by Lucas Mann
The talking stops here. I watch Beth as she breathes, watch the skin around her clavicle ripple like running a spoon over the top of pudding.
I watch her but I think of a conversation I had with my father years ago. Josh had just left our place after a detox attempt. It was the first time he’d done it in front of us, but I never saw him. He was behind a closed bathroom door, and I had to settle on hearing him retch. My father took me to the park to shoot baskets. He didn’t want to talk but I did. I remember being scared. I remember asking him, What if I get sick like that? If it’s not his fault, then can it happen to me? Mostly, I remember the ease with which my father said no, how sure he was that I had no reason to be afraid of myself, as he caught my rebound, tossed me the ball, told me to shoot again.
I was assumed immune to that affliction, always. And always I’ve wondered if the assumption was the thing that kept me safe. Tell a child he is not one to lose himself, and when he’s high on Vicodin, sad over a breakup, he will not reach for anything more. Tell a child he’s fine, and he’ll believe you. It cannot be that simple.
Beth tries to feed me Bagel Bites that have been in the freezer for a long time. I decline and she says please. I shouldn’t go home hungry; that’s not right. She hands me the food, wrapped in a paper towel.
I stand up and say, “Thanks.”
She says, “I’m sorry,” but I’m not sure what for.
I take the tram back across the river, an overthought homage to the stories Beth told me. The pod moves haltingly and groans in the wind. I’m afraid of heights, so I look at the floor. I imagine my brother and his mother up here, swaying into one another, together, close.
—
When I read Josh’s notebooks, often I find myself abandoning all direction except the search for any acknowledgment of my presence. It’s there. Only twice. Both mentions come from his dream journals, where he always believed he’d find explanations. The first is abstract:
[NOTEBOOK, UNDATED, “DREAM”]:
Last night, I went to bed and my “outside” was content. I popped a Xanax and this was supposed to carry me on my way. Dreams ate away at the little orange pill. Shame. Thinking of how pathetic I am. Dreamed that I should be working. Boss is calling me. I’m hiding. Under the desk. Porn magazines under the desk, Luke, a Chinese girl, whores. The inside rules.
I look for meaning in my company. Me, some porn, a Chinese girl who is not named, and more than one prostitute—we are the objects that he hides with. Or, we are the objects that manifest his shame. That glare out from his inside and remind him that he isn’t who he wants to be. Or, we are toys, the kind that are soothing at first because you can see them as uncomplicated, but you always feel worse for having played.
The second mention is more direct:
[NOTEBOOK, UNDATED, “POWER DREAM”]:
I saw myself golden and huge. My father was standing in the shadows trying to talk to me, holding the baby. I looked at him and his baby; doomed.
I’ve stared at this one for a long time trying to figure out who he’s talking about when he says doomed. My father and I in the shadows together? Him, golden, alone? All of us? There’s nothing more about me, nowhere deeper to dig. And as a friend once told me: Write a dream; lose a reader. Because dreams are nothing but crossed wires unless you’re hell-bent on looking for meaning. And forced meaning is cheap because then anything counts.
It feels good that he wrote of me, I know that. Even doomed, even under the desk, in the shadows, with all the things he no longer wanted to see.
I force myself to look out the tram window because I want something to do. In front of me are stacks of high-rises, Manhattan at its most overbearing. I think I can see people moving on a top-floor balcony. I have a realization that cannot be proved. That always, and especially the last time with Beth, Josh wanted to take the tram for this way of seeing. Here, you are not crammed next to people on the ground, not part of the street-bound tangle of legs and wheels. Here, floating, you’re at the perfect height to see the tallest of what has been built, not the slow construction of it, not the base. And you can see figures in windows moving, not below you but in front of you, suspended in glass a hundred yards away. High up, so they must be happy, but you can’t see their faces to confirm their happiness or feel less than them. You are moving and yet you feel still. You are suspended in possibility. You are, for ten minutes, over black water, comforted.
Beth is often present in his writing, more present than anyone. He always speaks of her gently, with regret or reverence or a promise to atone. In the same notebook, twenty pages later, but who knows how many months or years, there’s a short poem written in blue ink, with looping, tired handwriting:
[POEM, UNDATED, “STAY”]:
Just look upon me (mother!)
Bless me. Do not go. Do not stay.
I will be here.
He was. And so was she. She still is.
—
I remember a lot of books in Josh’s apartment, some borrowed from our father, some new. I remember him reading aloud because he liked the rhythm of a particular passage. I remember Post-it notes sticking out over spines. But when the boxes were brought home after his death there were no books to read from. A keyboard, a collection of Beatles sheet music, a lot of CDs, but I don’t remember any books. In high school, I tried to teach myself to play his Beatles sheet music on his keyboard. I managed to get the left hand down on “Hey Jude,” but then I quit, content to plod through the rhythm and sing until my voice cracked.
I don’t know where the books went, or how present they really were. He did save writing, but only the kind that came in quick, unprofessional bursts. He saved his own work, of course, a decade’s worth of it, and he also saved writing addressed to him. I think reading a novel, something fully formed and outside himself, became increasingly difficult. The addiction robbed energy and empathy equally. But he read and reread the scraps of loose-leaf that bore his name, that confirmed his existence, his address. He stuffed them into a plastic bag, knotted and unknotted until the handles broke.
Only one piece of correspondence is negative, and it’s the last he ever received. It is so starkly out of place that I can only assume he didn’t have time to throw it out:
YOU ARE HEREBY ORDERED to appear for a VIOLATION OF PROBATION HEARING at 9:30 a.m. on 06/02/2000 before judge A. GOLDBERG in part AA70 of the SUPREME Court of NEW YORK County.
This letter is dated May 19, 2000, a week before he was found. When I scan through the correspondence bag, it’s always the first piece I read; then I quickly ignore its implications, the way he must have tried to do. It’s a glaring question, one with an answer that he didn’t want to see and that I’m not sure I want to know.
The rest of the documents, the ones consciously saved, are kind, praising. They span more than a decade and have been, I think, decisively curated, pared down to only the positive.
He kept each paper from college deemed worthy of an A, even a B+ in political science that showed promise. Red pen comments:
Comprehensive and thorough!
Well done!
Great work, but PROOFREAD!
He kept a response from a Brown education professor whom he mailed about a business plan that he developed and briefly got off the ground—a high school curriculum worked into rap songs that he wrote. The response is kind but curt, short enough to be almost a form letter. He highlighted the encouraging phrases in pink marker:
Wonderful Ideas.
Keep Trying and I believe you’ll get there.
Respectfully yours.
Mostly, it’s love letters, all kinds of love. I pour these out on my coffee table, read until they become the same:
It hurts when you yell at me. I want you to approve. If everything works out fine, I think we’ll get married and have a family.
It feels so good to have somebody that I love.
I really mean it when I say that I will always be there for you.
Please return my
kiss.
Consider yourself hugged!
You smell so good. You write such good letters. I am so lucky, I think.
Happy Birthday, you handsome dog.
You. Are. Still. My. Valentine. And you will be for a long time.
You are talented. You are unique.
I imagine him reading each letter, then carefully refolding. It seems like every missive is signed with a different name:
Love, Evelyn.
Forever, Grace.
Love you always, Nerrisa.
For now, Sonia.
Love, love, love, Anisha.
Booba.
Priya.
Sima.
—
She asks me to call her Sima because long ago my brother told her about a woman named Sima who he loved and missed. And it’s nice to think about reminding someone of their love—less complex, less exposed than being loved all on your own.
This is the day she meets him:
She is working the counter at a sandwich shop on East Twenty-Sixth Street. It’s the late 1990s. She arrived in New York only months before. She is twenty-five, both young and old for her age. At home, in a suburban community in Bangladesh, she had felt every bit of her quarter century lived. When she walked to the store for groceries, she knew everything to expect, each passing face running into the next, each with something to say that she’d heard before. When life is so predictable, it’s as though you’ve lived it for a very long time.
Now Sima is young every day. She is a baby, practically, on the 7-train to work from Jackson Heights, way out in Queens, smelling piss and man-stink, unable in the rush-hour crowd to tell who is emitting what smell, unable to shuffle away. And she feels eyes on her, too. There are men, dozens of them in every train car, who stare at her so blatantly that their looks become fingers and she feels them poking up her calves and into the soft crease behind her knees and up her thighs and finally onto her rear, which she wishes, a pure, intense wish, would somehow deflate a little. Every day she crams herself into the clinging denim of the jeans she buys at the dollar store down the block from her apartment, walks to the train, and begins again.
Sometimes her mind blanks. Or not quite blanks but woozes, forgetting hours, snapping back into full consciousness when her boss yells or when the train door is about to close at her station, and that jolting sensation, more than anything, makes her feel like a child looking at the sky until boredom becomes the passage of time.
“Hello, you look very nice,” she hears, and it brings her back from a wooze.
Before she even turns to put a face to the voice, she smiles. This is the first nice thing she’s heard all day. When you’re the one making sandwiches while others wait hungry, you don’t often hear the best in people. Voices are snide and impatient; they make her not want to look up. This voice is soft. And there is something else, too, the realization climbing up her blushing face. Was that Hindi? Did a voice across the cold-cuts counter on Twenty-Sixth Street just speak kindly to her in Hindi? Her ears are confused. In this setting, they’re trained to pick up and understand barked, rushed English. At home, there is Hindi, also barked, from family members and, sometimes, the man she is to marry, who is getting himself too comfortable with commands. Her worlds and their languages don’t mix.
This Hindi accent is terrible, but the speaker is straining to sound right, and that’s sweet.
She looks up.
“Hello,” he says again, in Hindi. He smiles, a broad smile with big, flat teeth, and she feels herself keep smiling back.
It’s a perfect scene, the two of them together for the first time, even under the fluorescent lighting that makes the sandwich cheese look radioactive. There are other customers scattered at fake marble tables, but they are obscured and irrelevant. Her fellow sandwich makers on the line don’t look up; they mayo buns and grate iceberg like they always do. It’s just Sima and Josh on opposite sides of a sneeze guard, smiling at each other.
There is silence as she tries to decide how to respond to him. She could attempt to flirt, toss his Hindi hello back in American slang. Or she could make a little joke about his accent, correct the way he fails to round his vowels. But, no, nothing flirty. She freezes, stays silent, and hides her smile with the back of her hand. He laughs and says hello again, this time as a question. She laughs at that and now they’re laughing together.
He has a round head, with lots of extras on it. Extra skin, bloated circles climbing up from his neck. A beard with gray flecks, coating the fat. He’s sweating, and individual beads cling to his beard hair. He raises a thick hand to his face to wipe off the moisture.
He looks so sheepish and unaccustomed to his frame that Sima can’t help but speculate about how he once looked, what has been lost. His whole torso is shrouded in a wool coat, green-and-blue checked, like a lumberjack from an air-freshener commercial, very American. It’s hot today. Everyone else is in Tshirts.
He orders a turkey sandwich. She makes it for him and they talk. It’s just pleasantries, little snippets of chatter about the weather and the crowd in the shop, different types of cheese. She wants more. She wants to ask him why he’s wearing a wool jacket on such a nice day. She wants to ask him how he knows Hindi. She wants to ask him what’s wrong because there does seem to be something wrong, a wince on his face even as he smiles, a throb, hard to explain, in his brown-green eyes. She wants to ask him why he spoke to her, why that small decision feels already like it matters.
—
A month later it’s even warmer and he’s back in the shop still wearing that jacket. It’s the lunchtime rush, and he is the only customer not hair-gelled and preppy, with shiny loafers that clack as they shuffle down the line. Sima thinks it’s strange to see a white man not shrouded in office attire.
It’s Josh’s turn to order. She prints his ticket and tries to keep her eyes down on the condiment buckets.
“It’s me,” he whispers to her in Hindi.
Obviously. Before she can answer, he says, “May I have your number?” again in Hindi, a secret that nobody else in the shop can intercept. His accent is getting better. He comes in so often now and he practices with her. Sometimes he doesn’t even buy a sandwich, he just stands and talks and then eventually says good-bye.
Sima’s mother’s voice is clear in her head, a firm and pursed no to everything this burly stranger is offering. She has a job that she should be grateful for that he is distracting her from, a future husband back in Queens who she should be far more grateful for. These are things she knows rationally.
She is lonely.
She scribbles fast on the back of his ticket, and he holds it up like he just won something.
“Thank you,” he says.
She smiles and tries to go back to work.
He leans over the sneeze guard and says, “I’m going to call tonight. Can I call tonight? Please?”
There are many concerns to consider, primarily that when her future husband is around, he always picks the phone up first. But tonight he’s working and Sima will be alone, staring out her barred window at all the people pulsing along the avenue below who don’t know her and never will.
The suits stuck on line behind Josh are growing restless, and Sima feels their glares, eyes like fingers again, poking.
“Sweetheart,” one says. He points to the face of his watch.
“I’m going,” Josh says. “But I’m calling. Tonight, I’m calling. Unless you say no, I’m calling.”
The rest of the day is wooze. The rush ends, then comes the late afternoon drag, then she’s home alone and nothing worth stopping for and really experiencing happens until the phone rings.
His voice sounds like he’s been crying.
“Are you okay?” she blurts out in English, hearing her own stilted accent echo back at her through the fuzzed connection. “Is there anything I can do for you? What’s wrong?”
He says, “Nothing,” and she can picture his face pleased that she asked. What a funny thing, to
know someone’s expression when you can’t see them. Outside her window, trucks thud in the potholes on Northern Boulevard.
“Where are you?” Josh says into the phone.
“It doesn’t matter,” Sima says. “Where are you?”
She wraps her fingers around a mug of tea, listens to Josh breathe, and tries to picture where he might be. Where would a man like him live? She thinks of the borough of Manhattan, long and pinched the way it’s drawn on subway maps, full of shimmering surfaces with white faces reflected in them. She pictures a tall building, all black glass. He is in some apartment, somewhere in those black windows, but she cannot muster any detail around him. Just his face, smiling, sad.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “Tell me about your life. Please. I want to know.”
—
Maybe, after all the long talks, she asks him outright what his demon is or if there are many of them. Maybe he just volunteers the information at some point because he senses that she wants to know. Often she can’t remember how their conversations begin and is hardly conscious of when they end because they pick up again days later, so fluid each time. There is always something at his edges, though, gnawing in at him, causing him to stop mid-story, right before the climax or the explanation, to say that there are things beyond his control. She wants to know more, to know all of him, and finally he lets her.
He’s leaning at her over a small table near the back of the sandwich shop after her shift. His fingertips, bracing his weight on the table, almost touch hers, and she thinks about how she could give a sharp exhale and blow the stringy hair off his forehead. That’s how close they are.
“I am good,” he says. “That’s what I’ve been saying. But there’s this monster. Really, that’s what it is.”
He looks young, little-boy frustrated. He reaches his fingers forward to touch hers. She doesn’t pull away.
“I can’t not do it,” he says. “You don’t know about drugs. This is the thing: It’s like I’m not allowed to not do it.”
She nods for him, unsure and unconvincing. He is sallow under the fluorescents.
