Lord Fear

by Lucas Mann

[POEM, UNDATED, “THE DREAM OF 4/17”]:

  Train tracks. Trying to jump the train, can’t.

  Trying to shower (naked), public place (Lincoln Center).

  Warnings about those after us in the train yard (Father figure?)

  Signs of yesterday refuse to give up. I must think of it like this. It seems so real but that is only the physical appearance, an incorrect one at that. Psychological mistakes. Under it (or above it) is reality. Not bad. Not good. But not what dreams speak of. Rational.

  I am in a Chinese restaurant on Sixth Avenue. I am four years old, or maybe I’m five. I am young enough to kick my feet in my chair and feel them swinging high above the floor. Josh and I are alone because he’s my babysitter, and that makes this night take on a hazy, buzzing quality, every atom in the air, on my skin, electric. He’s wearing sunglasses, yellow-tinted aviators, even though it’s nighttime and we’re indoors. We’re eating crunchy noodles as loud as we can, and he sees me staring at the glasses so he lets me wear them. I put them on, and I can’t see anything, hardly, just the outline of his cheeks and his teeth smiling into the dark yellow. He takes them back, and I ask him, How can you see; how is that possible? He shrugs and I watch his shoulders move, and I think of watching boats on the river when it’s choppy, the way they heave up and settle themselves down so perfectly with each wave. I think everybody else in the restaurant is looking at us, looking at him, and seeing the same thing.

  “You want to hear a joke?” he asks me, hunching forward.

  The way I remember it, this is the first joke I have ever been told. I nod my head that I want to hear it. He whispers and we lean closer to each other.

  “So there was a faggot who was on a football team,” he begins. “But he didn’t realize that he was a faggot yet.”

  I don’t know what faggot means, but I like football and I can tell by his face, his grin every time he says the word, that it’s a word of consequence, dangerous in a way that I cannot articulate my desire for. He says it quieter than the other words, but louder somehow.

  “He always played tight end when he was in the closet,” Josh continues. “But what do you think happened when he came out of the closet?”

  The question doesn’t resonate with me at all. I don’t know what closets have to do with football, or why he would have been in one and not on a field. And when Josh answers the question, “He switched from tight end to wide receiver,” I am no closer to understanding but I have no wish to understand because now he’s laughing and his laugh sounds like applause, or it doesn’t sound like it but it feels like it. I laugh with him and my laugh is higher, but I like the way our laughs sound together, careening off the walls and the tables, building force as he asks, gasping, if I get it, and I tell him yes.

  I ask him to carry me home on his shoulders because I’m exhausted and I know that he can do it. I bob through New York, and I think of pictures of men riding on elephants that Josh brought back from his trip to India. I whisper something about elephants into his ear, and he holds his arm out in front of us like a trunk and makes a trumpeting sound. He begins to buck and heave a little under me, so I hold tight around his neck. I don’t know what I’m feeling, but I feel it deeply, the view from his shoulders, his voice floating up to me, the streetlights above us, stretching out like fingers into the black.

  My favorite of Nabokov’s metaphors is this one: Nothing is sweeter or stranger than to ponder those first thrills. They belong to the harmonious world of a perfect childhood and, as such, possess a naturally plastic form in one’s memory, which can be set down with hardly any effort.

  It’s like hands in newly laid concrete, how fast you can leave a print and how long that print will last, prints that I experienced without any thought that the memories might run out or shift in meaning once I understood all the words. I like to think that these are pure, purer somehow than Philip’s memories, because Nabokov says that only as we age do our memories get choosy and crabbed. But I already asked Philip what he thought he knew, and now, even as I don’t want them to be, his memories are mine, at least a little bit they are.

  I get out of the subway on Sixth Avenue, where once I rode on my brother like he was an elephant. The Chinese restaurant is gone and has been gone for many years. It was a Foot Locker, then an Arby’s, and now it’s an enormous nail salon. Through the windows I see dozens of women, spread out and stooped over other women’s feet, mouths sheathed in blue paper masks, eyes down. All of this feels so trite to observe. Time has passed. New things have sprouted where old things died, and so it’s harder to see the old things. I remember myself leaning down over my brother, my elephant, on this block so that I could hear him. I remember him saying, “Do you love me?” Maybe there was need in his voice, a need for easy validation, but I don’t remember it that way. I just remember saying yes and then rising back up as tall as I could, putting my fat little arms in the air, and trusting that he wouldn’t let me fall.

  —

  My father keeps beer in the fridge for me. He doesn’t drink, really, and I don’t live with him anymore, but I think he likes that I come over and, when I do, he can say, “There’s beer.”

  I live in Brooklyn with Sofia now. There is no reason for me to have post-work beers with my father, but I do, three, four days a week, settling into that familiar hollow space on the couch next to him. I text Sofia that I’m working late, cold-calling for the nonprofit that I cold-call for, or chasing an interview for a story. Usually, I stay until right before the B-train stops running. I hurry to catch it and feel guilt, though I’m not sure what for.

  Dave has been living here, mid-divorce, and the three of us sit in a triangle. He wears a moth-holed red sweater that used to be my father’s. He’s reading an old paperback copy of Herzog.

  “Read something else,” my father says.

  “Why?” Dave says. “I like classics.”

  “It’s a cliché.”

  “Just because I’m divorced?” Dave says. “Or narcissistic? Or Jewish? Is this a self-hating thing?”

  I laugh.

  “Have you even read it?” Dave snaps.

  “Of course,” I lie. “It’s about an unhappy, divorced Jewish guy. It’s a classic.”

  “You want to watch a movie?” my father says.

  This is a common progression. We are readers and watchers. We compete with knowledge of the art we consume. We quote lines and challenge one another to identify the source. We play that game where one person names a movie, then the next an actor from that movie, then the next another movie that actor has been in. We play in endless circles. We speak of the world in archetypes. In the movie of our family, we have decided, Albert Finney will play my father because of the eyebrows. And Paul Giamatti will play Dave—he doesn’t like that. And Seth Rogen will play me.

  My father bought himself a John Ford/John Wayne DVD box set, and we’ve been sporadically making our way through each of the Westerns. He loves John Wayne movies, that whole parched-earth, stoic morality thing. I like them, too. Dave, not as much. He finds them all surface, resents that we’re supposed to assume that there’s depth under monosyllabic restraint.

  Last week we watched Stagecoach, laughed when Wayne faced Claire Trevor, told her, “I know all I want to know.”

  Josh used to write movie scripts. I don’t know if he ever finished one, but he left behind ideas, story lines, short scenes, title pages with huge, bolded type. When I slept over at his apartment, I would fall asleep on the couch to the sound of his typing. In the morning, he printed what he wrote on long, perforated sheets. He let me rip the pages apart, and then sometimes he let me read aloud the side characters, usually women, while he voiced the protagonist. He wrote about the city at night. He had consistent themes and types. There was a drug lord named Alonso, a tortured DEA agent named Lance. Men with clenched jaws and burdens unspoken. I pictured them all with his face.

  I have his old scripts now, at least the ones he saved. They’re mostly just first scenes. They open
in the early morning hours, predawn, and make some reference to most of the city that never sleeps being asleep. He favored searching cameras, lots of sweeping across the Manhattan skyline, spotting one light on in a building, zooming in fast to find a young man, handsome, well-dressed, once described as “conservative” in look and behavior, about to get caught up.

  Ah, says the voice-over in the last script he ever began. This is just who I was looking for.

  It’s an appealing place to start, a nice trope to think about: the heartthrob facing dangers long after everyone else has gone to bed. Never mind the cheesy titles—The Loophole. Executive Justice. Heaven, Hell and the Witness Protection Program. Focus on the ideal.

  Tonight, I’m expecting a later John Wayne effort, The Searchers maybe, but my father says he has a surprise and pulls out an unmarked DVD of never-watched home movies that he got converted. They are predictably benign. There’s a scene of my second birthday, and we laugh at the way I shovel cake into my mouth. There are shots of my father trying to film a boat in the distance, his voice from behind the camera saying, “I can’t figure the thing out.”

  Then static, then a new scene.

  The new scene is grainier; I’m not sure why. It’s set in a rented summerhouse on Long Island, walls the color of moldy bread and an oblong living room with a piano in the corner. The camera is positioned on a counter, pulled back from the action. From the moment the camera turns on, there is music. Josh sits at the piano and plays, arms dangling out of a red tank top.

  “He taught himself how to play the piano,” my father says, sitting next to me. “Nobody taught him that. He taught himself.”

  It’s just after sunset in the video. The shot looks candlelit but there are no candles. Josh begins to play “Let It Be,” even slower than the original, not plodding, though, sensuous. I hear voices from behind the camera begin to sing. A back swoops in, arms holding me, and then I’m placed on his lap as he plays. He looks over me at the camera. I look where he looks, and for a second both of our eyes are facing out, glowing. Josh begins to sing softly. I can’t hear him over the voices closer to the camera, but in the video I hear him and my body sways with what the sound must be. I collapse into him, and I put my head on his chest like I can feel the music vibrate out of his skin.

  The clip is only a few minutes long. There’s no progression, just a steady camera fixed on one point where Josh happens to be sitting, like a Warhol movie, but nostalgic. Then, static.

  My father has begun to cry. He cries only at films, sometimes books.

  “Movie star, right?” he says.

  “Totally,” I say.

  It feels important for him to say and for me to agree with. We are, after all, cultural consumers in this family. We put stock in our taste. We find beauty there, in the proof of knowing what we saw and whether it was good.

  There’s a particular moment halfway through Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diary that I often return to. Ten months after his mother’s death, he watches an old movie. It’s a Hitchcock mystery from the forties. As he watches, he feels no escapist joy; but what he records instead is the soothing sensation of finding his dead mother in Ingrid Bergman, who doesn’t look anything like her. On-screen, captured, he sees: her lovely, simple hands, an impression of freshness, a non-narcissistic femininity—his mother in words that he hadn’t yet thought to use, in a place he hadn’t been trying to look for her. That rings true for me. Not the exact connection that he made but the fact that he made it, those general qualities that an icon can be a vessel for, so much brighter and easier to see in moving strips of light.

  I have found my brother in Patrick Swayze, Brando, John Travolta (in that movie where he drives a taxi and raises Kirstie Alley’s child), Steve Guttenberg, Bruce Lee, Heath Ledger (before the obvious association), Elliott Gould, Tupac, Spencer Tracy, Kenneth Branagh in Hamlet, Laurence Olivier in Hamlet, Warren Beatty, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Leonardo from the live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. He’s in their lips or their shoulders or their eyes; their confidence, their contradictions, their promise.

  Now, in this little room, in the dark that is so familiar, as my father weeps like that time he took me to see Streetcar as a kid, I’m seeing my brother as himself, or it seems like it, at least. I think he would have liked that, the meeting of fantasy and reality, captured, vivid, in moving strips of light. It’s flickering, fast, but I see him.

  —

  This is a scene as I envision it:

  Josh is leaning against a puke-colored locker, something out of a John Hughes fantasy, his wispy beginnings of armpit hair catching the fluorescent hallway lights, poking out from a cutoff Zeppelin T-shirt. Drumsticks, his very first pair, used gifts from Philip Goodman, writhe in his hands. He keeps a beat on his thighs, wooden tips clicking on tight black denim. He doesn’t smile and he doesn’t speak to anybody, because he’s concentrating. When the bell rings for first period, he sighs and tosses his head back, his mane of hair bouncing above his shoulders. He puts the sticks in his back pocket. He walks past Daniel Chang toward homeroom. Daniel has been staring at him. When Josh gets close enough to make eye contact, Daniel panics, presses himself up to a water fountain and watches with a tilted head, slurping until Josh disappears.

  This scene blends into one of a school bus, packed. Josh is there again, drumsticks blurring, bare arms dangling, body erect. Most of his middle school peers are watching him as they bump around the three-mile loop of Roosevelt Island, where they all live stacked in new high-rises. Josh returns nobody’s gaze.

  Daniel Chang is in the back, watching Josh over the top of his seat. Daniel is newly immigrated, still friendless. Watching Josh provides him with a rare feeling of inclusion. Everyone else seems to be watching—the boys that try to hide it, the popular girls that seem to move and lust in a pack. Daniel sees what they see, and thinks that if Josh turned and looked back at him, his whole life might be different. The bus stops in front of Josh’s building, and he’s up, two bouncing strides toward the door, and then he’s gone until tomorrow. Exhale.

  —

  By November, it’s already freezing cold at dusk. Daniel is standing on the bike path along the East River, and he’s shivering because this is the cusp of his first New York winter and he doesn’t yet own a jacket. In thin jeans and a sweatshirt, he tries to stop shaking and thinks he can feel his newly descended testicles rising back into him like the lotto numbers that his mother watches sucked into tubes every evening. He’s here because his first friend has brought him with the promise that others will be here. One of those others is Josh, leaning over the metal railing, spitting into the water. As a pinkish, polluted sunset shimmers across midtown Manhattan, Daniel Chang is introduced to Josh. They face each other, and Daniel wills himself to say, “Hi, I’m Dan,” because he has decided Dan sounds better than Daniel.

  Josh looks him up and down, more down since Dan is nearly a head shorter than him. Time is, of course, slow. Maybe they can hear water like a tongue slapping the pylons below them.

  “Danny Boy,” Josh says finally. Then he smiles, so Dan smiles, too, until his teeth get cold and he knows he’s held it too long. He jerks his head down to look at his Keds like he’s never noticed them before.

  —

  A relationship develops like whirring 16mm footage, uncut but sped up. They aren’t best friends, but they’re around each other more and more—a bigger boy and a smaller boy walking along the East River as the sun sets and rises and sets again. In Dan’s apartment, the air is quiet and stale, both his parents either working or worrying. He hurries back out into the city, where Josh is, and motion returns as they explore a New York that has the gritty swagger and grayed color palette of a Cassavetes film. Dan watches Josh as they mature together, remembers the details.

  They are seventeen now, maybe eighteen, and he has followed Josh to a party full of kids with famous parents and paint on their pants. Dan goes to the local public high school, but Josh goes to the magnet art school to p
lay the drums every day. Dan has no affinity for art of any kind, but he likes the word and the word works for Josh, with his pouting lips, his all-black wardrobe, his seeming detachment from responsibility.

  The party is in a Manhattan apartment overlooking Central Park, and Dan scans the walls speculating on the value of everything. It’s one of those apartments that was built at the turn of the century, with a maze of extra rooms once meant for cooks and maids and sets of grandparents. Now it’s a place to get high and then get lost looking for the bathroom. Dan walks past a room full of nude African statues, watches two pasty strangers making out, unable to look away until one of them sees him and stares back. Dan shoves his palms into his blue jean pockets and wanders on. He feels two crumpled bills and what he briefly hopes is a quarter but soon realizes is a nickel. Everyone around him is talking about beauty—the beautiful feeling of a drug he’s never tried, the beautiful sound of the keyboard on a record he hasn’t heard of, the beautiful way light functions in some movie with a French name. He thinks of the conversations that Josh must have during the long school days when Dan isn’t present, every word a reference to something else, a language that one needs to be initiated into.

  Dan enters the living room. He hears his sneakers squelch in spilled wine, panics, and then finds Josh. Josh is standing in the center of the room, and if he isn’t bigger than everyone else, he at least seems to be. He has begun to devour weight-lifting handbooks and drink protein shakes. He writes workout plans, laminates them, shows them to all his still-scrawny friends. They, too, seem to be written in an alien tongue. A shield of muscles tugs at a shirt that Dan remembers being loose once.

  The lifting was a brilliant decision. Dan can see that. What’s more avant-garde, in a room full of the concave, self-titled avant-garde, than looking like the hypothetical bullies they’re rebelling against? Sure enough, Dan sees clusters of these too-hip skeletons edging toward Josh, curious, wanting to be near him, to brush a shoulder of that bulging shape just to see what it feels like.