Lord Fear (11 page)

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.

Caleb rides the building alone. It seems that every elderly woman in the co-op has picked this exact time to go to the store. They scream and point their crooked old fingers at him and say,
Young man, what on
earth
do you think you're doing?
One lady just starts shrieking, no words. Eventually, Caleb gives in to the reckless hilarity of his situation. He has never felt like this before, unafraid of potential repercussions, immune to the size and the meanness of all the strangers in the world. He begins to laugh. Down and up, as the door opens at each floor, he is still cackling into tape, a screechy sound like a seagull.

He thinks of Josh. He thinks of him standing in the hallway on the fourteenth floor, laughing until his stomach hurts and he's gasping for air, falling down and laughing more. They are laughing at the same time, with the same feeling, with the same wildness in their eyes. Caleb is sure of it. He lets himself think that all of this has been an initiation into a way of being beyond boredom. And even if it isn't all that, it's still funny, so either way, success. And when finally the door opens back on the fourteenth floor, Josh is there just how Caleb imagined he would be, doubled over, laughter somehow shrill and bellowing all at once. Caleb has
predicted
this—what a sensation to feel. He has pictured his cousin in his mind and known him well enough for that mental image to conjure truth. Caleb hears his own laughter mix with Josh's, the tones rounding each other out, and he doesn't even flinch or yip as Josh yanks the tape off him and his blotched red skin snaps back into place. Caleb is happy, and pain, he thinks, right now and always, loses out to joy.

Joy and only joy. Joy on loop. Joy like an old cartoon chase where cat and mouse run through the same set the whole time. Joy like a game of free association—hear Josh's name and blurt out the word; hear the word and blurt out the name.

Caleb remembers joy.

—

“Maybe I'm disappointing you,” he tells me. “But this is where I end.”

It's not exactly true. We've been talking for a long time, weaving in and out of decades' worth of stories. He's told me about a beach scene when Josh swam, naked—I knew it even before Caleb said it—to capsize a day-sailer. Caleb watched from the boat as Josh's lithe teen body bobbed in and out of black water.

And there was a lovingly described tableau of Josh inconsolable right after John Lennon died. Caleb watched him as he listened to “Dear Prudence” on his bedroom floor, in awe of the magnitude of his grief, how much music could mean to a person.

There were assertions. Josh was smart, like crazy smart. In college, he gave Caleb philosophy books to read and Caleb got smarter just trying to do an impression of Josh's smartness. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kant, all that shit. Josh really
got
it; Caleb just pretended, mostly.

He taught himself to play the piano—did I know that already?

He used to ride Rollerblades around the city as a teenager, hold on to the backs of trucks and go hurtling through rush-hour traffic. Never cared about a crash.

He had a big penis. Objectively.

Caleb has told me plenty, but we've returned to the first scene each time—how it feels to be young and helpless and taped nude to a chair.

I like Caleb. He's smart and has a sneaky, wry sense of humor. He laughs a lot and it's infectious.

We're in a law office, his law office, high above downtown Brooklyn. It's the end of his workday. There is rush-hour honking
outside. Somebody calls somebody else a motherfucker down on the street, and we both hear it. Caleb says, “Might have a new personal injury client in a few minutes,” and we both laugh. Caleb lets his laugh run out after a while, so I do, too. He's finishing his lunch at dinnertime at his desk. It smells like Russian dressing. He spills a little dressing on his tie, dabs.

I have been pushing him to remember differently, or more pointedly, with a little variety at least. He's tired and not interested in what I want.

He finishes his sandwich, then finishes his Diet Coke, then wipes his fingers on a paper napkin.

He says, “Look, I don't think of the addict part of Josh. It's separate. Whatever he became, that was somebody else. He's still a god to me.”

“A
god
?” I say.

He says, “Oh, Jesus, it's not that deep. I remember him how he was.”

But how
was
he? That's what I want to know. What is it that Caleb is so sure about? What's the recipe here? One part older cousin, one part violence, two parts inappropriate nudity, a sweet dash of kindness at the end, and then shake for the perfect manifestation of a preteen destined for great things? Caleb is looking at me, and underneath his smile I think I see strain—he doesn't want to say more than he's said.

He is physically small. His body would make sense on a child or an old man. Of all the men in his life who dwarfed him, the ones he loved most died, each in some way by his own hand. His youngest uncle killed himself with a bottle of Vicodin after years of taking just the right amount of Vicodin to not die. Joey, his older brother, had a heart attack a couple of years ago after a decade of on-and-off crack abuse. And then Josh. They were all, when Caleb remembers them, as large and beautiful and
inevitable as shadows. There were so many things that they did, so many options that they had—smart, good-looking men who were loved, who people expected things from, not with a sense of pressure but a sense of assurance. Born protagonists.

Caleb has always felt secondary, but he is here. He is talking to me. None of the half men he loved managed that, and I ask him if he resents the fact that they deserted him. If he wanted so badly to be them, didn't they have a little responsibility to, you know,
be
? It shouldn't have been that hard for Josh to stay alive. If he could do
anything
, how come he couldn't do this one most basic thing? It's a rhetorical question, directed as much to me as it is to Caleb. When I hear myself say it, it sounds so hollow and obvious.

“It's not like that,” Caleb says. “He just…he could have been a rock star so easily. Some kind of star. The kind of person people look at.”

“Yeah, but he wasn't.”

“Yeah, but he could have been.”

In almost every memory I have of Josh, he's wearing a leather jacket. I think I've tampered with a good deal of the memories, since many of them are inside or on warm days when everyone else is wearing a T-shirt. Some are of me curled up against his body on the couch, watching old movies, the feel of cold sleeve studs on my cheek.

When Josh died, I got the jacket. Wherever I've moved, it's hung in the corner of my closet. It has no place in my real life; I favor comfort-fit Banana Republic denim and am not Billy Idol. But I wear it sometimes, always in performance. I wore it on Halloween in high school, when I didn't have a costume and was scrounging my room for something absurd. I brought it to college and wore it again on Halloween, and then to another costume party, complete with one of those combs made to look
like a switchblade. And once to a Brooklyn birthday because the ironic Evite said, “Dress like you're ready to bash someone's face in, bro.” And sometimes in the mirror, performing for myself.

There's always tension, because in the moment, on me, the jacket is so absurd, but it seems crucial that I retain nostalgia for the idea of it as a talisman of my brother. It covered Josh with metal scales, made photographers stop him on the street, made him smell like a cowboy and a greaser and a poet, and that's what he was. There was so much artifice to him. He didn't want to relate; he wanted to be ogled.

When addicts recover and live, I think part of the appeal of the story is that they've been stripped of artifice and they mature as humbled, extra-honest people. Humbling is always nice to observe. They speak quietly, with both nostalgia and remorse, about their past performances. They admit everything and make rueful, self-deprecating jokes that aren't meant to be laughed at. Josh died mid-performance, when I was still a child, when Caleb still experienced him as one.

Virginia Woolf described her earliest memories like this:
Many bright colours; many distinct sounds; some human beings, caricatures; comic; several violent moments of being, always including a circle of the scene which they cut out: and all surrounded by a vast space—that is a rough visual description of childhood
.

For Caleb and me, Josh is the bright color; he is the sound. He is that enormous caricature of what a human might be. He is the violent moment of being. And then there is vast space.

Woolf's mother died when she was thirteen.

I should be able to see her completely undisturbed by later impressions
, she writes. But she can't. She remembers her mother's voice, her hands, the last exhalations of her laughter, the bracelets she wore and the sound they made when she moved, her beauty and how easy it was to accept that she was beautiful. She
remembers quick scenes and bits of dialogue, but so much else is context—wanting it, not having it, adopting others'.