a good hypothetical. A place that can exist in collective cultural imagination, free of urban sprawl and supermarkets and traffic congestion, just lights and river, the Eiffel Tower, good bread. A place to love and make art. I like to think that, above all, that’s what he wanted to do.

  In college, I traveled to Paris with Sofia, and we watched children push miniature schooners in the pond where everyone watches children do that. I was running out of my parents’ money, so we pretended to be the kind of kids who had to worry about such things, bought a single fresh baguette in the mornings, ripped off hunks all day as we walked until we were lost, talked about how we needed nothing more than this. It was exactly as those moments in a life are supposed to be—better than the moments around them, indulgent, brief, Facebook-logged, and then mostly forgotten.