by Lucas Mann
“I need you to do something for me,” Dave says.
I say okay. He tells me there are pills in his backpack, lying on the floor next to us. Vicodin and Percocet and something else I can’t recognize. And there’s more at home in the little suitcase that he brought over to my parents’ place. I make an involuntary surprised noise, and he says, “Come on,” like this shouldn’t be a shock.
“Flush them all,” he tells me. “And don’t take any for yourself.”
I start to protest that last part to be funny, but he looks at me, so I say okay, again. I promise I’ll come back and I leave. I start running down Seventh Avenue because that feels so cinematic, my willingness to wheeze just to make sure I destroy the danger in time. I stop after a block because I’m tired and this is stupid; it’s not that kind of danger. I get a slice of pizza and I walk with it.
I shouldn’t be thinking only of Josh. Not every danger is his. But memory conflates, especially if someone dies when you’re still young enough to see only Woolf’s bright caricatures, when you don’t think much of anything but you feel everything. Josh’s overdose is the most seismic event that has ever happened or will ever happen in either of his brothers’ lives, an axis on which all other stories move. He is every thrill and every fear. There’s no room for anything else, or there shouldn’t be.
But soon I’m in my parents’ bathroom, standing over the toilet with two bottles of painkillers. I’m hearing Dave and his pleas for my help, seeing his shaved white head, the scrapes on his arms. I’m the one concealing evidence this time, making sure that this incident can be isolated quickly in the narrative—just a little too much prescribed to ease the sciatica, just a bad day and an overreaction on the way back from the pharmacist. I think of Dave’s memories of Josh on the leather couch where I sometimes slept, Josh making his brother hold on to the secrets.
It’s not a premeditated thing, not a statement I intend to make, but there are my fingers reaching into the second bottle, pulling out two Percocets, high-dose. I pop them into my mouth and swallow hard and dry before pouring everything else into the bowl.
I sit in front of the TV for hours.
The phone rings and my father is on the line, far away. He asks how Dave is, and I say bald, which is the wrong answer, so I say okay, lucid, getting better. I watch a reality show about deep-sea fishermen and feel like my fingers are made of steel, mid-smelting. I hold them in front of my face and wiggle them to see them ripple, and then I laugh at myself because that feels like an amateurish thing to do. I walk back along Seventh Avenue and mumble my way through explanations at the hospital—who I’m looking for, what he’s in for, which I can’t really explain, where they’ve put him, which I don’t know. They tell me where he is, but I get lost. I walk long loops around the hospital, peeking through open doors at tubes. I finally find him way up in the psych ward, the place for botched wrist-slits and failed ODs, sitting at dinner across from a very thin man, who starts to cry when I walk in. Dave is glaring at him, disgusted.
He sees me and doesn’t say anything. I give a big smile-wave combination like this is visiting day at summer camp. I sit next to him and tell him my task is done. I think of Paul Newman eating eggs in Cool Hand Luke and fight the urge to laugh. He thanks me and says the food is horrible. He runs a plastic spork through mashed potatoes like he’s raking a Zen garden. His ex-wife had a mini–Zen garden. I watched them rake it together, him looking up and saying, I swear it really calms you, no bullshit. We sit next to one another in a crowded room where nobody speaks. I ask if he wants his fruit cup; he says no, and I begin to eat.
I think that whenever somebody writes about an addict, the narrative is ready-made for them in stencil form if they want to take it—either the former addict writes memories of their past as though detached from it, with wry, wise regret, or a loving observer writes about their loved addict in isolation, as one person who fell into one hole, and if or when the hole closed around them it was tragic but there were no implications for anyone who knew them, just the tragedy. The bad-luck anomaly. That’s the story we’ve been telling, all of us, from a sturdy, safe place we made up, from the quiet of lives that have settled around his absence.
But Josh is in the thick air of the messy moments of all the years that have passed without him. He is here with us, in this room where nobody wants to be, where anybody has the capacity to be. There is a face, his face, transposed onto all the faces that I look at and am frightened by, slurping fast dinners before waiting in line for the pay phone and hustling back to their cots. There are his eyes; I think I remember those clearly now, deep, layered brown and a little hidden. And there are his words, the ones that Dave spoke to me not long ago, words that feel like they underlie so much of what came next: Lord Fear is frightened of what has never been.
—
Like me.
This is the first thing that Lena Milam thinks when she faces Josh. She is on Tommy Parker’s bed in his mother’s apartment on Roosevelt Island—on top of the sheets; they haven’t yet been under together. Tommy is sitting next to her, close. He is narrow and gentle, gentler than any other fifteen-year-old boy Lena has ever encountered. He’s holding her hand, and that makes her feel lucky. Lena is fourteen, and she, too, is narrow and gentle. Tommy is fit to her. She thinks of them like two parts of one machine that works.
Josh is the other part to Tommy. When they stand together, there is no similarity, just comedy, a mismatched buddy-cop vibe. Josh is tan and broad, and when he speaks it’s meant for everyone to hear. Tommy is often at his elbow, pale and concave, a perfect straight man. Before Lena, they were always together. Now they are together less, so there’s tension.
Josh walks into the bedroom and doesn’t say anything. He looks at Lena and Tommy on the bed. Lena feels as though she’s been caught, though she’s not sure doing what. She pulls her hand away from Tommy’s, and Josh laughs at that. She presses her fingers together like a steeple. She keeps her legs crossed at the ankles, and squeezes something invisible between her calf muscles. She rocks her torso just a little, the motion only noticeable to anyone who might be staring at her.
Josh is staring. He leans down, right in Lena’s face. He reaches forward, and the muscles on his forearms make little valleys where skin settles around strained sinew. His fingertips, calloused from drumstick wood, are pointed at her ribs, and she imagines that he might play her bones like he is a xylophonist and she is a pirate skeleton from a Saturday morning cartoon. Right before the moment when her body would have decided to flinch, Josh veers his hands away and grabs Tommy’s arm, the intended goal from the beginning.
“Thomas,” he says, fake-stern. “Thomas, it’s time.”
“No, man,” Tommy says in a way that makes Lena think this protest has been planned. “No, hey, come on, man, it’s embarrassing.”
“Thomas, the lady paid for a show, and goddamnit, she’s going to get one.”
Josh winks at Lena. She feels queasy in a good way.
Josh has Tommy by the elbow and he yanks him up, escorts him into the space that has just been ordained a stage, the little square of blue carpet in between bed and door. Lena watches.
The show begins. It’s mediocre, but spirited.
Josh is John Belushi. Tommy, theoretically, is Dan Aykroyd. They do Blues Brothers bits. They order four fried chickens and a Coke. They talk about Illinois Nazis. They call Lena a penguin. The accents are terrible. These are New York boys, and New York boys can only do New York accents.
Tommy stops after a while, his face adorably ashamed.
He says, “Okay, that’s enough, I think she’s seen the movie anyway.”
She has.
“Get your ass back up here, my brother,” Josh says, still in the bad accent.
He tugs on Tommy, somewhere between fun and threatening.
“Dance with me,” he yells.
Tommy tries to make himself heavier, unmovable, but Josh kicks at his shins to get him stepping. It’s funny. The eff
ort is, at least, even if the impressions aren’t. Lena begins to laugh, a surprised, gasping sound, holding her steepled fingers up over her lips. Josh seems nourished by this. He points at her, triumphant, and smiles. He has the most geometric smile that Lena has ever seen. Every feature is so large and defined that it has its own shape—rectangle teeth in a row, sharp diamond eyes, lips opening as wide as possible so that his mouth is stretched into a full trapezoid.
He begins to force Tommy to shake his tail feathers. He makes him dance like Ray Charles is playing an electric keyboard in the corner and they’re surrounded by black extras. Josh dances, too, with abandon rarely seen in a straight male teenager. He dances up close to Lena, puts his face right in front of hers. She sees all the things he wants her to see, things hard to define—his force, his burgeoning beauty. Teeth, he wants her to see his teeth as he smiles. But she sees something else, too, equally hard to define. Maybe the best way to put it is need. For all the ways that Josh’s body forms a physical command—laugh, laugh now—his eyes are begging. Laugh, please. I need you to laugh.
This is an important moment.
It is intoxicating to be fourteen and needed. Overwhelming, yet impossible to confirm. Lena scolds herself against Judy Blume self-importance, that joy of identifying as the kid who gets the insides of people when her peers see only a shell. But there is Josh dancing, and there are his insides shivering, she thinks, in need of someone’s cupped hands and breath for warmth.
The show ends. Josh releases Tommy, shoves him, actually, back next to Lena on the bed. Tommy is breathing hard. He holds her hand again, palm now damp.
“How was that?” he says.
It’s a loaded question, and Lena is still thinking of fear like a birthmark on Josh’s face, so she just says, “Great.”
She looks up at Josh, his chest heaving, unconvinced. There’s a moment of panic, and then she laughs again. It starts forced, but it catches on inside her, and Lena laughs until her ribs hurt and she is hoarse, laughs until she snorts, clapping her hands like a zoo seal during a public feeding. Josh smiles.
“She’s all right, man,” he says to Tommy, like the only thing that has transpired in the past fifteen minutes is Lena looking to pass inspection. Lena swears to herself that she can see him slacken into momentary peace, as though he has finally exhaled.
—
Josh is waiting for her on the street before her first day of high school. She hasn’t asked him to do this. She’s hardly even seen him all summer. He looks like he feels as though he should be thanked.
“Thanks,” Lena says. “You didn’t have to do this.”
Josh shakes his head with vigor. He says he will not entertain thank-yous, says it’s nothing. She shrugs and they turn to walk together because that’s the only thing to do. He doesn’t put his arm around her, but it feels like he’s been thinking about it. He hangs close, walks slowly so that he doesn’t leave her behind. Their sides brush, her shoulder, his biceps.
Lena doesn’t date Tommy anymore. She misses him and cries a lot. She feels hugely alone most of the time, alone like there is no matter around her. Then she feels ridiculous, goes to the bathroom sink and splashes cold water on her face until it’s numb, which is also, she thinks, kind of ridiculous.
It seems like a long time since she has walked next to somebody. She decides that it’s a nice feeling, and that Josh is nice for giving it to her. He’s the only other person she knows who goes to the High School of Music and Art. She thought of him at her flute audition, and in her pre-September panics she has had only his presence to imagine, a school full of Joshes, their shoulders and laughter filling up the hallways.
He’s wearing sunglasses, even though the sky is gray. He’s wearing old Keds that squeak as he walks. He walks like a goddamned horse. Even as she feels him slowing for her, she is doubling her steps to keep up and make it casual.
“You’re slow,” he says to her after a block. “No wonder you’re always late.”
“How do you know I’m always late?” she says.
“A guess.”
“You know, it doesn’t make sense to wear sunglasses on a cloudy day.”
He stops and looks down at her with a grave face. “There’s glare,” he says. “Off the clouds. The sun is stronger on days like this. You’re squinting right now. You don’t even realize it, but I see you squinting.”
He looks satisfied.
“You don’t have to slow down for me,” she says.
“Yes, I do.”
They walk to the tram, the only way for a kid without a driver’s license to get off the Island until the subway tunnel is finished. Ahead, Lena can see the metal pods creaking back and forth over the river on thick cables. The wind is angled straight at their faces, blowing Lena’s hair into her eyes, ruining whatever her morning mirror time had intended to accomplish.
When they get on, the tram shakes in the wind. Lena is afraid, like always, of the fitful jolts of creaking metal. They can see all of New York City below them, and she imagines the feeling of falling into it, the sound of that crash. Josh looks down at her. He tells her that when he was a kid he used to be scared whenever he crossed a bridge. Not anymore, but he remembers the feeling.
On the uptown bus, it’s like they stop at every corner, vibrating in idle, waiting for old women on their grocery runs. A man is standing over Lena’s seat, rocking with each stop, zipper at eyeball level. Lena feels Josh next to her, ready to spring. Lena doesn’t want to like that feeling, but this is a big bus full of strangers and she is small, and Josh is here with her.
They don’t talk. He has his headphones on and she can hear music leaking out. She wants to lean in closer to see if she can recognize the songs. His drumsticks are in his hands, pattering on his jeans. She is pretty sure he’s looking down at the top of her head. Their sides touch again. This is mutual, Lena tells herself. We both need this.
At the gates of the school, he doesn’t say good-bye. He disappears into the mass of people who all seem to know him, and she is alone again.
—
“Comb your fucking hair,” Josh tells her when she opens the door to her building. Lena isn’t offended. It’s always like this. A year of it now, their ritual repeated but never addressed. His waiting for her, her lateness, his running monologues about her hair needing a fucking combing, her clothes needing a fucking wash, her face needing, well, something, something to improve it. It makes him happy to admonish her, and it doesn’t make her unhappy.
Lena steps out into hard drizzle, unprepared. She runs to Josh and he raises his coat up above the two of them. She nestles into the dryness. He smiles, embarrassed by his own chivalry. The coat is new, a black trench, too warm for the season, but it’s a look that he has committed to and he does not commit to looks lightly. She tells him, “I like the look,” and he says, “What are you even talking about?”
Lena slept through her alarm this morning and then woke in a panic, scrambling out of bed, stubbing her toe while scrounging for clean underwear. She said no to breakfast, pushing through the kitchen while her mother yelled something about nutrition and her sister sucked her teeth in judgment.
“You’re not even late,” Sister said.
“You sure you’re not hungry?” Mother said.
“She just wants to be early for that boy. Can’t keep him waiting.”
Lena’s sister doesn’t understand. She assumes they’re sleeping together because that’s how she sees the world, as one big petri dish of people doing the deed and trying to keep it from her. But Lena and Josh aren’t doing that, and even the thought is infuriating. They are just together in the mornings, on time. They shepherd each other through New York City at rush hour. It feels good. All fall it felt good, and in the winter, too, when they left mismatched footprints in the snow. And now in the spring, when he wears tank tops on sunny days, like the Roosevelt Island tram is Venice Beach.
Yesterday he wasn’t there waiting for her and it ached. This is another thing
she could never explain to her sister—how she paced waiting for him, then walked to his building, looked high up at a window that might be his, imagined him alone up there, watching her. How when she hurried out of the apartment this morning and saw him, she felt relief. He wasn’t mad at her. He was okay. You can’t explain a platonic longing like that. The steady weight of one promised hour each weekday.
“We have to stop,” Lena says at the corner deli. “Breakfast.”
She runs in and returns with a two-pack of Twinkies and a Coke. She holds them out, one in each hand, grinning, an offering—Go ahead, Josh, tell me.
“Jesus Christ, Lena,” he begins on cue. “That is so fattening. There are five hundred calories there. And none of them are productive.”
His lips are pursed. His head is angled down in disappointment. One clump of wet hair has curved over his forehead like a parenthesis. Lena almost slides it off with her finger, then doesn’t. He looks right at her, posture rigid, only enhancing the superiority, dark and lucid irises like ink. He tries to snatch her food, but she’s expecting this and pulls away too fast, hides her daily corn-syrup doses behind her back.
She sticks her tongue out at him. He marvels aloud at his own patience, says that when he stands over the premature grave where Lena’s total lack of willpower will take her, he will not feel responsible or even sorry, not even a little.
“Bury me with my Twinkies,” she yells, and he laughs and that feels good.
A pigeon dive-bombs them, streaking toward Lena’s unkempt hair. She flails at it with her Twinkies, her can. Josh shrieks in spite of himself, a noise so preposterous coming from him. Their eyes meet and now they’re both laughing, until the laughing runs out and they’re just breathing.
In the pause, Lena wants to ask why he wasn’t waiting for her yesterday, why he does that sometimes, and does he know what it feels like to stand and wait, how small she is on wide sidewalks, the way doormen look at her with pity? She wants to grab him by the elbow and say, Jesus, of course she knows it’s hard for him some days. She sees the frail parts of him, and if anybody can understand when he doesn’t want to go outside and see all the faces moving past, closing in, it’s her. She notices on the mornings when he comes down with drawn eyes, without having bothered to wash his face or brush his teeth, when mushed cereal and chewed fingernails are sticking to his gums. It’s a small thing, but she notices. He can try to explain if he wants to. She’ll listen.
