Lord Fear

by Lucas Mann

  I got up and looked down on her with what I hoped was calm derision.

  I said, “There is nothing lamer than dudes who own snakes. You might as well think magicians are cool.”

  I hated it the moment I said it. It felt like a confession. If Josh walked into our dorm right then, snake-draped, in his leather jacket and aviators, looking for my or anyone’s girlfriend, I would have thought him insufferable.

  I am very afraid of snakes now. I don’t like the way they feel, just armored muscle.

  After the dinner party, we’re in bed talking. Sofia is worried.

  She says, “Do you think it was too weird a story?”

  I say, “No, they loved it, it was memorable. People remember stuff like that.”

  “Too memorable?”

  “No, the right amount of memorable. Everybody loved you.”

  She closes her eyes and I kiss her eyelids. She smiles and says she likes when I do that. Then we are quiet together.

  We live on the sixth floor of a turreted prewar building off Flatbush Avenue, far away from anyone we know. In my father’s generation, Jewish immigrants lived in this neighborhood. Now it’s nearly all black, having gone through that most common New York evolution. We call it the frontier of gentrification out here, though that waifish blonde always wheeling her harp into the elevator suggests that we aren’t the first settlers. On Sunday mornings, I like to leave our windows open and listen to the microphoned preacher of the Haitian Tabernacle Church next door, a detail of our lives that gives me an unreasonable amount of joy, just the idea that I am a grown man finding my way in a world so gritty that it includes patois.

  My father grew up in Coney Island, the son of a cab driver with a gambling addiction. He read a lot, ran the bumper cars at the theme park, never gambled, and hated Brooklyn. Josh was a little boy in Sheepshead Bay, right next to Coney Island, overlooking the Atlantic, and the family moved to Roosevelt Island when his father got a good job in advertising and became more of the man he wanted to be. Still, Josh grew up viewing Manhattan from across a river. I was born downtown, never knew a life not surrounded by the place people want to live and the things people want to own.

  Yet this is the place I want. It’s the opposite of Josh’s fantasies, but I’m proud of this roach-infested monument to semi-independence, with its rent-controlled grandmother neighbors and dollar stores, the smell of salt fish on the street. I’ve fled to Brooklyn with an eye for romance the way my father once fled from it. It’s the current of how generations live in this place.

  As I try to conceive of my life, the potential development of it, I see Josh’s stunted life and our father’s long life in sheets of clear tracing paper stacked over one another, different lines on the same city grid. Josh’s lines move in reaction to our father’s steady, straight success. Then my sheet settles on top of both of theirs, my line tiptoeing around the places and movements they’ve already claimed, unsure.

  Sometimes it seems like the paths that they walked, that I am walking, were preordained, or at least entirely circumstantial. So when I search for Josh’s reasons, unique and explainable qualities that made him push too far, all I find are the cue cards for every pampered white boy flailing around trying to be a man in the nineties. He came of age in the earnest, self-affirmational eighties. Then he lived in Murray Hill, downtown, surrounded by up-and-coming Wall Street plug-ins, in an apartment that his dad paid for, with a black leather couch like you see in high-class porn. Then, when the soon-to-be-a-star narrative ran out, he was just a guy with artsy inclinations and nonspecific business cards, and all of a sudden it was the mid-nineties and there were needles lying on park benches when he walked out for bodega coffee. That was never my world. I can’t know what I’d have done differently if it had been.

  —

  The next night, Sofia and I walk to a party in Bedford-Stuyvesant at a renovated brownstone that houses five of our friends. We find someone who has coke and try to beg in a dignified way for a line. A small group of us goes into a bedroom and we snort. We play ironic techno music about shopping and dance around with one another. We are all, really all of us, wearing plaid shirts, bought used, the kind Josh wore to cover track marks when everyone else did that, too. We laugh a lot. We plan a group trip to Virginia Beach for New Year’s, because who goes to Virginia Beach in the winter?

  This is strong coke, and soon I feel my body tighten, picture my blood as a fist, punching at the limits of my veins. I feel a ghost hand on my neck.

  I’m asked, “What’s wrong?”

  I say, “Nothing.”

  I stand alone by the door. It’s midnight, still early. Sofia walks over, presses herself into my body. She smells like cigarettes. She says, “I’m tired, take me home.”

  I want to go, too, but I feel that I shouldn’t.

  “Come on, let’s stay,” I say. “You’re the only person who gets tired on coke.”

  “I’ll leave alone, then,” she says.

  She knows I won’t let that happen, and she waits by the door for me to grab my jacket and follow. On the street, in the cold, she apologizes and says I didn’t have to leave. I say, It’s fine, in a passive-aggressive way. But it is fine. I never stay. I never push. And I like that she can play the foil, while I pretend that all I want to do is linger, that I dull my true inherited nature out of consideration for her.

  We walk home, a bit frightened in this neighborhood so late at night. My arm is around her and I’m reveling in the impulse to protect. We walk past more buildings, look into more windows, imagine. We ask each other questions: If we could live anywhere, where? If it’s a choice between a patio and a bay window, which do we have to have? I try to push the conversation to what might happen tonight, in our bedroom, things we’ve never tried. She stops, grabs my shoulder, and says, “Should we have bought some? Just for us to have? We could stay up all night. It would be fun, right?”

  I tell her it’s better that we didn’t. I say I’m still a little buzzed anyway, which I’m pretty sure is a lie. She agrees and we keep walking, content to explain to each other all the ways that we think we feel a little different than normal. At home, we drink water, take Advil, fall asleep.

  The next morning, I wake up early and make us eggs. I spoon them onto her plate and have a flash of memory: Percy on the pull-up bar after Josh finished a set; Josh cracking raw eggs into protein powder, shaking, drinking.

  Sofia says, “Will you be insulted if I put salt on these?”

  I say, “No, I mean, I already salted them, so they shouldn’t need any, but go ahead.”

  When we’re done eating, we clean the turtle tank. Last year, Sofia bought a turtle and named her Heidi, so now we have to care for her. Heidi lives in an overpriced aquarium next to the TV. Mostly, she sleeps on a rock under a lamp, but every month or so her water gets putrid brown and we have to set her on the bathroom floor while we dump her filth out in the tub.

  “Watch her,” Sofia says, straddling the tank, scrubbing the glass with rubber gloves. “Don’t let her run away.”

  The turtle hasn’t moved. She’s settled under the radiator for warmth.

  “She’s not going anywhere,” I say.

  “Well, she’s scared, poor thing,” Sofia says. “Hold her.”

  Suddenly, I am enraged. I start yelling.

  “I hate that fucking turtle,” I yell. “It doesn’t do anything. Why the fuck do we keep it alive?”

  Sofia calls me an asshole. I stomp out of the bathroom and she finishes alone. She lugs the clean tank back into the living room, sets it down on the table next to the TV, then glares at me. I pretend to be reading. The church starts up next door. I hear the shaky hum of chords on an electric keyboard. She places Heidi back on the rock, under the lamp, and Heidi doesn’t move. Sofia sits down on the couch next to me, and I apologize without specifics. She pulls a fleece blanket over both of us. We sit and listen to the electric keyboard, and I run my fingers along her neck, careful not to squeeze. We watch the turtle
.

  “Do you think she’s warm enough?” Sofia says. “I hope she’s warm.”

  —

  Josh recognized the power of his snake as a metaphor. He got Percy before he got high, but he soon made the connection—those forces that he kept closest to him, that held him tight.

  He left behind long, free-associative journals from each time he tried to get clean. They were meant for revisiting, full of little annotations and Post-it-note reminders: Read this when it gets hard! Learn! Now I force myself to revisit them, because it’s in these journals that he seems at his most bluster-less. And in so many of them, through dreams and memories and promises, a serpent slithers.

  [NOTEBOOK, UNDATED, “DETOX JOURNAL”]:

  It seems that my life has been a mental struggle. An aggregate of the madness (panic attacks), fear of sleep (real fear!), fear of darkness, pathological shyness toward girls from ages 14–19. Since I was conscious, cognizant of the world, it has been a mental struggle.

  Paxil is a gift from the Heavens. No more panic attacks. But I still felt short changed. I always tried to like inebriates, but I either didn’t like them or they made things worse. Pot, coke, alcohol, speed, and a plethora of prescription drugs did nothing. That’s when I met the giant python.

  She first came in the form of Percodan and Vicodin. She was still not squeezing me, but she looked so beautiful. I was petting her and she was writhing, ever so gently, around my limbs. I am not stupid. I know the dangers of a giant snake. But after all I had been through, I deserved it. I had been to hell. I was in purgatory. And for what? To be on anti-depressants so that I could be content? Fuck that. I deserved happiness. It was owed to me. The Serpent, she made me happy. She was beautiful. She still is.

  She was tightening around me. I didn’t care. Life went from panic, to contentedness to bliss to euphoria. I was being constricted.

  I try to break free. She has grown. Oh, she has grown. While she was on me, right under my nose, she grew. She knows what I like. Knows what I need. And what I fear. I am being constricted.

  It has always been so important for me to see Josh as fearless. To see the snake as another monster that he toyed with and could control, at least for a while. It’s harder to think about him helpless and realizing it. To know that before the snake, before the high, there was fear, and that being wrapped in something, constricted, crushed, helped make the fear go away.

  Later in the same journal, he writes immediately upon waking from a nightmare. He says he dreamed that he scored on East Houston Street, by the river. He was frightened and confused, didn’t know how he got to where he was. He was surrounded by prostitutes, all of them with “black girl” hair extensions. And then he saw that some of the prostitutes were little children. And then he was a little child, too. And then he saw a child’s skull with a snake weaving in and out of the eye sockets. He didn’t make it back home; he just stopped right there on Houston Street, snorted the whole bag, and then woke up.

  I have no idea if this has any meaning, but I can’t stop thinking about him seeing himself as a child, lingering in the dark places, using. He was a child and he was a corpse. The snake was there from the beginning to the end.

  The image pushes back against my memories. I was always a child. He never was. I was dwarfed, afraid. He wasn’t.

  I still want to know more about what he felt, but each time I lose a little obliviousness I long to take it back. I lay my head across Sofia’s lap on the couch, like I do sometimes. She pulls the blanket up onto my shoulders. I watch the turtle stick her neck out, hit her nose on the glass, then snap back into her shell. I am so easily young again, looking up, waiting for something new to happen, trying to remember how it felt to be wrapped in his snake.

  —

  At seven years old, Caleb sits next to his aunt Beth and kicks his feet over the edge of floral-print couch cushions. He’s watching cartoons and drinking orange juice, overcome by that special kind of obliviousness that children develop when faced with screens and straws.

  “Are you hungry?” Beth is saying. “Hon, are you hungry?”

  Caleb is oblivious, so he says nothing.

  “You want some crackers? Some Oreos? You look hungry. I’m going to get you a plate of Oreos.”

  Caleb doesn’t notice her leave his side and doesn’t feel as exposed as maybe he should, because while he watches and sucks he doesn’t see the planning of his abduction. He doesn’t see Josh in the doorway giving a signal to Dave and Joey, Caleb’s older brother. He doesn’t hear Josh whisper, Now. He only registers the feeling of hands on him, grabbing his arms and legs, and then the sour taste of an extraordinarily pungent tube sock being shoved in his mouth. He struggles. He kicks a little, tries to yell, feels his own spit gurgling into the sock, mixing with someone else’s sweat. Caleb is trussed up by his kin, Dave squeezing his ankles and Joey his wrists. He feels like one of the ducks in the window of the Chinese restaurant they go to on Christmas. He is dragged down the hall, and the gray carpet leaves sharp raspberries on his soft flesh. The stinging makes him want to cry, but he wills himself against that embarrassment.

  He sees Josh, the mastermind, walking alongside him, grinning. It’s a look of mischief and kindness all at once, and Caleb likes the layers of that. The smile promises torture, but it also commends Caleb, almost sweetly, for his willingness to take it. Josh winks. Or Caleb thinks he does. Yes, it was a wink. Remember the wink, he tells himself.

  Caleb watches Josh run ahead into his bedroom to prepare.

  “Bring him in,” he orders from the top bunk. “Bring him in and let me get a look at him.”

  Caleb knows that Josh is doing an impression of Brando’s voice in The Godfather. He doesn’t know the original voice, only Josh’s version, so he thinks the impression is flawless. He sits on the floor and feels many things. He is aware of how many things he is feeling, and that awareness is yet another feeling, awe at the overwhelming, near-physical presence of his emotion. He is terrified but joyous, breathless and panicked but easing into a sense of routine. He protests whatever may soon happen, but he hears laughter in his muffled pleas and realizes that he doesn’t know if he’s being sincere when he tries to beg for this to end.

  Eventually, he exhausts himself. Josh grabs some rope from somewhere.

  When Caleb is fully hog-tied, Josh counts punishment options on his fingers. He lets each threat linger on his tongue. He sits up straight and swells himself with breath. Caleb watches Josh’s chest as it inflates and thinks about what his puny fist would sound like beating against that chest, and then thinks about an iron door-knocker echoing through a stone castle in an episode of Scooby-Doo. The air feels coated in potential. Caleb will soon be the vessel for something epic, and he knows it. There will be no common noogies or purple nurples. Not today, not here, not with Josh. This is a space of transcendent torture.

  Caleb scrolls through options in his mind. Will it be the atomic wedgie, that perfectly symmetrical ass-chafing, a pair of hands on either side of his waist, yanking up so that the elastic of his tighty-whiteys grazes his ribs, then rocking him back and forth along that narrow balance beam of fabric until he bleeds and his kin claim that he’s on his period, none of them quite sure yet what that means? Will it be the Punishment Dice, a term Josh coined, Caleb’s fate decided by a roll—one promising a punch in the stomach, two a triple fart in the face, and so on, until heaven help you if you see a six? Will they hold his head in the bathtub again, make him trust that they won’t let him drown?

  Josh’s smile grows, his teeth sharp, his cheeks ripping apart with happiness.

  “Fuck it,” he says, and Caleb’s body shudders at the word. “Fuck it. It’s summer. It’s hot out. Let’s get European. Strip him naked, boys.”

  They have to untie him first. The rope proves to be a totally pointless embellishment, but at least it makes the afternoon last. They tug at their inexpert knots until Caleb is finally free, but before he can run Josh grabs him. Caleb’s shirt is ripped and
then it’s on the floor. Joey grabs the bottom of his jean shorts and lets Caleb’s own futile struggles pull them down. Then each ankle sock comes off, even as he kicks and laughs because of the ticklish soles of his feet.

  Finally, Caleb stands in just his underwear, Batman in five poses on his crotch, ready to fight. He tries to back away until there’s no more space and he’s pressed against Josh’s dresser. There is a pause for effect. Josh steps forward and does an impression of a falsely well-intentioned father.

  “Young man,” he says. “You’ll thank me for this someday.”

  As everyone laughs, Josh lunges and gives a quick yank. The underpants come down and then there it is—dangling little-boy penis, cold and pale.

  “Look at it,” Dave screams. He and Joey begin to flick at it, aiming to hurt.

  How long? Caleb wonders, feeling the sting. How long like this to make Josh happy?

  He will accept this treatment as long as he needs to, partly out of a lack of choice, partly because Josh’s happiness makes Caleb feel like a new person, larger, buoyant. He will, he tells himself, stand naked and stinging in service of that feeling. But standing naked isn’t enough. Josh is digging under his mattress. He exhumes a roll of duct tape, stolen from his mother days ago in the preplanning brainstorm phase. Dave and Joey emit owl hoots like a sitcom laugh track. Josh eyes his desk chair, that swiveling, wheeled, newly threatening contraption.

  It’s hard to know how much time is passing. Being with Josh feels like days when you’re in the experience; then when the experience is taken away and you return to your small self alone, it feels like you only got seconds. Time is a banana slice trapped in a Jell-O mold as Caleb is strapped to the chair with circles of tape until every inch is used up, because, Josh says, safety first. Even his mouth is taped.

  He hears his own heavy breath bursting out of his nose as he looks up at Josh wheeling the chair, hair flying off his ears as he breaks into a run down the hall toward the elevator. The door opens and Caleb feels himself spun and jostled as Josh wheels him right into the center of the elevator, facing forward so if you entered and happened to be looking down, you’d see all of Caleb’s circumcised, prepubescent secrets. It’s just the two of them for a moment. Josh whispers to him that he is a goddamn champion for doing this, and Caleb says, “Doing what?” But into the tape it sounds like nothing. Caleb looks up at Josh in the doorway. Josh gives a last grin, presses the button for every floor, all twenty, including the roof and the basement, and then exits.