Lord Fear

by Lucas Mann

  Josh is holding a beer that he hasn’t sipped from in hours. Beer is all carbs and the loss of control. The loss of purity, really, both mental and physical. Josh is pure. Dan watches Josh’s free hand, where there is all the evidence of sober concentration. He keeps up a steady, complicated rhythm on the arm of the velvet couch in front of him, something that could appear to be a fidget if you weren’t looking closely enough.

  A girl interrupts Dan’s sight line. She walks up to Josh and offers him a cigarette. He scoffs and says something shitty about how he prefers air. Dan thinks that this might be the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen, and though that’s something he thinks often, he is ready to stand by his assessment in this case. Her hair is somewhere between red and brown and her lips are red. Her jeans are tight, tight from the ankle to the crease of her knee to the controlled swell of her ass. David Bowie is on her T-shirt, bright blond hair, bright blue makeup. Josh wears makeup. He doesn’t talk about it but Dan sees it. Does she know that? Does she like it? Is it a Bowie thing?

  Dan tries to catch his friend’s eye to give a look that says, Holy shit, that’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. He begins a little wave, but feels his hand suspended up by his shoulder and aborts. Hands back in pockets, he watches the girl ask Josh questions. Are you having fun? Leaning closer. Do you ever smile? Fingertips on his unresponsive arm. Take me somewhere quiet?

  Dan is still, like if he moves it might ruin something. Josh whispers an excuse in her ear, and she has the look of someone rejected for the very first time. She pulls her fingers back from his elbow. Josh smiles over her head at Dan and makes a face like he’s nauseated by her presence. Dan is furious at the injustice of the world and the different ways that different people are allowed to experience it. Josh struts over to him.

  “Nothing worse than a drunk chick,” he says. “That’s a woman without dignity.”

  “Yeah,” Dan says.

  Josh surveys the room, says something about weakness. We are too good for this place, he tells Dan, and Dan is no longer angry. Together they strut to the elevator, then out onto the street. They walk through Central Park. It’s black and there’s scuffling in the shadows. Dan thinks he can see people, thinks he hears running footsteps, but he’s not sure. The park at night is a prime example of the kind of place Dan’s parents have told him not to be, all shadow. Josh walks fast, steps loudly, doesn’t care who hears him. Dan hurries to keep up.

  —

  Four years later, they are still friends, more so than ever, if only because of proximity. Other friends have moved far away to college, and so Josh and Dan are left together, always a pair now.

  They’re in Chinatown at a dim sum joint with tiny wooden tables and tiny plastic chairs, where Josh is the only white guy. He seems to enjoy that; it’s a scenario he cultivates often. He sits splayed and satisfied, the whole restaurant reflected in the curved glass of his aviators. A waitress, young, walks over. Josh tries to order for the two of them in Chinese; he mangles it, but she likes the effort and giggles down at him.

  “Very good,” she says.

  “I’m a linguist,” he says.

  She walks away, and Josh says she has a pretty nice rack for a Chinese girl. Dan agrees. Josh leans back, his left arm stretched across the empty chair next to him. Dan imagines Josh’s mouth on the waitress’s nipples, sucking, the sound that would make.

  “Depp is the man,” Josh says.

  21 Jump Street has sort of become their thing. 21 Jump Street on Thursday, a party on Friday, dim sum on Saturday morning to recap the conquests of the night before.

  “Freeze,” Josh screams across the table, pointing a finger gun at Dan, face perfectly Depp-ish. “Freeze.”

  Dan throws his hands up and tries to say, Ah, c’mon man, like a pimp just caught. They laugh together.

  Josh has a girlfriend, a new one, and he starts talking about her. Her name is Naya, and she’s Indian or Bangladeshi, Dan never gets it right. Sometimes she goes out with them on Fridays. She doesn’t say much. Josh leaves her next to Dan, goes off somewhere to talk to other people, returns after too long. She asks Dan, Where is he? She loves him, loves him to the point of stinging tears and gnawing stomach pain when she can’t see him. When Josh returns home after dim sum, Dan knows there will be messages on his mother’s answering machine, aching messages. Josh will call Dan, say listen, and then hit Play, and Dan will hear him laughing into his protein shake as Naya’s recorded voice whines, Where are you?, yet again, trying so hard to sound nonchalant, which makes it sound the opposite. Are you screening? Pick up if you’re there. Hello?

  “She fucks crazy,” Josh says, leaning over the table. “These Indian girls, they’re proper, they’re not supposed to, so it’s like they’re dying for it.”

  Dan is silent as he tries to imagine what dying for it means, and what it might look like. He imagines the sound of struggling breath, hair yanked back, eyes wide in a perfect ratio of pleasure and pain. A few months ago, it had been another girl. At the same table over dim sum, Josh had told Dan all about her family, so overprotective that she’d been brainwashed away from sex until marriage. Which was bullshit. But Josh, the pull of him, his insistence, it was all too much. She agreed to anal as a compromise, whispered that in his ear, and then Josh relayed the message to Dan in more of a yell, talking about the tightness of it. All Dan could say was, How tight? How tight?

  The waitress is standing over the front counter by the mints looking at their table.

  “You like her?” Josh says.

  “Well, yeah,” Dan says.

  “Do you want her?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “That’s it. Shut up. I just asked you if you wanted her.”

  The moment slows down after this. Josh stands, winks, strides across the little restaurant. The waitress sees him coming and tries to pretend like she doesn’t. Dan watches the distance between them close and feels the weight of inevitability. He doesn’t hear any of the exchange. He sees Josh move in, lean over, and speak.

  Josh returns with her name and number written on a blank ticket. He slides it to his friend, a gift, a kindness, and he gives a little bow.

  —

  The next time Dan sees him bow is for real, a bow to a roomful of people. The people are clapping and so he’s bowing. He’s on a professional stage for the first time. Not just any professional stage; this is CBGB, as real a setting for a rock star as exists in the world. Fucking CBGB, and he’s being watched like this is a school bus on Roosevelt Island and everyone else is a twelve-year-old girl. It feels like a scene that Dan will remember as a beginning. He will be able to tell people, anybody, years from now, I was in the first crowd.

  Josh is standing behind the keyboard that he taught himself to play. He doesn’t look nervous and he doesn’t look to anyone for validation. He looks down at his own fingers, and then out over the crowd at some point beyond. Dan sees him at an angle reserved for concert documentaries, lots of crotch and chin.

  The club isn’t full. It’s a Wednesday, after all, and Josh is not Joe Strummer. Dan recognizes almost every person in the room. Josh’s parents are in the front, beaming, his father clicking a newly bought camera like a zinc-faced whale watcher. Dave is in the back sulking into a soda. Friends are in the crowd, old classmates from Roosevelt Island who stand around Dan in a jealous pack, shy immigrant girls he’s met at Josh’s college parties. Yeah, you could see it like a talent-show crowd, and you could see how poorly that fits the surroundings—proud parents taking mantel photos in the place where Iggy Pop used to cut his skin to let fans lick his blood.

  But Josh is backlit onstage, and he looks the part. There is a red glow coming from behind his neck. His body is pulsing with breath. His arms are like snakes snapping at the keys. His mouth is open and his eyes are closed as he sings a low harmony. Dan is standing as tall as he has ever stood, right in the middle of the front row, fists raised, metal buckles jangling on his leather jacket, howling at my brother e
ngulfed in a spotlight as the first song begins its crescendo.

  —

  Static. Then the downfall.

  Six years later, Dan’s leather jacket is folded up tight and rests in a plastic box in a hall closet at his mother’s apartment. The motorcycle that he bought with his first string of paychecks, that even Josh was jealous of, is packed up, too, covered in an old sheet. The bike makes his girlfriend nervous. She’s a nurse and she has pulled metal shards out of bloody holes in a triage unit, so danger carries no awesomeness for her. She works all day, comes home with sore feet, and likes to lie on the couch with Dan in their starter apartment in Queens, with the news on, feeding each other lo mein.

  Josh is in their apartment now for the first time, and just his presence, his insincere compliments about their taste in furniture, is making her nervous. Dan is busy staring at Josh’s sweaty face, the ring of new flesh that submerges his once lean jawline. Dan is trying to remember what Josh’s jaw used to look like. He wants to take his fingers and frame Josh’s head, to cut out all the excess from the image and remind himself. Then he wants to put his girlfriend’s face behind his finger frame and say, See?

  He and Josh rarely see each other anymore. It’s not like they had a fight; it’s just that Dan began living this life, and Josh began living another one. Dan isn’t exactly sure what that life is. For a while, he just assumed that Josh had finally found more interesting people to be around. Dan would call his apartment, and when Josh picked up, he sounded distracted, far away. He said, Dan, I’m working. Or, Dan, I’m writing. Then he mostly stopped picking up.

  “Nice candles,” Josh says to Dan’s girlfriend, then smirks. “They smell great. What’s that smell?”

  “Autumn,” she says.

  They are silent after this. Dan wants to tell a story about the time he saw Josh onstage at CBGB playing the keyboard, then turn to his girlfriend and say, “You like music, right?” He wants to reconcile two lives. He wants to defend his home and his matching furniture and the woman that he bought it with. But more so, troublingly more so, he wants to defend Josh to her. It is a special loneliness to be flanked by two people who you love who do not like each other, an empty feeling to know that they don’t see what you see.

  Dan defends nobody and instead goes to piss, walking stiff and hurried out of the room like it’s an emergency. For two minutes, he leaves his girlfriend alone on the couch next to Josh, leaning away from the slow breath and dilated eyes that she diagnosed the moment he walked in the door.

  Dan returns ready to tell a story about middle school that is too boring to upset anyone, but Josh is at the door, putting his sneakers on and mumbling that he’s late for something. Dan stammers out a noise, not a real word. Josh is already opening the door, then already gone. Dan’s girlfriend is up, saying, “If he comes in here again, I’m leaving.”

  “Wait, why?”

  She speaks fast. “He asked me to write him prescriptions and I said I could lose my job for that, and then he asked again and I said please stop, but he wouldn’t so I told him to get out.”

  Dan says, “What does he need a prescription for?”

  She says, “Oh, Jesus, Daniel, really?”

  In bed that night, she asks him what it is about Josh. What’s worth caring for in a man like that? Dan stares up at the white ceiling, the fan moving in slow, shaking rotations. He remembers drumsticks and lockers and dim sum and women, each of them the most beautiful woman ever to live. He says nothing. She coaxes him, not in an accusing way, but gently. She wants to understand. He loves her. She says, “I don’t get people like that. Who have everything and then screw it up. It doesn’t make any sense.” She’s right, but Dan has never stopped to judge Josh and doesn’t want to now. He wants to say something about Josh’s humor and how he could lock his eyes on you, how that felt. He wants to say something about desire, too, about the intoxication of being around somebody who feels like he deserves all that he can think to desire. How easy it is to believe that. But everything Dan remembers feels small and shallow as he remembers it, and he thinks the memories might shrink even more if he says them out loud. He stays silent until they fall asleep.

  —

  Josh never returns to the apartment, but his voice does. He leaves so many messages on the answering machine in his last years. Dan comes home from work, hits the button, hears the beep, and then Josh’s voice is in his living room. Dan’s now fiancée stands behind him with her arms folded as he listens. Danny Boy, Josh begins like old times. You there? Danny Boy, pick up. Dan? Buddy, where are you?

  First it’s exciting. Then it’s irritating. Then Dan feels himself beginning to dread his friend’s voice because to hear it is to pity him, and he doesn’t know how to pity Josh, doesn’t want to learn. He agrees to meet up just to make the phone calls stop. Josh gives him an address in Astoria, a few blocks from the 7-train, on a street full of closed auto repair shops. It’s a basement apartment. A woman Dan has never met lets him in and says nothing to him. She isn’t beautiful. Skin hangs off her as though she was born with extra. She folds in on herself as she walks.

  She sits next to Josh. Dan sits on the edge of a kitchen chair and rubs his hands together for no reason. Josh doesn’t move, but his eyes fix on Dan. He says that he’s happy to see him. Then says it again.

  “Danny Boy,” he says. “I want to know about you. Tell me about you.”

  This might be the first time in their relationship that Josh has asked outright like that. Dan begins to talk, but stops as Josh grabs a rubber tube off the couch next to him and ties it tight around his biceps.

  “I’m listening,” he says, “Talk.”

  Dan speaks in quick syllables, only continues when Josh urges him on. He tells him that life is good. It’s just life. Job, drinks on the weekends. Other stuff. It’s all fine.

  As he speaks, he watches Josh and the woman take turns injecting each other. At first, he wonders if this is for his benefit, Josh looking to surprise one last time. But it’s not that; he’s not looking for a reaction at all. He’s just doing what needs doing. Dan watches Josh’s fingers, still strong and graceful, as he feels for her vein like it’s a note and then slips the needle in, presses down gently with his thumb until the brown stuff is all gone. Dan watches their heads loll back together. He watches their quick eye contact over the shared bliss and then watches their eyes dull into something painted.

  Josh offers once; Dan declines. Josh shrugs. Then silence.

  The silence extends for the better part of an hour. Dan keeps his eyes on his friend as he moves through strange pulses of life—sits up, snorts, giggles a little, then sinks back down. Dan looks at Josh’s body melting into the scabbed skin of this woman who never told him her name. They breathe together until Dan can’t figure out whose breath is whose. He tries to hold his own breath; he’s not sure why. Two pigeons fight outside the window and their racket startles him. He listens to that for a while. He stands and debates whether to touch his friend’s shoulder, but he doesn’t want to feel how that must feel, because then he won’t forget it. He walks out fast, shuts the door softly.

  Static.

  —

  Small talk is difficult with Dan. He seems hell-bent on making it but has absolutely no aptitude for it. I’m on my third Pepsi because when he can’t think of anything else to say he says, “You want a Pepsi or something? They’re free. I’ll go get you one.”

  “Thanks, man,” I say when he hands them to me.

  “Oh, don’t worry about it,” he says. “I told you it’s not a problem at all.”

  We’re high up in a building somewhere in Midtown. We’re in the office of a moderately sized hedge fund. Dan does computer stuff for them, which is why we’re in here on a Saturday afternoon, alone.

  “You know, you take a nine-month course and you’re certified,” he tells me. “It’s an option. Everybody needs IT.”

  “Oh yeah, totally, thanks, I’m just bad at computers,” I say.

  “Yea
h, it’s not easy,” he says.

  He tells me he has an access key for work so he can get in the office anytime, because if something goes wrong, if all this money—and it’s some important people’s money—gets trapped in a system error, only he can save them from financial ruin. I am impressed by this, though less impressed than I act.

  We’re at a table meant to seat thirty men in striped suits, not just the two of us, miniature, me in my stubbornly childish jean-shorts and band T-shirt, Dan with a newish gut hanging over his waist, polo tucked snugly into weekend Dockers. He looks like an avid but horrible golfer, a man whose greatest pleasure is drunk-flirting with strangers at happy hour. That’s not fair. But if you talk about another man’s beauty for long enough and he’s not around to provide a dose of reality, it makes those who remain alive seem even more mundane than they already are.

  We’re surrounded by windows, a whole building of windows, and across from these windows are other windowed buildings full of empty rooms like this one. I don’t like it, the reflection of the same thing back at itself, over and over, no beginning or end. Dan tells me that sometimes, not often, he regrets not seeing Josh much in the last years. I ask him if he’s haunted by those final memories, if they stay with him. He says no, nothing like that.

  “Josh used to have this joke about me,” he says. “He’d be, like, Hey, if Dan came in and found you fucking his mom, what would he say? And the answer was, Hey, Ma, what’s for dinner?”

  Dan laughs at this. It’s funny because it’s true, he says. He’s a pretty mellow guy. Doesn’t really like to dwell. And Josh was just crazy, man. Dan reiterates that. Josh could do anything and would do anything. He says each anything with this heavy, cartoony, eyebrow-arching quality, I think so that we can share in that sense of wide-eyed dirty talk.

  This character, this break-room legend, is the opposite of the boy Philip Goodman remembers. At first, as Dan spoke of him, I felt relief, then goose-bumped curiosity. This was the brother I had wanted to see—bold, grinning, phallic. But now I’m uneasy. The forced glory was short-lived and Josh is still distant. Mostly I feel like we’re laughing at his bad jokes.