Lord Fear (17 page)

“You look like him,” Lena tells me. “The way your hair falls on your face a little.”

We're sitting across from each other at a scratched wooden table. Her irises move in small, concentrated circles as she takes
in my face. I imagine that, in her mind, a vintage city bus sprouts around us, closing us in, a seamless set change to the New York of her high school memories. But we're in Park Slope, and nothing moves backward in this sleepy paradise of cafés and real estate offices and swarms of children who can correctly identify cilantro at the market when their parents want to show off.

Lena's twin daughters are probably out of their bath by now, their father wrapping them in yellow towels and drying their hair. She keeps apologizing that she will have to leave for home sooner than she wants to because she doesn't like the girls falling asleep before she lies next to them for a few minutes, so that they can feel her. She likes to stay for that moment when their faces change as they begin to dream.

Our hands almost touch as Lena reaches out her wallet to show me photos of the girls, sitting with their heads cocked in opposite directions, wearing matching checkered dresses, little tablecloths with eyes. She snatches her fingers back, thin, elegant fingers, flutist fingers. I picture their narrow tips on Josh's arm in the same spot that my own fingers would touch a few years later but with less grace. I imagine her teenage head like my child's head, tilting up at him.

The bar we're in is beginning to fill with thirtysomethings. Faded sleeve tattoos snake down bare arms, stop above sensible leather-band watches and wedding rings. Scarves are stuck into the armholes of peacoats before they're hung on iron hooks. First dates begin with quick hellos and mangled cheek-kisses. “Tainted Love” begins to play, not the original, soulful version, but the cover that epitomizes every stereotype I have of a bouncy, metallic eighties adolescence. Faces lift. Lena smiles down at her hands. I watch her fingers tap on the table.

“Hey, that Roxy Music song I was talking about, do you know it?” she says.

“Yeah, of course,” I say.

She straightens up and smiles. “He must have played it for you. When you were a kid? Did he? He loved that song.”

“Oh. No. It was in that Bill Murray movie a few years ago. What's it called? He sings it drunk at karaoke. The soundtrack was really popular when I graduated from high school.”

She sags and I wish that I'd lied. Josh is so deeply past tense that a song he loved new has reseeped into popular culture as something for a faded star to sing as he attempts to reignite. I watch her realize that. As a sort of penance, I tell her the story about me on Josh's lap in the home movie, when he pieced together “Let It Be” on the piano.

“Oh, that's lovely,” she says. “What a nice thing to remember.”

“He taught himself to play the piano,” I say.

“I know,” she says. “Isn't that amazing? To have an ear like that?”

She thought of him today, she tells me. She dropped her girls off at school and she waited for the bus home alone. It was cold rain all morning and she'd forgotten an umbrella. She felt her hair, stringy, nearly frozen, sticking to her face and her neck. And then he was next to her, telling her she'd never looked worse, like seriously never ever, until she laughed, and then he put his headphones over her ears and watched her listen to his song. When she thinks of him, there is always music and she is always laughing.

“I was thinking about him for a while,” she says, “and then something went off in my head like, hey, he overdosed. That's so strange. Sad, too, but more just weird. He had so much willpower. He was so healthy. When I was a teenager, all anybody around me felt was apathy, and he had so much conviction. If anybody didn't need drugs to feel things, it was him. You know what I mean? He was so
much
on his own.”

She acts out
much
. She balls her flutist hands into narrow fists, presses them on the table. I nod my head at her, eager, agreeing with the feeling of the word as she uses it, a feeling that I know I remember. It's not just sad that the gentle Adonis she knew became a junkie; it's a surprise narrative. A fluke. It doesn't make any fucking sense. And the senselessness is kind of absolving.

Those people who shit themselves when they nod off on the subway, they are not him. The scabby punks who live on benches in Tompkins Square Park with arms that have turned to leather, who told me dope stories in exchange for pizza, they are nothing like him. That is what we're agreeing upon. I feel momentarily certain. But then. But then those scabby punks went to high school once. Even if they dropped out, there was at least a year when they sat on the bus and somebody probably sat next to them who found something
much
in them, indulged in fantasies of their lives that involved a different future. Everyone at this bar knew someone like that. And as the microbrews flow, if I went around and prodded each stranger, they'd find slurry details to remember, muscles and drumsticks, geometrical smiles with ominous unbrushed teeth.

It's the commonness that's most wrenching
. Lena fights the commonness with care. Lena takes the common moments and breathes into them until they inflate.

“He deserved so much better,” she says, spreads her palms on the table, flat and certain. “If there was anyone who deserved…”

She coughs needlessly. There is toast slathered in locally sourced goat cheese between us, meant to be shared, which she hasn't touched.

“Finish it,” she tells me. I do and she watches.

“You really have his hair,” she says. “Did I tell you that already?”

And then, “I don't want you to think that I'm weird for caring
this much. Do you think that? I mean, it was just a few years that I really knew him, right? We never even kissed or anything.”

I say, “No, it's nice.” I surprise myself with how fully I mean it.

“I think some people, you care for them more because they need more care,” she says. “That's not a bad thing, needing care. Or caring.”

When we leave the bar, we walk side by side down a very different part of Flatbush Avenue from the one I live off. I keep my hands in my jacket pockets and say, “Brrr,” and she gives me a little smile. She tells me that her girls like to say
brr
like that. They like the way it makes their lips feel. Sometimes Lena and her husband and the girls stand in a circle and
brr
at each other. She says it's silly but it's just one of their things. I realize how much I don't want to know about their things. Josh fades against their things. Their things don't seem silly at all.

“I think of Josh more now than I did for a long time,” she says. “It's because I'm a mother. I look at my girls and I think about him. When they make me laugh. I laugh and I look at them and they're so beautiful but they're so breakable. Sometimes I leave the room and then I rush back to look at them again just to make sure.”

She stops, embarrassed, eyes down, lips pressed. She shrugs. The wind picks up, and she snatches for her hat to make sure it doesn't fly off. The skin of our cheeks is pressed back, and our eyes squint at each other, our backs rounded. I put my hand out behind her because it looks like she might fall.

“That was a sweet thing to do,” she says when the gusts calm.

I think I see a rat weaving across the sidewalk, losing itself in the sewer. I think I see another one, or maybe it's two, burrowing in the slush in a tree pit.

“If anything makes sense about the overdose, it's that he was alone,” she says. “Underneath it all, he was too tender to be left like that. I think about how that must have felt for him. Nobody
touching him or hearing him or anything. Doing, well, what he was doing. I hold my girls tighter.”

In the years after Josh's death, I spent a lot of time trying to read my way to knowing what his high felt like. It started with Nirvana lyrics, but those never made sense. Burroughs came next, and Ginsberg, naturally. Now I look further back to Thomas De Quincey. I found this passage near the beginning of
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
, and when I first read it I didn't like it:

Eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath; and to the guilty man for one night givest back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure from blood; and to the proud man a brief oblivion for wrongs undress'd and insults unavenged
.

I didn't like the idea of the drug having its own rhetoric. Because I had scattered memories of my brother on the nod, the way he would forget his sentences halfway through, robbing him of language that once came so easily. And I didn't like the idea of the drug giving anything back, when all we ever talked about was what it had taken from him.

But the passage is in my head now, clear, as Lena describes her breakable little girls, the way they need her assurances to fall asleep. What did Josh want more than whispers that he was okay, no, far better than that? What did he need more than a companion, hands on his face at the bus stop, covering his blemishes? He was already alone, Lena knows. Alone when he looked like a bodybuilder, alone in a rush-hour crowd. Maybe heroin was one kind whisper in an empty room. There is no
much
ness in that revelation, nothing sexy, just a quiet and obvious truth: People deserve to be held by something.

We get to the subway entrance, and there's no longer a reason for us to be together. There is rumbling beneath our feet. I'm missing my train.

“I have to go,” Lena says.

She leans her torso in for a hug. She squeezes once and says, “I'm sorry if I sounded stupid. I remember watching him at band practice in high school and him looking really, perfectly happy when he played the song right.”

[NOTEBOOK, JANUARY 23RD, 1991, “NOTES”]:

What really freaks me out is how I “fall from grace” every day. Because the mornings are usually symptom free. Most of the time, it's lurking in the background. Then the day progresses and I'm totally in it by night. And it's chronic then. One thing I can do is tell myself not to expect too much all at once. So when I feel good in the morning, that's when I tell myself that I might (probably will) feel worse by the night. This way, at least I won't feel frustrated or like I failed (just bad—really bad)
.

This is some of the earliest writing of Josh's that I have, not quite his high school self, but still, missives from his unaddicted early twenties. I read looking for something as close to innocence, as far from subterfuge, as possible.

He wrote these words on an early page of a notebook that he decided would contain the story of his emotional life. The rest of the page is dedicated to a super-pouty Morrissey quote, a motif that continues until he begins writing
See: Morrissey the God
and then simply
M.T.G
. at the end of many of his paragraphs. Another motif is
D.P
. It pops up constantly, even on the front cover, written in dark green marker, triple underlined.

He used abbreviations whenever he referred overtly to his
depersonalization
—the best word a therapist had ever given him for overwhelming anxiety that he couldn't shake, those moments when he lost control and viewed his own existence through stained glass, frozen, unable to breathe. After a childhood in and out of therapy, starting before there was really a language to put to what he was feeling, he clung to the right term when it was
finally given to him. But he didn't talk about it; I never heard the word out loud. Now, I flip through his pages, and I see
D.P
. hounding him, and I think of Lena next to him on the bus on those days when he couldn't bring himself to speak.

He wrote these words right around the time he had his last accidental conversation with her, and I look for a description of that specific shame. He so rarely wrote in specifics, rarely wrote even in scene. Her name appears nowhere. Still, I'm surprised how quickly I find her perspective bleeding through every page, through each admission and plea. She saw him; his words confirm it. He wrote the sentiments that she always wanted him to express to her—how
hard
a day could be, how much he needed support. How he didn't want to feel like a failure as he tried to fall asleep, and how easy it is to fail.

These are, I think, words reaching out for a voice to call back, and I imagine Lena on the other end of the line willing him not to hang up until she's found the right thing to say. She saw him, underneath the beauty that she helped cultivate. She saw him soft and afraid and trying, but that self is soon pushed from his writing, consciously sublimated, as opiates begin to whisper, then to yell, to tell him that he is the opposite of afraid. I still read fear in the subtext, hiding, but the persona changes. A new language takes over.

[LOOSE-LEAF, JUNE 13TH, 1995, “THOUGHTS”]:

I am in my cocoon now. But when I burst forth, I will be a cobra instead of a butterfly. Never married! Fucking! Fuck women, as a race. Fuck them as I did and I do, as vengeance for my teenage years. You pathetic creatures will have to suffer your fate. I will be rich, a public figure, diesel, but these times will remind me never to sell my soul to creatures. Love? Love is hate. What most people refer to as love is for glorious pursuits and ultimate rewards
.
Love is the juice and the candy. Long live power and its glorious unattainable end! Long live intoxicants! Long live vengeance! Long live misogyny!

I want his soft younger writing and the self that came along with it to feel original as I mourn its loss. It isn't original; I know that. He writes about flirtations gone wrong, about feeling like,
What comes next in the grand tragedy of my life?
He uses words like
azure
when he wants to be poetic. He quotes liberally from lyrics that, without a melody to elevate them, are just terrible. Even the torture of depersonalization can sometimes seem flat on the page; it was hard to express how awful that felt without reaching for language that rendered it common. Still, there is a churning underneath the pleading poetry, and that churning feels real, realer definitely than the soapbox preacher of self-reliance that took over so often after Lena knew him, the one that said he hated women and love, hated anything but strength and sensation. I can hear Lena's voice now when I read his stoned rage—
I see you in there
.