Lord Fear

by Lucas Mann

Josh’s door stays closed, mostly, for years. When it opens, the air changes.

  Dave is fifteen, walking to the kitchen, and he is summoned. This has become the routine of their relationship—Josh stagnant, alone in there, Dave moving outside his door and then sometimes, without warning, getting invited in. They sit on Josh’s bed. The posters have changed. Dave eyes the newest and most idiotic one, a Ferrari GTO, cherry-red, the ultimate trophy meant to be lusted after by boys in towns that he’s never been to, dreaming of screeching along back roads and revving the engine for mall girls in parking lots. Josh doesn’t have a license or a place to rev.

  A bleached-blond fantasy is stretched prone across the hood of the car, her first-generation fake breasts mashed against metal. The poster’s placement is pretty obvious, visible with a slight head turn to Josh lying in bed, so he can look at the tits and the metal and pound his dick into old gym socks that he leaves on the floor for Beth to wash. Dave has heard him at night. He falls asleep imagining his brother’s face, manic, his hand a blur as he comes, looking at this two-dimensional portrayal of success.

  In the mornings, Dave sometimes wakes to the sound of Josh doing push-ups under the poster, his exaggerated groans like he’s pulling a semi-truck or is halfway through frantic porn sex. Some mornings the door swings open and Dave can stand silently, watch his brother’s eyes fixed on the poster, face too earnest to be anything but funny. Josh pushes until his body is hard and swollen, set jaw jiggling with strain, and if he’s not imagining a Whitesnake video, he’s imagining himself in a Rocky training montage, and it’s a toss-up for which of those things is lamer.

  The more Josh tries to stand out, Dave thinks, the more he tries to make himself someone impossible to ignore, the more undefined, unoriginal, vague he actually becomes. Man has muscles. Man cuts sleeves off shirt to show muscles. Man wants car with woman on top. Man sees sunglasses on TV and man buys those sunglasses to look like TV man. Man has desire so man makes himself come. Rinse sock; repeat.

  Josh has summoned him today, it seems, for an economics lesson in between sets. He points at the car on the poster.

  “Guess how much,” he commands. Dave doesn’t know. “Guess.”

  Dave guesses wrong and Josh calls him an idiot.

  “Okay, so can I go?” Dave says.

  “Do you think Dad could buy that car?” Josh says.

  “I don’t know,” Dave says. “Maybe?”

  “Bullshit,” Josh says, and Dave shrugs because this is the most pointless conversation being had anywhere in the world at this exact moment.

  They sit in silence. Josh begins to poke his shoulder muscle and watch the skin form quickly back over his finger indent. This can be done alone. Josh is not kicking him out, which means that he feels the need for company, for some unburdening that is too much, too honest, for his small cadre of sycophantic friends.

  “Why do you want to be so rich?” Dave asks him, surprised that he has spoken what he’s thinking.

  Josh stands up, just to loom.

  “You’re a fucking idiot,” he says.

  “You’re a fucking idiot,” Dave says, and the words thud with strain.

  “No, you’re the fucking idiot,” Josh says. “You don’t even know that when you’re rich you can do anything. That’s the point, you idiot.”

  Dave doesn’t want an elaboration on anything. He wants to leave, find his friends, real friends, the kind of guys who manage to get laid without Ferrari posters or push-ups, and he wants to smoke a joint along the river. He wants to tell his friends about this conversation, and then pantomime his brother jerking off for them to laugh at.

  Josh plants himself between Dave and the door. He smiles the smile that he always smiles, and the meaning, or meaninglessness, hasn’t changed since they were little boys. He makes a list of all the things he’s going to do when he gets money. He’s going to leave. He’s going to buy a ticket the day of his trip, first-class, not tell anybody, so they’ll all have to know what it feels like to miss him. He’s going to take cash out of a bank before he leaves and put it all in a suitcase. He’s going to go on a sleaze tour of the world. He’s going to fly into Thailand and start there, but that’s too obvious for smut, so then he’s going to head through Bangladesh, southern India, Sri Lanka. He’s going to buy boats off the struggling fishermen who built them, motor to little islands where nobody goes who doesn’t live there. He’s going to fuck whores in every ramshackle village he finds. He’s going to take girls who have never before been whores and make them whores, holding the money out as an answer to all their questions. He will have and they will have nothing, and so he will be infallible.

  Josh laughs and looks for Dave to laugh, but Dave doesn’t.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ, lighten up,” Josh says.

  “I’m light,” Dave says.

  He watches his brother fill the doorway. He looks at his face and he doesn’t understand. Josh’s wants, the fury and extravagance of them, never feel right to Dave. They come without a clear origin. Josh already has things; Josh isn’t told no. There is no excuse of having been deprived to make him want the way he does.

  —

  The setting changes, eventually. Josh moves out of their mother’s apartment into a new one that their father pays for, waits behind a closed door for Dave to enter. The rest is pretty much the same.

  Dave walks in with falafels after an NYU class. He expects to find his brother writing or fiddling on his keyboard, but instead Josh is standing in the middle of his living room, shoulders pulled back, smiling, holding his dick and pointing the head right at Dave like it’s a TV remote. A condom, wrinkled and wet, banana-yellow, lies on the wood floor between them. Dave looks down and makes an involuntary noise appropriate for the situation.

  “Don’t touch it,” Josh tells his brother, as though that’s something Dave had been considering.

  Josh urges him to come in, just step around it. Dave doesn’t move. Josh launches into the story of everything that transpired to result in a used, banana-yellow condom lying on his floor. Josh tells him that they’d been standing right where he is now, him and the whore. He made her put her hands on the wood, bent her over fully, and then fucked her. He made her scream, not just because she was paid and had to.

  Dave stares at his brother, which he does not want to do because that’s what Josh wants, but how do you not stare at someone trying so hard for it?

  Josh has a girlfriend. She’s often here with him when Dave shows up, on the couch, quiet, no suspicion on her face. Dave lets himself be angry on her behalf now. That feels nice. She is a good woman, he reminds himself. He doesn’t know her well, but she’s always seemed gentle, at least, and it can be assumed that she’s a good enough person to not deserve to sit oblivious on the same couch where her boyfriend rough-fucks prostitutes. Her name is Priya. She is South Asian of some kind—she never offers details and Dave never asks—and so every time he sees her it makes him think of Josh’s proposed sleaze tour in his bedroom at their mother’s place.

  Dave likes to mull over the option of telling Priya about the sleaze tour, feeling righteous in the telling. Josh makes it so easy to feel righteous.

  Percy, still a baby but already huge, slithers by Dave’s leg, a cable rope along his ankle, and Dave jumps. Josh laughs and tells him to watch out for the monster. Dave tries to focus his thoughts on Priya, who is so beautiful, more beautiful now that she isn’t here and he’s staring at the full extent of how she’s been wronged.

  The first time Dave met her they sat in Josh’s bedroom, Dave on the bed, Priya, posture of a childhood ballet dancer, rigid on a low chair. They were all going to go out to dinner, but Josh was in the bathroom, showering and primping, so they sat in his room to hear him as he talked through the door. Priya smiled every time Josh spoke. Dave was aware of being jealous of his brother. Josh, something in Josh, made this woman want him, made her happy when she heard his voice. Caleb was there, too, standing by the door, and Dave knew that he was also jea
lous of Josh, and that made Dave angry.

  Priya was mid-sentence when Josh came out of the bathroom. She was facing Dave, and she didn’t see him as he walked behind her, naked, still dripping. Josh held his finger to his lips and glared at Dave to stay quiet. Dave felt his own inability to disobey and he hated his silence. Josh dangled himself above his girlfriend. That was the best way to put it. He held the base of his dick and dangled it in front of her eyes, demanding her to look. She sighed and he held it a little lower, so it obscured her face.

  Josh was waiting for laughter. Dave set his jaw and felt his teeth grind together. He didn’t want to give his brother the satisfaction, but laughter was easier than silence. He giggled, regretted it. Caleb giggled, too. It was a timid sound, the noise a rabbit would make if rabbits could laugh. Priya said nothing, gave a wry smile, and resigned herself to sitting very still, as though this scenario had always seemed like a plausible inconvenience for her to wait out.

  Josh got bored quickly. He kissed Priya on the cheek, gave a wink to Caleb and Dave. She didn’t seem upset, and nobody spoke about what had just happened, so it felt almost instantly unreal. They went to get Chinese food. He put his arm around her, she rested her head on him, and it was possible to believe, walking down the street behind them, that nothing was wrong.

  —

  A few months later, the phone rings in Beth’s apartment and Dave picks up. Josh is on the line.

  “Get over here,” he says. “Come now. Please.”

  Maybe it’s because of the shock of hearing please, but Dave does not protest and he feels in sort of a haze as he leaves his mother, crosses the river, walks through Manhattan.

  The door is open when he gets to the apartment. Josh grabs him, pulls him in, shuts the door behind him. His eyes are worried, which is nice to see. Dave wishes Josh would stop moving so he could look at those eyes and feel satisfied. Josh is saying, “Listen, you need to say that you’ve been here all night. You’re my brother and we were just having movie night. That makes sense. We were watching a movie. What were we watching? What would we watch together?”

  There is no answer for this.

  “What did you do?” Dave asks him.

  Only as he vocalizes the question does Dave realize the full expanse of what the answer could be. The line between Josh’s wants and his possibilities has never felt so blurred. There is no one around anymore to check his impulses or to ask him why. How far does he go in this shiny new apartment when he is left alone?

  Josh tells him the story and doesn’t seem ashamed. He rushes through it without providing much detail, but what he says is enough, and Dave shapes a scene that is the ultimate confirmation of his suspicions. How could he not?

  The prostitute was on her back on the leather couch. It was a humid night and her thighs stuck to the leather. She lay waiting, looking up. He came out of the bathroom and stood above her with the snake running along his shoulders. He extended his arms and Percy ran the length of his wingspan, the dark maroon pattern on the tip of his tail twisting as Josh grabbed hold and waved it. She followed his eyes.

  Percy wants to play. Dave imagines Josh saying this line, Hannibal Lecter–ish, barely above a whisper.

  She scrambled off the couch and started to back away. He walked at her like something out of a really bad movie. Percy writhed.

  She snatched her tiny pile of clothes off the floor and ran out his door into the hallway. He didn’t follow, just stood in the doorway, no longer smiling. She told him you can’t just do that. She was going to fucking tell people about this, she said. He didn’t respond. He stood, Percy heavy on him, and wondered who she could tell, what she would say, who would believe her. Maybe someone. Nothing had happened. He wasn’t going to do it, but how might the story sound? She got in the elevator and he was alone. He felt alone.

  Dave doesn’t say anything. Josh doesn’t want him to; he just wants his presence and an alibi. Dave listens to his brother talk himself down. Nothing happened. And who’s she going to tell? And what’s the big deal? Even if she’s green, she’s probably seen way worse. She’s a whore; that’s sort of the idea. And even if she does tell somebody, she’s not a person you listen to. He’s a handsome young man, freshly shaven, in a Manhattan apartment, with clean suits hanging in his closet.

  “Fuck it, everything’s fine,” Josh says. He waves his hand, dismisses the issue. Dave feels himself nodding.

  “You want to stay?” Josh says. “Stay if you want. I don’t mind.”

  —

  Years later, the phone rings again at Beth’s place, and time is a gear that won’t catch. Dave still lives with his mother, finally done with college but not yet ready to move, wary of being alone. And Josh is still alone in that apartment, a large part of why Dave is so wary.

  “Come over,” Josh says when Dave picks up.

  Beth lingers at his shoulder, trying to hear something through the receiver. Dave shrugs her off.

  “Come on,” Josh says. “What are you doing? Nothing. You’re doing nothing, you’re scratching your balls. Come on, I’ve got to tell you something.”

  So Dave goes. He leaves his mother, crosses the river, walks through Manhattan.

  They don’t do much. They sit on the black leather couch. They watch cartoons from their youth, with bright placating images that they could always agree on loving. They laugh together. Dave remembers when Josh would call himself Captain America, call Dave a communist, leap on him, and start smacking his face in the name of freedom. He even brings that up and Josh laughs, agrees that it happened that way. They watch until it feels like silence needs to be filled.

  A tampon commercial comes on, set at a carousel.

  “So, little brother,” Josh says. “Guess who’s been shooting dope?”

  He doesn’t look at Dave. He stays sitting up with that forced weight lifter’s posture, staring at the TV as though not in conversation with anyone.

  There are emotional options available to Dave. Pure shock, though that would be a stretch. Sadness would certainly be appropriate. Perhaps a sudden geyser of brotherly compassion that Dave has never felt before, a revelation that no matter what he’s done in the past, Josh is in danger now. But this is not a moment divorced from history. The first and only thing that Dave can think is that this is the final and greatest act of his brother’s aggression. Percy slides across the top of the TV and nestles himself by the radiator. This is a dare, Dave thinks. Another taunting question. What are you going to do, little boy? What do you make of me now? How can you possibly handle the life that I’m willing to live?

  “You should try it,” Josh says when Dave gives him no response.

  Of course that comes next. No confession here, just the challenge.

  Dave lets his gaze wander, and everything becomes obvious now that he knows to look. The Bic lighter on the coffee table of a man who always chided smokers for their weak wills. The spoon lying on the counter of a kitchen otherwise immaculate. And, Jesus, the obvious one, the hypodermic needle lying next to the spoon, as though Josh spent hours staging the perfect still life of brand-new addiction. Is there blood on the needle? That would be a nice touch. Dave remembers waiting his turn in the doctor’s office in Sheepshead Bay and hearing his brother’s screams echoing. He was so terrified of needles that three gruff Russian nurses had to hold him down. Dave remembers Beth’s voice, Shh baby, shh baby, until it was over.

  Josh gets up, walks to the kitchen, and returns with the needle between two fingers. He points it at Dave like the tail of a snake.

  “It’s the greatest sensation you’ve ever felt,” he says. “Just trust me one time. There’s nothing else past this. This is where all feeling leads. You don’t want to live a life without feeling, do you?”

  “You want me to use that?” Dave says.

  “Dave, I’m clean,” Josh says. And then, “What, you don’t believe me?”

  They are both silent.

  The only reason Dave doesn’t walk out is the guilt. Josh
knows it, too. Dave is the one who first got Josh high, and there’s a feeling of responsibility in that fact that he doesn’t want now. Dave broke his arm in a pickup softball game, got overprescribed Vicodin, brought some to the apartment, and announced that life feels better when it is slowed down. And of course that’s true. It really, really does. And he really did think that Josh would feel better, be better, when everything shimmered and lagged a little. And Josh was better. Their time together was less tense. Dave never loved his brother more than those first months when they shared an opioid daze.

  Dave should have known what the end result would be. How could he have known? Still, he should have. Josh has to be bigger in everything. One perfectly good high—tidy pills, ready-made doses—isn’t acceptable when someone somewhere is getting even higher. Dave eyes the tip of the needle, a new toy, so much cheaper than a bench press or a makeup kit or a girl from an ad in the Village Voice.

  “What do you want from me?” Dave hears himself say, more soap opera than he intended.

  Josh raises his eyebrows, lets that serve as an answer.

  “Josh, this is fucking absurd,” Dave says. “It’s just…it’s absurd.”

  Josh shrugs, then grins. He sits back down next to Dave and makes a show of how much better sitting feels to him now, like nobody has ever really sat before. He tilts his head back and lets his body sink deeper, his toes wiggling in his socks. He closes his eyes and relishes the last effects of a hit he must have taken before Dave arrived. Dave watches him let the feeling take over, oblivious to anything other than his own sensation, which is kind of what he’s always cultivated.

  Dave stands up fast. He remembers in a wave, every stoned scene that has brought them to this point crashing down, all the long and boring hours when Josh invited his little brother over so as not to be alone.

  He remembers the first time Josh took Vicodin. Josh was nervous. Dave taunted him for that.

  He remembers, months later, Josh no longer nervous, sitting on the couch and insisting that nothing tasted quite as good as cherry-flavored prescription cough syrup, which he bought when Dave didn’t arrive fast enough with the pills. Josh wore a ridiculous silk smoking jacket, looked like Hugh Hefner on steroids. He took out a set of really nice tumblers, the kind that captains of industry pour aged whiskey in to celebrate a merger. He plucked three ice cubes from a bucket with unnecessary tongs, then cracked the childproof seal and gave it a sniff like he was a sommelier. He poured one full bottle into a single tumbler, perfect, right to the top, and began to sip. He sipped and talked about the future, mumbled vague screenplay ideas until he finished the syrup and finally looked pacified as he fell asleep.