Lord Fear

by Lucas Mann

  Stop, Philip thought. For everyone’s sake, don’t be embarrassing. Realize how embarrassing you’re being and then stop it.

  Josh did not stop. He kicked at the coffee table as he ran to his bedroom. The family trailed him. Philip watched. He watched Josh writhe on his bed, screaming the word no until it sounded like he had a stutter. It was the kind of gutted repetition that actors utilize in movies when something awful, like genocide awful, has happened, and even then you wonder if they’re overdoing it. Philip always preferred subtlety on-screen, in general. There should be some correlation between the seismic effect of an event and a person’s reaction to it. Looking at Josh, Philip didn’t see a logical correlation to anything.

  Beth tried to move in on her son, to love him, wrap him up. It was a sweet impulse, but Josh was too big for the moment to look sweet. He was a broad-shouldered boy, a bit chubby, larger already than his mother as she tried to hold him in small, shaking hands. She wanted to swaddle him, her baby, but he wasn’t a baby and she couldn’t. Philip watched her roll off, then sit next to him on the bed, reaching out every few seconds to touch him on his heaving back and see if he felt it. Josh hid his face in a pillow, but he kept screaming. It looked like the sound was escaping through his ears.

  Dave lingered by Philip’s leg like the cat. He reached up, pawed him, and wanted to know why all of this was happening. What’s wrong with him? is what he said. Philip didn’t answer. He patted Dave’s head. He wondered what strange feat of genetics could make one boy so solid, so right, and send another shrieking and babyish into puberty. It felt important to let Dave know, in some way, that he wasn’t implicated in this. That Josh was the kind of flawed that provides no lineage or explanation.

  My father stood over the bed for a while, palms up like he was asking a question. His shoulders, broad like his son’s, were tense, almost at his earlobes. He coughed and shook his head, and then walked past Philip out of the room. Philip watched his measured steps down the hallway to the closet, where he retrieved his winter coat. He put the hood up over his ears and walked out into the snowstorm. Josh didn’t notice, didn’t hear anything but his own volume. How long was he going to scream?

  Josh wanted to be with Philip. That’s where the tantrum came from, and Philip was keenly aware of it in the moment. Josh wanted his parents gone. He wanted to sit next to Philip and feel his essence, his coolness, as though some osmosis could happen there in the apartment and Josh could become him, an instant solution to the problems of growing up. That’s what all twelve-year-old boys desire, right? To not be themselves and not be their parents; to instead be something mercifully in between? Philip could relate to the impulse. It was the way that Josh went about his desire that lurched past pitiable into repulsive. Desire is only desirable when muted, the way Philip had learned to look at women, restraining himself enough for them to notice the restraint and grow curious.

  Josh’s hand began to bleed.

  Maybe his knuckles had scraped his bed frame or the plaster of the wall. There were tear streaks on his Kiss sheets, snot stains across Gene Simmons’s scowling face. And now smeared drops of blood. Philip thought of Beth. He pictured her later that night, after he’d been blissfully relieved of his charge, cleaning her boy’s fluid like he was an infant, while my father high-stepped through the snowdrifts until the embarrassment was over. It was a triptych that Philip wouldn’t forget, that he would relay in detail to anybody who ever asked about Josh, the defining images: A boy writhing. His mother cleaning. His father ashamed.

  —

  Philip continues to try. For years. He continues to tell himself that it is the right thing to do to try.

  He watches movies with Josh when Dave is out with friends and the apartment feels too big.

  He reads the overwrought poems Josh writes and he doesn’t make fun of them. “There’s talent here,” he says. “And sensitivity. Girls love sensitivity.”

  He teaches Josh the drums, even though he’s never taught and never plans to teach again. Philip’s good, but there are plenty of real teachers out there. He even offers up the man who taught him years ago, but my father begs, tells him that a real teacher will lose patience, tells him that it has to be Philip or nobody. So Philip tries. He sits on Josh’s bed and listens to him beat on the brand-new kit that my father bought him before he’d ever played. He tells him, “Good,” when he finally masters the easiest of Beatles songs. He smiles when Josh says, “I’m going to be a fucking rock star.” When Josh earns his way into the High School of Music and Art, Philip never mentions that hardly anyone tries out for drums.

  They settle into a rhythm, the two of them. Josh writes, Josh plays, Philip listens. He claps obligingly. He agrees with Beth that maturity is happening when it isn’t. He is patient. But the longer their relationship lasts, the more afternoons pile up, identical, the heavier his effort feels.

  The interviews are the last monument to his patience. The Josh Show—who else would be the guest?

  Philip sits in the kitchen. He shuffles his socked feet on white tile. He rests his elbows on the table and lets the weight of his body fall. He tries to let the questions wash over him, like a meditative kind of thing, an almost gentle buzzing. Give one-word answers every few seconds, fall into yet another rhythm, and then it will be over.

  Josh looks the way he always looks when everyone in the room has tired of him. He’s leaning forward at Philip, palms flat on the table. His eyes are wide, his face skin stretched tight, manic. Philip thinks of it like a dead sprint distilled into a facial expression.

  Phil, Phil, Phil, Phil, Phil.

  Josh is bleating at him. He says something about tits, then something about pussies. Now he’s asking Philip what pussy smells like. Again. Philip hears himself saying, “Like cod,” which is funny, he thinks. He smiles to himself. He has always been told that he’s funny. He understands the mechanics of humor. It has to be quick and effortless, a shift snuck into an unsuspecting conversation, not a barrage of dirty words thrown until one sticks. Josh is saying clit, over and over. Other words, too, but he’s saying clit the loudest, with real glee. Philip wants to get close to the tape recorder and say with slow, unmistakable enunciation, Josh, it doesn’t get funnier the more you do it.

  The last time Philip came over, he brought his girlfriend. Josh said the same words to her. He talked about fingering pussies and laughed as he mimed the gesture. She gripped the handle of her coffee mug tight, and Philip had to watch little veins pulse on her hands.

  “I think we’ve got somewhere to be,” she said. “Philip, don’t we?”

  “Where you going?” Josh said. “Where you going, guys? Where you going?”

  Philip leaned in close and hissed, “Stop it, Josh. Come on, man, stop it.”

  “You going home to finger her pussy?” Josh said.

  Even when they made it to the elevator, Josh was still audible. He was leaning out the door into the hallway—“Phil, hey Phil, where you going?”

  When the elevator door closed, Philip hugged his girlfriend and she exhaled.

  “He’s just too old to be that way,” she said. “It’s not right.”

  Phil, Phil, Phil, okay, hey Phil.

  Josh is still going in the present. His giggle has become a shriek. He stamps his feet on the tile floor in a happy way. On the wall behind him, thin-stemmed wineglasses shake with the force of his stamping, make little plinking noises. His body is powerful. He has begun to pack his broad frame with new, adult muscle. Pectorals push against his T-shirt. He’s no longer a chubby boy. If Philip had just met him today for the first time, there maybe would have been that stab of jealousy that occurs whenever a man in his thirties passes a sculpted teen on the street, the knowledge that he could never return to that ideal now even if he tried. But this is Josh. Philip knows Josh. He imagines leaning across the table, putting his fingers on Josh’s biceps, and finding it to be slick, inflated plastic like a pool toy. He imagines pricking the biceps with his fingernail and watching
the body deflate.

  Phil, are you listening? Phil, Phil, Phil.

  His patience is gone.

  Phil, when was the last time you rubbed clit?

  Philip hears his own voice cut in despite himself, chiding, When was the last time you did?

  At first it feels good to point out that Josh has never rubbed a clit in his life, to give him pause, if only for a second, but then it feels sad.

  Philip stands. He hears his own voice again, and it sounds like an older man’s.

  “We’re done here,” he says. “Turn the thing off.”

  He’s out of energy. He leaves fast. Josh watches him from the doorway, smiling, certain that he will see him soon.

  Josh never tracks him into the hall, never rides the elevator down with him. Never wants to hang out at Philip’s apartment. Never wants to be taken out for dinner, or to a ball game, even just for a walk along the river. He’s supposed to be a musician, but he never goes to a club to see a show. There’s a whole city around you, Philip told him once. All these lives, all these fucking interesting people with things to tell you. Josh shrugged, said fuck all those people, grinned a stupid grin. Philip grins in the elevator, thinking of Josh as some iron-pumping, emotionally unstable Rapunzel, waiting helpless, high above any intrigue or danger, for a visitor who is willing to climb.

  Philip will climb again, he knows that. He will be asked and he will oblige. And it will be the same, static and tense. Minutes will pass slowly, and Josh will be what he always was. Because the thing about living is that it’s hard. Philip is thirty-three and still trying to make art, pay his rent, be good to a woman for an extended period of time. He still gigs on the drums, sits sore at the bar after his sets, paid in watered-down drinks. He writes songs and scripts, and he hopes that they’ll someday be famous. He auditions for all the small hoodlum parts available to angular, olive-skinned men. Josh has a life planned that looks something like Philip’s. Being creative and being handsome and being a man, a fully developed human being beyond his mother’s apartment. Philip shakes that notion away. Josh, adult, paying bills, making art, not merely imitating the shell of an artist’s presentation—every detail of the idea is insulting to Philip, insulting to his ambition, to the work it takes to be him. It’s a hypothetical that feels like it will always remain one.

  The elevator opens at the lobby, and then Philip is outside in real, dirty New York air. He walks along the river, watches the chop. He thinks about the tapes, about how this will be the last time with the fucking tapes, even if Josh begs him. There will be no more recorded evidence of their time together. Good. The tapes will disappear, like songs do, like poems, and eventually he’ll stop feeling the need to try.

  —

  Philip’s cat hisses at me. It shakes its ash-gray bulk and sends tufts of matted fur up into the air. I sneeze and glare at it.

  “You heard the tapes, right?” Philip is saying. He is sunken into his couch along the back wall of a tiny living room in a rent-controlled apartment near Prospect Park. “You get what I’m talking about, right?”

  I feel myself nodding. Then I sneeze again.

  “Sorry,” I say. “Allergic.”

  Philip nods at this, so I keep the motion going, and we bob our heads at each other for a while. He wears torn black sweatpants and a white T-shirt with faded words written along the chest. He’d just come back from a run when I met him on the stoop. He lives by the maxim that the older you get, the healthier you have to be. I don’t know how true that maxim is, but he assures me that someday I will.

  A decade ago, I watched him conduct my brother’s funeral with his black turtleneck and gentle eyes, and I assumed so much. And in the way that memory can make us so certain about assumptions, I became certain that if we were to meet again, he would be, if not physically the same, on the same emotional pitch, waiting to continue in the sincere, near-reverent manner that I left him in. He was the orchestrator of everyone’s last kind speech about my brother, and whenever I try to find that memory, all those stories with their sweet, melancholy jokes, their assertions of transcendent qualities possessed only by Josh and the absolute shock at the loss of him, Philip’s face is one of just a few sure things. He has refused, all afternoon, all through our hours of talk stretching out in this cat-dandered apartment, to live up to any aspect of how I remember him or, more precisely, how I remember the way he remembers. And why should he? It’s not his responsibility to reshape what he felt, yet I still feel let down.

  There had been a conversation in my head before this meeting, and it was nearly symphonic in its good vibes. I pictured the way my laugh and Philip’s would sound together. They would sync up, is what I thought. They would come easily because Josh made us both laugh. And there would be a familiar quality, because I’ve been told that my laugh echoes my brother’s, and he would surely recognize that. I have actually been waiting for Philip to say something funny, so that I could laugh sincerely at what he said and then he could say, My God, I just heard him, just now, in you.

  He’s glancing at my notes, willing them to end.

  “I’m not sure what you want,” he says. I hear his feet shuffle on the throw rug beneath him. “You want some more water?”

  He’s up, bounding the corridor to his kitchen. Old wood groans under him. His legs, still boyish, elastic and thin, step around and over a life’s worth of sentimental debris. There are records with loved, worn covers. There are books, too, stacks of them that would ordinarily render me grudgingly impressed, and I can see once-bright Post-its sticking out above the pages that he wants to remember most. I find only smugness in the warmth of this place, the years that he has lived within these walls and will continue to do so, the art he has accumulated, the smiling expanse of pictures on every countertop, the satisfied routine of his existence.

  I hear Philip drop a mug and stumble around in his kitchen. I hear him say, “Shit, shit.” When he comes back, he eases down onto the couch with a sigh. I try to look at him hard. I have more questions lined up. Possibilities include: Do you think he thought that all great artists get high? And, Are there times when you think of him the most? Why? And, Do you remember what you said at the funeral? Do you remember what I said?

  I ask none of these and instead ask a question that I know will be my last. If we were boxing, and it feels a little as though we are, this would be a haymaker thrown rounds too early by a fighter who is tired and just wants to hear the sound of something heavy connect.

  “Do you think you loved him?” I ask, looking past Philip at the cat who has fallen asleep, face pressed into its own stomach.

  I ask him only because the answer will be yes, and, sure, it’s an aggressive, manipulative use of the word love, but really, what isn’t? I want, at least, some agreement, so I can end this fumbling interview on my terms, terms that happen to be widely accepted terms for all people, and thus are irrefutable. Love is so much better than any alternative, and so we say it.

  Philip digs his hands into the fur on his cat’s head until everything but his wrist has disappeared, and still it doesn’t wake.

  “For me, he was impossible to love,” he says. He stares at me and then blinks. “You have to know somebody if you’re going to love them, or else to say you do is bullshit. I don’t want to bullshit you.”

  He keeps staring, looking for agreement. I nod for him, regret it.

  “Some people aren’t meant for that,” he says. “You and I have been sitting here for a few hours, and I just connected with you more than I ever did with him.”

  —

  My favorite part of Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory, is the way he nestles the idea of memory into so many different images. There isn’t one central metaphor; memory is not merely an ocean or an ever-splendored thing. Instead the whole book reaches for metaphor again and again, always with a new image to put to a word that is invisible and ineffable on its own. He writes of the hand of memory, the horizon of memory, the way memory can crumble. Memory as a b
ackdrop, an eye, a glass cell, an entire city, an engraved stone, a stack of books. He settles on none of these, never seems to reuse or even refer back to an old metaphor when trying out a new one.

  Memory is a fight. That is what I believe in this moment.

  Memory is the back-and-forth pull between Philip and me, the struggle that hangs over his coffee table, each of us with a quiet need to be right. The problem is that no memory is entirely right, just as the meaning of the word can always change. And what I’m trying to do, let my memory of one life meet and mingle with others, is a flawed endeavor, pretending that a peace exists within acts that are not peaceful.

  Josh was a boy who inspired, who deserved, love. No, he never was.

  I get up to leave fast, and soon Philip and I are at the door to his building, shaking hands. He grips tight and tells me that I’m starting to look like my father. I mumble something about how, yeah, people have said that, and then something else, funny I think, about how there are worse things to hear but not many.

  He stands in the doorway and watches me leave. I turn back and wave, he reciprocates, and then I’m gone. It’s only once I get around the corner on my way to the F-train that I realize we never spoke of needles or death. The only part of the story that I’d been sure we would cover, we didn’t. That should be a good thing. The character he gave me, the version of my brother that he made and I took and then wanted to give back, was not a dying junkie. But the death was there. It didn’t have to be spoken. It loomed, the result that all of Philip’s anecdotes about the things broken in Josh served to explain, so that he could never be just a young boy frightened or a teen overcompensating. Maybe it really was that way when Philip lived it, this awareness of the cracks, or maybe it came later, after Josh died the way he died, and all the details in Philip’s mind lined up to prove that he had known something all along, that he hadn’t been fooled at all.

  Memory desires, above all, to be right.