Lord Fear

by Lucas Mann

  I read Hemingway, of course, and got really into that whole possessive thing: You belong to me and all of Paris belongs to me, and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

  I read James Baldwin’s Paris writing, too, and loved the swirling emotion—relief, guilt, longing: My flight had been dictated by my hope that I could find myself in a place where I would be treated more humanely…where my risks would be more personal, and my fate less austerely sealed. And Paris had done this for me: by leaving me completely alone.

  Baldwin showed up in Paris on the run, wanting to be somebody without history. And Paris, its specifics, didn’t matter, only that Paris was not the place that he was running from. I saw Josh in cafés when I read Baldwin, anonymous to everyone but me, reborn clean. If there was anyplace for there to remain an ember of him, the promise of his life still pulsing orange, finally free from all back home that had tried to stamp him out, this was it.

  Of course it was a stretch to find Josh in Baldwin because Baldwin was running from hatred and oppression, from unavoidable violence crashing in on him. Addiction is a very self-imposed brand of oppression, but still, it’s better to think of the addict as oppressed than wallowing. Oppression doesn’t carry inward blame. That has always been the hardest part of remembering him, the effort not to blame. The effort to believe that he fought it, even if it was him and whatever fought it means. To believe that if he had the chance to start over, it wouldn’t happen again. Belief.

  “I feel that he is alive now, still,” Sima tells me. She leans across the table and her hands almost touch mine. “His spirit, I mean. He is watching us. I believe that.”

  I say nothing, so she says, “Maybe I sound cuckoo?”

  It’s not a question that I want to answer. Because yes, she does. I am not a believer. I was not raised for that. Neither was Josh, but I think he wanted to believe. In the end, he had to believe.

  There isn’t a language of addiction that takes atheism into account. The NA meetings that Josh quit, the Al-Anon groups my father later tried to find solace in—both required a relinquishing of control to that higher power that wants what is best for us. And really to believe what an addict tells you, tells himself, requires a predisposition for, or at least some experience in, faith. All you have seen is deterioration, but you are being promised regeneration, asked to trust that there remains some divinity, and despite how wholly unbelievable that is, you must believe. There’s a reason why Sima was his last friend, the last he made and then the last to stick around. Why she is the only person I’ve found who knew him as only an addict. She never got to hear him play music, she never read his words, she never saw the muscle lines that ran like shadows across his torso. She only knew a man afflicted, making promises. Even that first time he spoke to her in Hindi in a sandwich shop on Twenty-Sixth Street, she knew something was wrong. He was waiting to be redeemed, and she never let herself say that it wouldn’t happen. What a sap, I want to think, believing in the unproven and unlikely.

  “No,” I hear myself say. “Not cuckoo at all.”

  “I talk to him sometimes,” she says. “I smell him, like he’s sitting down next to me. Do you remember how he smelled? I remember how he smelled and how he spoke to me. I speak back.”

  I wipe my palms on my jeans, and I hear myself reciprocate with the last promises that Josh ever spoke to me. They may have been the last words he spoke to anybody, two nights before he was found. He called looking for our father, but I was the only one home. I was ready to hang up, but he said, “Wait, let’s talk, let’s tell each other about next year.”

  He talked about baseball because he knew that’s what I liked. He told me I would be the star of my high school team, even as a freshman, and he would be standing there watching my exploits on a field in the middle of Central Park, fingers wrapped around the chain-link fence. I would hit a home run, and he’d be there, clear-eyed, real, cheering for me as I crossed the plate.

  He never liked baseball. And the notion of his spectatorship as the ultimate redemption, like he was some divorced dad leaving a meeting early to make sure I saw him in his rumpled suit before my last big at bat, didn’t make any sense. But I didn’t think that then. He would be there. Absolutely, and the world around us would take on fuzzy, Kevin Costner–ish tones, two brothers reunited, cradled in the soft light of sober American nostalgia.

  “Do you believe me?” he asked.

  He was alone. I knew that. I listened for a sound in the background, anything. It was a hot night, and I think his windows were open. I could hear the tree outside his building, leaves scraping against brick. The dose that killed him must have been at hand, on the coffee table in front of him, maybe. I remember that he didn’t want me to hang up the phone.

  “Do you believe me?” he said again.

  I said yes, and then he said good, and when there was nothing else we could say he was gone.

  “Beautiful,” Sima says. “That’s beautiful.”

  She has to leave me soon, to visit her ailing mother, then pick up her daughter from her after-school program, then home for dinner, then straight to bed. But she will find time in between, she tells me, to light a candle for Josh, the way she did after his funeral. She won’t tell her husband or her daughter, because they don’t know who Josh is, was, and she doesn’t want them to. When explained, he is dangerous, and the two of them together are sordid.

  I will have dinner with my father tonight, and we’ll sit under a wall of pictures of Josh’s face, but none of them will look like the man Sima knew. We stopped framing him, not intentionally, I don’t think, but because the pictures became more sporadic near the end, and anyway it seems like a disservice to loved ones to emphasize the fattest, most vacant-eyed versions of them. There’s a picture on the wall from Paris, in a courtyard somewhere. I am in it; he is in it; we’re posing. He is posing in every picture. These images, never spoken of, hang over every cup of coffee my father drinks, every morning newspaper he reads. When he looks up, they must sneer at him, before-shots, reminders of what was lost.

  We’ll talk about movies and deem most of them bad. He’ll ask me how I’m liking my job, and I will say something ridiculous about how it feels like my very soul is being dragged out of my open mouth each time I sit at that desk. He will give a short smile. He will say that it’s amazing how quickly time passes. Eventually he’ll fall asleep to NPR whispering in the background, and I’ll leave.

  There is another Baldwin piece I love, and it has nothing to do with Paris. “Sonny’s Blues” is about a Harlem man with a junkie, jazz-musician brother. It’s about trying to listen. There’s a scene where the brother is at the piano, playing, striving to make the narrator understand. Finally, for a moment, he does. Baldwin writes: While the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.

  Josh is still speaking to Sima because that’s what an addict is always trying to do, trying to tell you. Tonight, in Queens, in an apartment with barred windows and a steep mortgage, where there are no pictures of him, he will speak. Tonight, in a quiet, candlelit bedroom, he will tell her and she will listen, his voice filling her as she watches her daughter, a smiling child who has never done anything wrong, who likes to dance on the bed in her mother’s skirts.

  —

  Sometimes my father comes out to Brooklyn, and we play tennis on the public courts at the tail end of Prospect Park. Then he follows me through my neighborhood to my apartment. We have discussions on these walks that feel like they’re designed for extra meaning—father and son treading on sturdy, well-practiced masculine clichés that make gravitas come easily. We are holding athletic equipment. We smell of sweat.

  I tell him about my neighborhood.

  He tells me how it used to be.

  On my block, a young woman pulls one child with each hand, while another stumbles behind her. She stops and turns to th
e stumbling child, says, “Keep up, or I swear to God.” The child begins to cry and then rubs his eyes with tiny, balled fists. She says, “Stop crying, or I swear to God.”

  I make an involuntary noise, a horrified half gasp. I’m thinking of the absolute exhaustion of being followed around by three small, helpless humans, compelled to love each of them fully and equally.

  My father says, “What?”

  I say, “I know you’re supposed to fall in love when you see your child born, but still.”

  He says, “I always thought that was bullshit.”

  The woman in front of us hears the word bullshit and turns fast, wraps all of her children in her arms and hurries them away from us, happy, I think, for something concrete to protect them from. My father laughs and says, “When they’re little, you’re just trying to keep them alive. I don’t think that’s love. It’s only love when they do stuff that makes you think about something other than keeping them alive. They get older. They say something funny. You can throw a ball with them. That’s love.”

  Our rackets swing side by side as we walk.

  It’s hard to think about father-and-son relationships without feeling like everything is oversimplified. When I ask my father for a memory of Josh, he talks of a Little League game and then groans. He says, “Damn, I wish I said something better.” But he didn’t, so we start talking about Little League because Josh once played Little League, and after him I played it with more success, and before him my father played stickball in a parking lot in Coney Island.

  Fatherhood is not meant to be unique; that’s the point. The transactions are meant to be so smooth that they are unseen, a narrative that just exists, that nobody had to work to build.

  —

  On a nice new field by the river on Roosevelt Island, my father wears a windbreaker that says “Assistant Coach” and Josh runs like an animal that was never meant to run.

  My father watches his son trace a course to his position in deep right field. He wonders what possesses somebody to stick his ass in the opposite direction of where he’s trying to go. Like, evolutionarily, what is that?

  Josh stops by the fence and looks down at his feet.

  My father paces the dugout in his windbreaker and tries to think of something that coaches say. He signed up for this gig because that’s what young fathers do for their firstborns, but he’s spent most of the season feeling fraudulent. The head coach, an Irish homicide detective who looks exactly like what he is, yells to the team with a voice born to command.

  “Look alive, boys.”

  “We need this, boys.”

  None of the boys question the stakes. And they do look alive, caricatures, almost, of aliveness, a homogeneous gang of Liams and Patricks and Ryans, bouncing on their toes, waiting for a chance to dive and then rise again, filthy and triumphant. In the distance, at the base of the right-field fence, Josh doesn’t hear anything.

  Wind hurtles off the river. Josh looks cold. He rubs his ungloved hand on his bare arms and gives a little dance. The boys in the infield look like they couldn’t possibly think of coldness at a time like this. My father wants to run out and drape a jacket over Josh’s shoulders. My father doesn’t want his son to be cold. But then he resents that impulse and resents the root cause of it, Josh, who could make the whole situation better simply by not behaving like a fawn lost in a snowstorm when in fact he is just a right fielder on a breezy April afternoon. My father is guilty for thinking this and then angry for being made to feel guilty, and the emotions continue to swirl like they usually do until he’s jarred by the ping of metal bat on ball.

  It’s hit well, and by some absolute miracle of Little League physics, it’s hit to right field. The game is tied and this is the last inning, and there’s Josh weaving like a drunk toward a would-be game-winner. Every person on the field and in the bleachers is watching him. My father is aware of that. Grass crunches under Josh’s cleats. The ball begins its descent. My father hears someone say, Ah shit, behind him, in preparation for a certain drop, maybe even a potential injury. Boy and ball and eyes end up at the same spot.

  The catch is very accidental. Josh is frozen, legs splayed, hands up. His eyes aren’t just closed, they’re clenched so tight that the effort lines his face, visible even from so far away. But there’s the ball nestled into his mitt, a true, unerasable success.

  My father claps his hands until they sting. He paces the fence as he claps. He yells as loud as he can, “That was amazing. I said you could catch. Goddamnit, I told you.”

  He’s never been this loud at a Little League game. He is overwhelmed by how loud he’s being. He feels like someone not himself and he’s momentarily embarrassed, but then he thinks he should be loud while he’s got a reason to be. He has spent so much of Josh’s childhood worried about the boy’s fragility. He has said, “It’s all right, you’re all right,” so many times—why not be loud in a moment that is better than just all right? Josh deserves to hear him like this. It feels good to hear himself like this.

  When the game ends, my father’s face is sore from smiling. He drapes his arm around his son’s shoulder and he squeezes.

  “You see?” he hears himself. “What did I tell you?”

  And then, whispered, a conspiracy between the two of them, “What did I fucking tell you?”

  They leave the field together. On the walk home, Josh is quiet. My father is willing this moment not to end. He’s rehashing the catch out loud, and the catch grows more epic and untrue in each version. Josh looks up at him. He has beautiful eyes. There’s no other word for them. They are brown but full of other colors. They change in the light. They are pure green sometimes, and sometimes orange, sometimes gray. My father wants to tell him that he notices all the colors, that he thinks they’re beautiful. He remembers the way women used to crowd around the stroller and coo. How they’d say, “Those eyes. Oh my God, those eyes never end. It’s like he knows something.”

  “Please, stop it,” Josh says. “It’s not a big deal.”

  It shouldn’t be a big deal. It isn’t. My father squeezes his son’s shoulders, relishing the closeness until Josh says he can’t breathe and wriggles away. They both fall silent.

  —

  He is seventeen now, and he’s seventeen the way twenty-five-year-old heartthrobs are seventeen on TV. My father is watching him work out. They’re alone in a fluorescent gym in the basement of the Roosevelt Island co-op. The pool is just outside and everything smells of too much chlorine. My father is sitting on a stool. Josh is lying on his back, heaving a bench-press bar up above his head and grunting so loudly that it’s almost obscene. He isn’t wearing a shirt. Muscles move like pistons as the bar rises and falls. My father wonders where all the muscles came from so quickly. He thinks that they shouldn’t fit. Eventually, he has to burst, right?

  Josh has printed a workout sheet so that my father can follow along with his movements. My father said, Very professional, when Josh handed him the sheet. He meant it, but he said it in a shitty way, and Josh didn’t like that, and now my father feels bad.

  “Are you watching?” Josh snaps at him.

  He slams the bar back into place, springs up, then drops himself onto the floor for push-ups, narrates the precision in each movement. His voice is deeper now, but not so much so. It’s still him. There’s still a wavering quality to it. The voice doesn’t fit the body anymore, and my father supposes that’s the point.

  “Watch me,” Josh says. “Like actually watch.”

  He’s up again, bounding to the rack against the mirrored wall. He grabs a dumbbell, turns, and makes exaggerated concentration faces at himself as he hoists.

  Nobody uses this place except for Josh. It was a selling point of the building when they bought the apartment, but this complex is all young families and elderly people, none of them with the time or energy to be vain. My father doesn’t live here anymore, but when he visits it feels like nothing has changed. Outside, in the pool, a gaggle of old women go through thei
r water calisthenics, making soft splashes as their elbows sink and rise.

  Josh invited him solely for this. Watch me work is how he put it, so my father is watching. He feels his own stomach as he watches Josh’s sinews twist. The fat on his belly feels like an overambitious cake collapsing on itself. He sucks in. Josh notices and smiles.

  For a moment, my father sees a better version of himself in Josh’s face, definitely in his body, the angled lines from his shoulders into his waist. His own father was an obese cab driver with a gambling addiction. My father is not obese, nor is he a gambling addict, nor is he a cab driver, and each of those small victories has led to a generational progression of manhood. He looks at his son, groaning in the name of progress, and tries to focus on that word.

  “Let’s take a walk,” he says. “Come on. Let’s go somewhere. Do you want lunch? I’ll buy you lunch.”

  He wants to put this moment on display. He wants people to see them together, wants to feel strangers’ eyes trained on his son as all the pistons under his skin pump with each step he takes. Josh will be admired and then my father will think, I made that, that is a part of me, and Josh will feel his pride.

  “I’m not hungry,” Josh says.

  “Well then a soda, shit. Or just for a walk. I want to go for a walk with you, is that a crime?”

  “I’m not done,” Josh says. “Look at the sheet; I’m not close to done.”

  “Come on, take a half day.”

  “No.”

  His voice cracks, mostly because he’s seventeen, but there’s panic to it as well.

  He says, “I don’t want to go anywhere, okay?”