Lord Fear (2 page)

We're all here, I think, because of Josh's transgressions, his pleasures. I want to know them, but the time to know has passed. The plywood hides everything. A line forms at the lectern so that guests can take turns telling benign stories. The whole room nods
with certainty after each one. An hour, maybe two, and then there's nobody else who has anything to say. Alone, in the back, I stare at the plywood, uneasy. I wait for something to change.

—

The scene is over.

It's a scene I relive often, willing it to take on new depth each time. Most of the details are made up. Most of the feelings are basic: lust, jealousy, guilt. I catalog what I can remember. I remember faces and stale air. I remember the smell of sweat and nervous bad breath. Mostly, I remember the feeling of brief, bleak community—all of us sharing in the simple awareness of the life and death of a heroin addict named Josh.

What follows is an attempt at a story about that life, that death, and the significance of both. When a man dies alone in his underwear, high, without having first found stardom to squander, of course, his significance is easy to forget.

It's the commonness that's most wrenching
, Roth writes at the end of his graveyard scene.

In some ways, most ways, this story
is
pathetically common: A man dies before his time and is mourned by those who haven't died yet. It's common for a roomful of people to have each known an addict, and it's common for a roomful of people to have a reason to grieve. Nearly four hundred strangers overdosed on heroin in New York City the same year my brother did, and nearly four thousand overdosed in that decade, and it's common, I imagine, for people to Google those stats to find some solace, or at least a sense of inclusion.

It's common, too, for everyone to leave with their own memories and assumptions, to put them away in some metaphorical sneaker box in a metaphorical closet, thought about only when drunk or bored, late at night, the dead man stretching out into their kitchen, standing with them for an isolated moment before vanishing again. And I suppose it's common for the baby in
the story to feel restlessness instead of sadness. To want the life remembered to be less common than every sign points to. Maybe that's the most common thing of all, embarrassingly common: my impulse to want to know more only to confirm to myself that there was someone worth knowing, worth feeling for in the way that I feel, the dull ache of my certainty that a life of importance ended unjustly.

My brother never meant to die, or at least not explicitly, so there is no note of explanation to refer to. There are only stories. The ones we tell. The ones he told. He was a writer, self-identified. He wrote songs and poems and scripts and rants and mantras. In the days after the funeral, his apartment was cleaned and all the writings he saved were collected. They were given to me, I think, because I had the fewest stories of my own to fall back on. I still wanted to know more, so maybe I would read them.

He made a lot of promises on paper, like if he wrote them down they had the greatest possible chance of coming true. His promises are, at least, a place to start.

[TYPED SHEETS, UNDATED, “SELF-INTERNAL MEMORANDUM OF JOSHUA”]:

(Carrots)

In 2–5 years, I will have my “Valhalla” on Long Island, complete with everything—bomb home studio, a bulldog, etc. I will have created an empire (publishing, music, education, and more), press galore (celeb status), mother will be “paid back” more than she ever dreamed. I will hold tremendous power in every way and will go to Paris on a whim at least six times a year
without question
. I will have “shown them all,” old employers (“The Fag Fascist”), etc. Money (tens to hundreds of millions), fame, and power. I will go even further with my
creativity in prose
. Women. Candy
.

Rules

–
There is no such thing as “no.”

–
There is no such thing as “impossible.”

–
There is no such thing as “fear.”

–
Knowledge and art are power
.

–
I am in control (destiny)
.

–
Success is never a matter of “if”;

–
Only “when.”

I Will Be…

–
Always working (12 hours daily) / Target Oriented / IN CONTROL of all (Including the drug situation) / NO FEAR / Just People (all are)
.

THIS IS MY SELF-AGREEMENT! THIS IS LIFE!

—

The first problem with remembering Josh is that his death immediately set to eroding the legacy of his life.
Legacy
seems like way too strong a word to use, but I cannot think of another. What I mean is that the vast majority of my memories of my relationship with him occur upon leaving the funeral home, when he was already boxed, then burned and buried. His life became increasingly overshadowed, with each passing day and then each passing year, by the only sure fact: that he died awfully.

The days after the funeral were slow. It was nearly June, and hot. I stayed home from school, sat around in my underwear, and ate leftover funeral pastries.

“You've got chocolate on your face,” my father said, passing me hunkered over the kitchen table. “I'm going for a walk.”

I went to watch daytime reruns, and somewhere in the middle
of the eating and the watching, I began to cry for the first time since Josh's death.

My father came home and found me, tear-streaked. He'd been gone for hours and he was sweating.

“What's wrong?” he said, and then winced.

I said, “Where'd you walk?”

“Around,” he said.

He went to take a shower. When he was finished, I did the same. I stood under the water for what felt like a long time. When I turned the water off, I got out and stood, disappointed, in front of the mirror, pushing at my flesh and wishing it didn't indent so easily.

Down the hallway, through the closed door, I heard my father make choking howls that he'd never made before. His sounds started low, more of a sad grumble, but then I heard his crescendo. He sounded cracked, underwater, like a broken police siren that couldn't properly warn anybody about anything. I put my head against the bathroom door and wondered when he would finish. I felt the walls vibrate, and I tried to figure out what part of his body he was slamming and what he was slamming it into. Then I heard him gasp, exhausted.

I sat on the cold tile floor and wrapped myself in a towel so that my whole body was covered, or close to it. I used to do that as a small child, pretending that I was a baby squirrel abandoned in a tree pit in a rainstorm. I used to sit, cold, squirrel-like, and wait for somebody to find me. There was no longer anyone looking. I realized that, and sat with the realization. I closed my eyes. I lay fetal and I listened to my father wind down. There was a final sound, almost a squeak, and then there was nothing. I stood and dried myself and tiptoed down the hallway to get closer to him. I leaned against the door to my parents' bedroom and I listened to him breathe.

—

My father had changed in one day. Though I wasn't sure of the specifics of the change, I was certain that one had occurred. I was impressed, maybe jealous, too, that Josh had the power to rearrange something in how our father was. Dave and I changed along with him, maybe for him, and though nobody acknowledged it outright, Josh's absence, the force of it, made a new family.

Dave became my big brother, full stop. We were, instantly, each other's only brother, each alive, and that small truth made us believe that our relationship was realer. It began when my father came through the front door on the night he found the body. He'd called ahead so we were all ready for his entrance. When he walked in, we stood like he was a TV judge. He surveyed the room and found Dave and me. He lurched at us. He caught each of us around the neck, and I think I got his left arm. He pulled our heads into his collarbones and he smelled curdled.

He spoke in a strange teapot hiss.
My boys
, he dubbed us in that foreign voice.
My boys, my boys, my boys
. And so we were.

That summer, and then every summer after, we went on vacation like a nuclear family.

Dave and I roomed together, and I remember us lying on identical, fluorescent teal bedspreads in a hotel room when I was fifteen. Our bodies pressed flat, our toes pointed, we wanted to prove who was longer.

“Stop pointing your fucking toes,” he said, and reached across the space between beds to slap at my chest.

I said fuck you, but didn't hit back.

I tried to imagine us like we were both young, children of eight or nine or ten, never separated. I guessed that my father imagined the same thing every night when he popped his head into our room quick enough to see only outlines—twin beds
and two boys that he made. We were all trying to stop time, or reverse it.

Really, I was a mid-growth-spurt teen, with fast-sprouting armpit hair that wouldn't stop itching and pimples like anthills on my back. Dave was balding and lumpy. He held his body with dissatisfaction, and his skin seemed to sulk, aware and ashamed of the fact that it was dripping through his thirties. The night before, I'd watched him tilt his head up and pluck nose hairs by the bathroom mirror as droplets of blood fell into the sink. Three days earlier I'd heard him shriek when he over-flossed and cut a groove in the gum skin next to one of his molars. You can't take dental hygiene lightly, he'd said. He'd become a man who lived by warnings, slathering himself in sunscreen, checking for ticks in his leg hair.

From his bed, he began to taunt me the way a brother should. He called me things that maybe he used to call Josh. Chubby boy, and then chubby boy escalated to fat boy. And then dumb, fat, little pussy. He told me I had a baby dick, and when I tried to say he'd never seen my dick, he said he saw me coming out of the shower and it made him want to laugh. I screamed that I was going to kill him.

We stood up in the middle of our room and tried to fight. He told me that if he wanted to, he could still kick my ass. He told me I was soft. I told him, bullshit, he was old.

I didn't know how to fight. I hit him with a pillow. The cotton slid across his face and made his cheeks jiggle. He swung a pillow back and I caught it, and then for seconds or minutes we were in the midst of a mighty, childish struggle. We grunted and wheezed. I felt spittle start to slide over my bottom lip, and I slurped it back into my throat too quickly, so I coughed. I managed to get an elbow into his ribs, and it felt good to know that his body was trying to recoil from mine. We spun together and
we rattled the TV console, knocked a plastic-framed sailboat print off the wall.

My father threw the door open, and we looked up with sitcom guilt.

He said, “What are you, morons?”

Dave said that I started it. I disagreed, shrill.

My father began to yell, and, at first, I was frightened on instinct. But when I looked at him again he was grinning. I felt Dave's grip ease on my arm. I heard him laugh. I laughed, too. There was closeness in this tableau, no matter how bumbling it was, how ridiculous. To be wrapped in such insular, brief hate, to bruise each other until the patriarch commanded we stop—it felt like just the right kind of conflict. Boys will be boys and then they will stop and grudgingly embrace. In the morning, they will wake up and start over.

That night I couldn't sleep. My eyes were closed, but I was thinking about my imagined first sexual encounter, and about Josh—two topics that ran together easily, both so desirable and out of reach. Often, he acted out my fantasies.

Dave couldn't sleep either. I heard him kicking his sheets and I asked him what was wrong. He told me it took him twenty minutes just to get a hard-on, and sometimes it wasn't worth the effort. I lay silent, unable to empathize, still a hormonal spring trap, scared to wear sweatpants on a windy day. The pills, he said, made it like he couldn't feel.

Dave had become the most wholly dependent drug user I knew. Each morning, I watched him run his fingers through a stash of lithium, Paxil, Klonopin. The pills made his body inflate and the muscles of a young man disappear from his calves and his forearms, the way I'd seen Josh's body mutate at the end. But Dave's weren't the drugs that killed you, they were the ones that kept you alive, even though that seemed like a subtle difference.

Dave stopped talking. He blew his nose and tried to sleep. I heard him kick his covers all the way off. Then I finally dozed, thinking of Josh's arms and a woman with big eyes and no mouth. I woke to the sound of Dave screaming. I said,
What?
, and kept my eyes on the ceiling. He told me he'd had a bad dream.

“Don't you ever think about living a day and then a year and then a decade?” he asked me. “And doesn't it ever not seem worth it?”

“No,” I said, not stopping to think about whether that was true.

He said he'd dreamed of a day that never ended and the sound of a motor underwater, and Josh's face hanging in the sky, laughing at him. Dave asked me if I remembered how mean Josh's laugh was. I didn't remember that. I didn't respond.

“You don't know anything yet,” he said.

—

I think we all became quieter, though that seems impossible. It's not that we spoke less, or softly, but, still, I remember a hush.

In the years that I lived with him after Josh died, my father watched at least part of every Yankees game played. He sat on his couch, ate grapes, and watched. My mother walked past every few innings, smiled at him or asked the score when she didn't really care. Sometimes, if it was close at the end of a game, he'd tell her that and she'd sit for a few minutes before touching his shoulder and moving on.