Lord Fear (12 page)

I see myself as a fish in a stream
, she writes.
Deflected; held in place; but cannot describe the stream
.

There is too much hubris in this connection, but I do feel the stream, and it is hard to describe as it moves, and that is frustrating. And it's particularly frustrating when writing about a late-twentieth-century junkie, because, really, what character has been given
more
context than a Gen X dude who was cool, then dangerously cool, then dead? I'm in a stream polluted with VH1
Behind the Music
specials about OD'd hair-metalers and televised interventions for strangers. The first twenty minutes are always the same—pictures of a
beautiful
child with
happy
eyes, scrolling under the voice of someone who absolutely cannot believe what happened next. Until every moment of their unaddicted life becomes a childhood memory, neon and unfocused.

Caleb's would be an amazing TV voice-over. Short, funny, imagistic, resisting critique. Caleb doesn't care about the vast space. He isn't curious about what was there. Why should he be? There is perfection in the simplified image if you trust it. Greatness, a precipice, nothing in between.

[NOTEBOOK, JUNE 16, 1996, “UNTITLED”]:

The dream and reality must coexist. And I must deliver. It's not about what's on paper or what I play. My reality must be (and virtually is…). By December, I'll either be pricing mansions on Long Island or I'll be in a rehab center, then working as a plebian. I must do now. And always
.

Dave is in the uninvestigated space at the edge of Caleb's memory as Josh duct-tapes him to that desk chair. Dave is looking at his brother and thinking,
I should bash your fucking face
in, you fat fucking bully
. He is looking at how small Caleb is and how big Josh is, and he is seeing torture. He understands. Dave, too, is small, and he, too, endures the whims of the monster. He actually thinks the word
monster
, because what else could you call Josh? People tell Dave he's dramatic, the kind of boy to hiss and writhe over a scraped knee, but he's not being dramatic about this.

Yes, technically, Dave is complicit in his cousin's torture. He cannot deny the feeling of his own hands on Caleb's flesh, cannot unhear the sound of skin yanked by tape. But there is a crucial distinction: Dave has no desire to be doing this. His nature isn't cruel. His nature is thoughtful, self-aware, the opposite of his older brother, who is so far from understanding the calibrations of how he makes others feel that he might as well be a goldfish swimming into the glass of its tank, over and over, learning nothing.

The people who only experience Josh for a few hours at a time, once every couple of weeks, can see him as precocious. But what seems precocious in manageable doses takes on a heavy awfulness when you go to sleep feeling it, wake up to it, are unable to live a life that isn't tainted by it. Dave is the chronicler of the moments that nobody else sees.

Caleb is in the chair now, strapped in, kicking his legs, and making a sound behind the gag that, amazingly, seems to be a laugh and not a scream. Dave watches his brother smile at what he's done. His smile is cold and blank. To call it sinister would be giving it too much credit. It's just teeth, big, white teeth with no connection to any human feeling, any shared experience. Dave watches his brother's back as he grabs the chair and wheels it down the hall. Dave lingers behind. He imagines the sound of the elevator door closing, then the sound of something snapping, then a crash. He lets himself feel relief.

Revenge fantasies carry through the years, and now Josh is
a teenager and Dave almost is, and nothing has changed except their father moved out so there's less protection. Josh has just slapped Dave across his face for no reason. Dave was standing with the fridge door open looking for leftovers. Then Josh entered the apartment, walked up to him, smiled his pointless smile, and swung.

He's strong. Dave reels and ends up on one knee. Josh leans down.

“Don't ever fucking look at me again,” he says. “What makes you think you can look at me?”

Dave looks at the wall. Of course, something happened in the outside world that led to Dave getting hit. Something has always happened outside Dave's view that he must then take the brunt of. It has never not been this way. Dave has been attacked in every room of their apartment, at every time of day, alone and in front of company. He's been punched in the nose, kicked on the ground, choked until it was hard to trust that Josh would stop in time. And Dave has always known why.

Josh is bad at life. Josh is isolated. Josh walks around by himself for no reason, just loops of Roosevelt Island, going nowhere, building up directionless rage. Dave knows Josh has been in therapy for years, has watched the worried looks on his parents' faces after returning from a session. He's seen Josh wail, seen him swaddled by their mother in a way that no child over six should be, as she turned to Dave and said, “He can't help it.” When Dave is feeling bold, too angry for restraint, he reminds his brother of these things—you have
problems
.

Beth heard the slap and now she's standing in the kitchen doorway.

She whispers Josh's name, as though preparing herself to eventually say it louder. She walks up. Dave sees the bones of her knuckles as she reaches up to rest her hand on Josh's shoulder.

“Stop,” she says. It's a question, not a command.

Dave sees the back of Josh's head as he turns to face their mother. He stands up straight, puffs his chest out. Beth shrinks from him like he wants her to. She is backed against the stove, almost resting on the burners. Her raised hand drifts down to rest on her thigh.

“You're a stupid bitch,” Josh says to his mother.

Dave begins to cry and he hates that. He closes his eyes and tells himself to stop crying.

“You bitch,” Josh says. “You cunt. You can't tell me what to do, you cunt.”

Then silence. Dave opens his eyes. Josh has leaned closer, teeth now only inches from the top of his mother's skull. He waits a beat, lets her helplessness sink in, and then walks to his bedroom.

Beth is a noiseless crier. She stands in the middle of her kitchen and shakes. From behind, if Dave didn't know her, he might think that she's laughing. The silence feels profane, and Beth won't look at Dave no matter how much he glares. She walks to the sink and begins to wash plates with a bright green sponge. Dave watches her hands move in tight, controlled circles until they disappear into suds. Her head dips into her chest.

When my father still lived here, he used to lie and say that one day Dave would feel a love for his brother so full and right that it would be impossible to question.
You'll grow up, time will pass, everything will soften
, he used to say.
You'll lean on each other
.

Dave doesn't believe that, because time has already passed. He walks down the hall, doesn't pick up his feet, lets his socks slide. He passes Josh's room and stops. The door is open a crack. He hears drumsticks beating on one cymbal with no real rhythm, until it sounds like a rainstorm. He takes a breath and shoves the door open. Josh stops beating the cymbal and says,
“What?”

“You shouldn't be like that,” Dave says. He'd hoped it would come out deeper.

Josh raises his eyebrows and says nothing.

“Why are you like that?” Dave says.

Josh stands and walks over to his brother. The floor creaks. Dave keeps his eyes on a poster of John Bonham, sticks blurred, tongue out. He expects to be hit again, but he isn't.

“You don't get to know,” Josh says, which is such a stupid, self-important answer, and then he closes the door in Dave's face.

Down the hall, Beth has made it to her own bed. Her door is open, too. Dave watches her next. She's curled up, her face almost on her knees, taking up just one corner of space on the mattress, like she's trying to make herself even smaller than she already is. Dave still feels the heat from his brother's fingers on his face. He lifts his own fingers up and swears to himself that he can feel grooves on his skin where Josh hit him, grooves that will never fill or fade. He turns his cheek so that Beth might look up.

She stares past him. She's looking for Josh—even if it's just the sight of his white door closed, knowing that he is on the other side of it. Dave's face burns fresh. He looks at his mother, rumpled in the middle of this room that feels too big now. His blood is on her bureau from the time Josh chased him in here and shoved him in the back, sent him careering too fast to put his hands up. He spots a bit of it, reddish speckling that would be unnoticeable to anyone who isn't looking. Her eyes meet his, finally. They are brown and wet. They ask him not to say anything because there is nothing to say. They ask him to let her curl up and worry for her eldest. To let her watch his closed door until finally he opens it and that moment feels like a victory.

—

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.