Lord Fear

by Lucas Mann

  When was that?

  Where was that?

  The junkie with the guitar is gone from the station when my father exits, and there is no more music. He wonders where a man like that goes when he’s done playing his song.

  —

  My father came to me today from West Fourth, and soon he will ride back there, but now he’s in my kitchen eyeing the roach motels I have lining the walls. He’s complaining about the Internet.

  “So many websites,” he says.

  “What?” I say.

  “I mean, the problem with the Internet,” he says, “is that everybody has a story that they feel like you should be reading, and they’re all there, so you read them.”

  He’s still sweating from the tennis. He smells the way he always smells when he sweats. He isn’t looking at me, but past me, out the window at the brick wall of the building across the alley.

  “I used to read all the literature on all these rehab websites,” he says. “That’s what I did that first night I found out, after I got home from the train. I just kept doing it. I hated all of it. I thought all the stories and all the promises were so stupid, you know? But then I read more.”

  I like this idea, the effort he made to understand in the best way he knew how.

  “Did you know Boz Scaggs had a son who overdosed?” he says.

  “Who’s Boz Scaggs?” I say.

  “Are you serious?”

  He tries to hum a Boz Scaggs song, wet and tuneless, then stops.

  He says, “Boz Scaggs wrote this thing after his son died, and he called him fine, beautiful, sweet. I remember that. This was maybe a year before Josh died, and I remember thinking, if somebody asked me, what words would I use?”

  Mostly, he just looked for rehab centers and survivors who swore they knew something that nobody else had figured out yet.

  How often?

  “Every night,” he tells me, like it’s really important that I believe that detail.

  He would lie next to my mother and wait until she fell asleep, and then he would slide down the hall to the computer, not wanting to lift his feet and put them down again on creaking wood. He would look into the screen and feel the blue light stinging his eyes. He would see himself reflected in the window, pale from the light, and old. He would let the platitudes wash over him.

  Are you losing somebody you love? Find them again.

  We are offering a 92% success rate!

  Recover your sense of spiritual meaning, purpose, belonging, and personal fulfillment.

  Allow God to rid your life of addiction’s grasp.

  “All of that bullshit,” my father says. He gives a dismissive wave.

  The issue, I think, is the assumption that logic can be imposed on the illogical. He was supposed to buy that basic, flawed concept. That a story with a complete narrative could be made out of needles in arms, decisions that become no longer decisions, sickness. That it was a matter of strategy and will.

  “Josh believed,” my father says. “He would tell me, Now I know what I need to do. He would talk to me about self-reliance and transformation. It was the same shit I was reading every night, like he read it, too, and internalized it. He’d say, Trust me, this is working, why do you worry like that? Why do I worry?”

  My father is angry at someone who no longer exists. He’s asking a rhetorical question of a man who is in no position to answer it. Josh promised him until the end that the end wasn’t coming, and then the end came and he never had to acknowledge how ridiculous it was, all those things he expected his father to believe.

  He wants to know if I see that. The end was inevitable, certainly from the time when he stood with Josh on the balcony on Roosevelt Island, probably from before then. Something was set in motion, something in the marrow of how his son was, not bad, not undeserving, just cracked. When you tell the story of an addict, it’s so easy for everything to become about potential triumph, and triumph implies change and change implies a choice.

  “I believed that he was trying,” my father says. “But that was never the point.”

  Now I see Josh’s face, as clear as any memory of him I’ve ever had. He’s in this cramped kitchen of mine next to the fridge covered in party Polaroids. He’s the size that he really was, which is to say pretty average, but he’s older in this memory so he’s fat. He is looking at me and our father. He is waving.

  This is a very specific memory, the way he looked at both of us together, the way he waved with a heavy right hand, held it by his ear and then dropped it quickly. He’s smiling and his eyes are narrowed into pinched crescents. His face is racked. He is holding it so tight, and his skin doesn’t move from that wide smile because he’s forcing it to stay. This strain is not something I’ve ever remembered on his face. I want to place the memory, but I can’t yet.

  “I used to sit in his apartment the way I’m sitting in yours now,” my father says. “Remember that big captain-of-industry desk he had? He would sit behind it and try to tell me all the things he was going to do. He always did that, even before he was using. He had all these pads of paper in the desk drawers, and these nice pens. He would pitch me ideas—movies, novels, businesses. You know what he told me one time? He was sitting behind that silly fucking desk, and he said, Dad, right now, if I got my body back to where it was, if I practiced, I could be a Major League Baseball player. I could be anything. I really believe that.”

  He looks at me and begins to laugh, then stops. He leans back in his chair and raises both hands, palms up.

  “Isn’t that what you want someone to think?” I ask softly.

  “I wanted him to make sense,” my father says. His voice catches.

  I remember where the memory is from. It’s from the last time I saw Josh, a sunny afternoon a couple of weeks, maybe, before he died.

  The scene begins in Sima’s memory, a moment with him that she described to me that I have stolen and blown up in my imagination.

  They were in a café, talking. Josh had been clean for nearly a month, which had happened a few times since she’d known him, but he said this time was different, something about how unfiltered the sunlight felt, the warmth of spring air. He’d been staying at Beth’s, sleeping in his childhood twin bed. He was letting his mother be kind to him, he swore it. He let her bring him soup during the night shivers, let her sit outside the door and ask him if he was okay, as he lay in a lukewarm bath because the water didn’t sting as much as the air. Finally, the air stopped stinging.

  Josh was trying to tell Sima just how vivid the world was when withdrawal stopped. He described it like lying under one of those lead X-ray blankets and then feeling the technician take it off, so for a moment you’re nearly floating.

  “Look at my eyes,” he told her. She did; they were clear. They both smiled.

  Their coffees were empty and she had to leave. When she stood up, he grabbed her hand and said, “The next time you see me, I will still look like this. I want to take you to dinner. I know the place already. You’ll love it.”

  They hugged good-bye and he squeezed her and she smelled him.

  He walked downtown. I imagine his walk.

  He passed Fourteenth Street, that corner with all the card tables displaying bootlegged DVDs. Like always, the DVD men whispered to him: Smoke? Snort? Shoot? He moved on, eyes at his shoelaces. He passed the basketball court at West Fourth Street and again, from men leaning against trees, standing shadowed on the top step of the subway entrance: Smoke? Snort? Shoot?

  Josh told himself a story: I am not that man.

  I opened the front door and he was standing there. My father made a startled sound behind me. We hadn’t seen Josh for a while. I wanted to ask how long he’d been standing there debating whether to ring the doorbell, but I didn’t.

  “Hi,” he said. “Is this a bad time?”

  My father and I were holding baseball gloves and heading to an asphalt park down the street. My father told him he could come with us, he could watch if he wanted, an
d he said, “I’d like that.”

  I remember that I hugged Josh, but then he fell back, walked a step or two behind us on the narrow sidewalk. I remember now, more than I recognized it then, that my father didn’t turn around to him, kept his neck stiff as we crossed Sixth Avenue. When I turned around, Josh’s eyes were on the back of my father’s head, and his lips were moving around words.

  They stood next to each other, facing me, as my father and I threw. Josh leaned into my father’s ear and spoke. I think he was telling him what he told Sima—I am clean, I have been clean, look at my eyes, the next time you see me they’ll be exactly the same. My father smiled, resisted looking, threw. I threw back as hard as I could, wanting to impress.

  We walked home together from the park, and Josh draped a heavy arm over my shoulders. I stiffened, then slackened.

  “You look good,” I said.

  “I am,” he said.

  “You do look good,” my father said.

  “I am,” he said.

  He stood on the stoop when we got home, and I had the realization that all three of us were trying to picture the act of him walking inside.

  My father and I stood above him.

  My father said, “Well.”

  Josh said, “Well.”

  When we were about to go in, Josh said, “I’ll be back soon. I’ll call ahead next time. The three of us can have dinner. Maybe next week?”

  I didn’t know if I believed him, and I heard that uncertainty in my voice when I said, “Yeah, sounds good.”

  That’s when he looked up at us, raised his right hand to wave good-bye, held it by his ear, and then dropped it to his side. His eyes were pinched crescents, and he was trying very hard to keep smiling. I think he wanted to say more, but then the door closed.

  It’s what happened next that my father can’t stop thinking about because it’s what he can’t know.

  Josh went back to Beth’s after he left us, and at some point in the next week or so he told her that he was ready to be alone, that he could be trusted to be alone. He returned to his apartment, all the faded black leather, the pull-up bar so long unused, his keyboard dusty, his notebooks stacked under the coffee table.

  I don’t know if the hit that killed him was already in his apartment, a last stash that he hadn’t been able to bring himself to flush, or if he got antsy in there alone and went down to Tompkins Square Park to buy from the gutter punks, or if he called a dealer to deliver and there was a stranger who sat with him at the end, impossible now to find. What I do know is that the only piece of writing or correspondence left in Josh’s apartment dated within a month of his death was the warning letter from the Supreme Court of New York: YOU ARE HEREBY ORDERED to appear for a VIOLATION OF PROBATION HEARING. The one that I found in a torn-up shopping bag on top of a pile of crinkled loose-leaf love letters.

  I ask my father what Josh was arrested for. He doesn’t know. When? No answer. We speculate about what he might have done. He got kicked out of a methadone program once; did he try to buy it illegally? Or was he selling it? It could have been an old prescription forgery charge. Or credit card fraud; he was good at fraud. A prostitution sting. That’s definitely possible, my father says. These are the options that we hope for because they make, at least, a small bit of sense.

  “I don’t know what he might have done,” my father says. “Whatever he really did, the full extent of it, he didn’t want me to know.”

  I’m not sure that the original crime matters. What matters is that on the day he died this might well have been the last piece of evidence he saw to tell him the story of who he was. And the voice, official, threatening, inarguable, said, You are a case number. You have done wrong and you have not atoned, but you will.

  I see Josh fold the letter back into itself, put it in the shopping bag on top of all the other voices, the kind ones, the ones that spoke of the good in him. And that’s when the last change of mind enters the scene, and the drug, and the desire to feel outside himself. It’s the best approximation I’ve found to speculate about, anyway. Who was he at the end? What was he seeing? What was he thinking? Maybe he was thinking that there was no story to tell anymore beyond the official one.

  A few days later, Beth called my father because Josh wasn’t picking up the phone. He met her outside the apartment. Neither spoke; both knew and weren’t sure how.

  My father opened the door with the spare key. The window was open, and he could hear rain falling on the hardwood floor. He wondered if they should hold hands, him and Beth, like kids in the summer before they jump off rocks into the water. My father never learned how to swim.

  There was a tiny staircase, three steps was all, that led from the kitchen into the living room of the apartment. They descended and saw Josh lying by the coffee table. He was in his underwear, white briefs. The elastic cut into his waist. Next to him was a bottle of Formula 409 cleaning spray and a sponge. It had always made him feel relief to clean. My father remembered that and almost smiled.

  Beth trembled and held back. My father did what was grotesque and somehow right, paternal at least. He knelt and touched two fingers to his son’s flesh. It was cold, so that was it.

  The police came. There was an official report. He rode the ambulance to the morgue. There was a death certificate. He went home.

  “I’m not saying that would make it a suicide,” my father says, so many years past that night, still reaching. “But, you know, it’s a reason. If he saw that summons and it was the last straw…”

  There is a morsel of redemption in the notion of a man attempting to rewrite what he is one last time, then coming home, seeing something that can’t be changed, deciding to finally close his eyes and stop trying. I’d like to think of him feeling resigned rather than desperate, still guilty and flailing to the very end. But then there’s the Formula 409 and the sponge, the implied promise to himself of a new shine when he woke up.

  I try not to think about that detail, the broad symbolism that it might hold. Instead, I try to imagine his last thoughts because there’s potential in that.

  I still have the one book he ever gave me, Rand’s Anthem. It was a birthday present. He handed it to me and told me not to let the world hold me back. I hope he didn’t remember Ayn Rand platitudes as he nodded away.

  There’s a Baldwin line that says it best, another from “Sonny’s Blues”: It ain’t only the bad ones, nor yet the dumb ones that get sucked under.

  I hope he was thinking something like that as he faded, on the scuffed wood floor looking at his ceiling, hearing voices from out on Twenty-Sixth Street like he wasn’t alone.

  —

  I’m at my parents’ place now, under the wall of Josh’s before-shots. Across from me, my father leans back in his chair and can’t figure out when he believed, when he stopped believing. Did he worry the whole time? Did he know? Was it as inevitable as it seems now? Did anything change at all?

  The addiction clouds things. Scenes condense and then they begin to eat their own edges.

  The story of addiction is the story of memory, and how we never get it right.

  We’re still having this conversation.

  We’re sitting in front of the TV and it’s another Sunday.

  “When I think back, it’s mostly about the death,” my father tells me. “I talk to him sometimes. I yell. You fucking idiot. That kind of stuff. I think about things disappearing. His face eroding until it’s gone.”

  He goes silent after that. He slurps tea and I sip beer, and on the TV in the background men are hitting each other and whistles are blowing. When I leave, he looks like he wants to say something else, but he doesn’t.

  I get an email from him changing his story again. He remembers Josh’s smile, he says, and calls it shy. Josh just wanted to feel better, he says, and why shouldn’t he want that? We all want that. He had a shy smile and he wanted to feel better. My father remembers Josh near the end, telling him he understood how hard it was to see him—a conscious gift of ackno
wledgment, one meant to heal.

  Maybe I’m just trying to put a gloss on it, my father says.

  [NOTEBOOK, JUNE 16, 1995, “NOTES”]:

  And to think, I myself wonder at times why I suck on the sap. As they all torment me. Torment. I won’t let the torment in. The red juice even tastes good now.

  [POEM, JUNE 18, 1995, “FATHER’S DAY”]:

  Absolution from the sap.

  In the sap, it destroys

  All that irks me.

  All the people that desert me.

  And it takes me,

  Yes it makes me,

  At one with all.

  And if the terror, or horror, or ugliness

  Calls

  It is washed away

  In a sea of red,

  The sweet, slow rocking of my head.

  When you see me I’ll be fixed.

  For I was broken.

  I was sick.

  The sea of red and what it brought.

  One day soon I will be king.

  I’ll shout, rooftops,

  Much I will say.

  How my cares were killed on father’s day.

  He writes nothing else until Labor Day, and I yearn to see that summer. It’s the closest thing I can find to a beginning of his addiction, that bizarrely reassuring change moment, when his original self and his addict self can be last separated. He entered a young man in pain, a young man searching. The red sap rocked him sweetly, slowly, and how necessary that must have felt, to be rocked. The sap was prescription cough syrup; I’m pretty sure. By Labor Day, he’s submerged.

  I imagine joy in the four months of no writing between these entries. I imagine that he recorded no promises, no vengeance notes, no sad poems, no posturing scripts, because there was no reason to. He was not detached from the sensation of being himself; he was reveling in it instead. There’s nothing to say about happiness; you just live it. That’s a cliché, yes, but I hope that it’s a true one. He felt joy. From Father’s Day on, for a whole summer, his cares were killed. He left no evidence, he just felt it. After all this looking, maybe the best explanation is in the silence.