Lord Fear (21 page)

—

A month later it's even warmer and he's back in the shop still wearing that jacket. It's the lunchtime rush, and he is the only customer not hair-gelled and preppy, with shiny loafers that clack as they shuffle down the line. Sima thinks it's strange to see a white man not shrouded in office attire.

It's Josh's turn to order. She prints his ticket and tries to keep her eyes down on the condiment buckets.

“It's me,” he whispers to her in Hindi.

Obviously. Before she can answer, he says, “May I have your number?” again in Hindi, a secret that nobody else in the shop can intercept. His accent is getting better. He comes in so often now and he practices with her. Sometimes he doesn't even buy a sandwich, he just stands and talks and then eventually says good-bye.

Sima's mother's voice is clear in her head, a firm and pursed
no
to everything this burly stranger is offering. She has a job that she should be grateful for that he is distracting her from, a future husband back in Queens who she should be far more grateful for. These are things she knows rationally.

She is lonely.

She scribbles fast on the back of his ticket, and he holds it up like he just won something.

“Thank you,” he says.

She smiles and tries to go back to work.

He leans over the sneeze guard and says, “I'm going to call tonight. Can I call tonight? Please?”

There are many concerns to consider, primarily that when her future husband is around, he always picks the phone up first. But tonight he's working and Sima will be alone, staring out her
barred window at all the people pulsing along the avenue below who don't know her and never will.

The suits stuck on line behind Josh are growing restless, and Sima feels their glares, eyes like fingers again, poking.

“Sweetheart,” one says. He points to the face of his watch.

“I'm going,” Josh says. “But I'm calling. Tonight, I'm calling. Unless you say no, I'm calling.”

The rest of the day is wooze. The rush ends, then comes the late afternoon drag, then she's home alone and nothing worth stopping for and really experiencing happens until the phone rings.

His voice sounds like he's been crying.

“Are you okay?” she blurts out in English, hearing her own stilted accent echo back at her through the fuzzed connection. “Is there anything I can do for you? What's wrong?”

He says, “Nothing,” and she can picture his face pleased that she asked. What a funny thing, to know someone's expression when you can't see them. Outside her window, trucks thud in the potholes on Northern Boulevard.

“Where
are
you?” Josh says into the phone.

“It doesn't matter,” Sima says. “Where are you?”

She wraps her fingers around a mug of tea, listens to Josh breathe, and tries to picture where he might be. Where would a man like him live? She thinks of the borough of Manhattan, long and pinched the way it's drawn on subway maps, full of shimmering surfaces with white faces reflected in them. She pictures a tall building, all black glass. He is in some apartment, somewhere in those black windows, but she cannot muster any detail around him. Just his face, smiling, sad.

“It doesn't matter,” he says. “Tell me about your life. Please. I want to know.”

—

Maybe, after all the long talks, she asks him outright what his demon is or if there are many of them. Maybe he just volunteers the information at some point because he senses that she wants to know. Often she can't remember how their conversations begin and is hardly conscious of when they end because they pick up again days later, so fluid each time. There is always something at his edges, though, gnawing in at him, causing him to stop mid-story, right before the climax or the explanation, to say that there are things beyond his control. She wants to know more, to know all of him, and finally he lets her.

He's leaning at her over a small table near the back of the sandwich shop after her shift. His fingertips, bracing his weight on the table, almost touch hers, and she thinks about how she could give a sharp exhale and blow the stringy hair off his forehead. That's how close they are.

“I am good,” he says. “That's what I've been saying. But there's this monster. Really, that's what it is.”

He looks young, little-boy frustrated. He reaches his fingers forward to touch hers. She doesn't pull away.

“I can't not do it,” he says. “You don't know about drugs. This is the thing: It's like I'm not allowed to not do it.”

She nods for him, unsure and unconvincing. He is sallow under the fluorescents.

“I want to quit,” he says. “Trust me. Do you trust me that I'm telling the truth?”

She does.

“There's a devil on my shoulder. The drug is the devil. I'm not the devil”—he pauses here because this is a crucial point to get across—“I'm not the drug. But the drug is right there, always. Always.”

She holds his hands. He lets them go limp as she holds them and they look almost dainty. She has the realization that she might be the only person in the world who gets this close to him
anymore, that this closeness is crucial. She wonders about the last time somebody not her looked at him like this, leaning forward, never backing away. Who was that person? When did that person stop leaning in? She tries very hard not to blink because that doesn't seem right. She looks down at his arms; he's left them bare today. He lets her see the shallow holes and ruddy irritations that spread like a constellation across his skin.

She has never been anything but sober, doesn't understand the mechanics of any type of high, and Josh loves that about her. Often he asks her to remind him of her forever sobriety, always responds with,
Amazing, you're amazing
. The holes in his arms make her think of the drug as alive, digging.

She runs the tip of her thumb across one of the needle tracks. He flinches, but then he lets her.

“It's important to me that you believe that I used to not be like this,” he says. “I was crazy strong. Like feel-my-muscles strong. I wrote music. I can play you tapes. I owned this business. I told you that.”

It's in Sima's nature to believe. She tells him, of course, asks him to show her that picture again, the one from when he traveled to India. He's standing against a graffitied wall, tan and beaming, with his shirt sleeves rolled all the way up to his shoulders, arms clean.

He thanks her with such force that they both fall silent. Then he decides to shift. She loves this about him, loves this the most maybe, his capacity for self-resurrection right in front of her, with their conversation hardly stalling. He sits up straight and waves his hand in between their faces, erasing what has been there. He says,
Hey
, like a dare.
Hey what?
she counters. She lets her torso stiffen along with his.

“Let's talk about
India
,” he says.

So they do.

He's good at talking. He makes words do exactly what he wants them to, like he's building something and she's watching. The settings are lush when he describes them, the dirt neon orange, not brown, each person a vivid, almost glowing version of humanity. She's from there, and it never seemed as remarkable when she lived it.

He speaks about the past and then skips right to the future. The future is just as tantalizing as the past. Forget the present. The present is dull gray. The devil is heavy on his shoulder in the present. And her shoulders are heavy, too, weighted a little more with each subway ride and ketchup refill and silent dinner. In the present, she has one friend, this man sitting in front of her, talking about what has been and what might be.

“I've told you why India is the most beautiful place in the world, right?” he asks.

Yes, he has. “Maybe. I don't think so. Tell me.”

The second time he went to India, he was alone, he tells her. He just bought a plane ticket and went because he couldn't stay away from the beauty. He had one backpack with him, that's it. Every morning he walked through Bombay to the same fruit stand to buy a mango from this tiny kid with an oversized smile. Never has anything tasted better than that mango tasted, and the kid watched him eat and he kept saying,
You like? You like?
All the children were so sweet. Fundamentally kind, even when they realized he couldn't give them much beyond high fives. He gave them all high fives. They said,
Howdy Partner
, like how they thought Americans did, and it made him laugh every time. No other place in the world is kind like that.

He's a tangle of words. Sima grins and he stops for a moment to watch her show her teeth. She looks down at her hands and then back up again, at him.

“We could go,” he says, as she knew he would. “Just buy a
ticket. We could go now. Or tomorrow. Do you miss that part of the world? Do you miss home? I'll take you back.”

He nods his head, urging her to do the same. She sighs and complies.

There is, there has to be, an unspoken recognition between them that they will never go to India together. Imagine if they tried. There would be a moment in his apartment when his decision would be simple—leave the drug and instead take India, take Sima, or keep everything the same. Yes, Sima is a believer, but not so much that she thinks she would win. And what of her own life? There's no leaving and returning on her delicate temporary visa. And even if she could, what would the conversation be in Jackson Heights as she packed?
I am going. I have to go. I need to live this moment with this man so I can feel something different. Yes, a man. He is my friend
.

Outside the shop, a taxi's honk is followed by the sound of a heavy fist beating on the hood. There is yelling.

“It will be none of this,” Josh says, jerking his thumb toward the noise. “We'll wake up and we'll go play with the children. We'll eat mangoes. Do you remember how they taste?”

“Yes,” she says. Yes for him. “They taste so sweet like they're still alive. We should go in May. Do you know they're juiciest in the spring?”

Both of their heads are still nodding. Not at the same time, but in sequence. She bobs up as he drops his chin down, like they're connected, pulling one another forward. He is imagining the mangoes. He is imagining her eating the mangoes, juices running down her neck, tropical sunlight on her black hair. She knows he is. She thinks that his imagination works harder than anyone else's. She told him that once. She said she thought he did drugs because his imagination was brighter, louder, more constant than any normal person's. She could tell he liked it when she said that.

“When we go, maybe it will be what I need to change,” he says. He grabs a sugar packet from the table and shakes it in a rhythm. “I mean, Jesus, there will be beauty everywhere. New experience. Who needs a high then?”

Sima still doesn't know exactly why anyone needs a high in the first place.

“Yes,” she says. “You'll be better.”

Josh coughs and she watches every part of his body shake. The layer of fat around him bounces. His head swivels on his neck, a surprised look on his face like he hadn't realized how long the cough would last or how hard the next breath would be. He gives a shamed smile. Sima doesn't like to look at him when he doesn't want her to. She turns and watches two of her coworkers on a cigarette break, spitting heavy globs onto the sidewalk.

Suddenly, his palm is on her face. It's not an aggressive move, but, still, a lunge to caress her, his fingertips tugging at the thin hairs on the back of her neck. Soft hands, no calluses, no texture. He wants her. He makes a noise, no words, just a low grunt. She feels his thumb slide down, touch her bottom lip. Nobody has ever done that to her, touched her lip like that. It doesn't feel right that he's the one to do it. It's a present and physical act, his hand snatching, very real and very desperate.

“No,” she says. She grabs him by the wrist, not hard, just enough for him to feel it.

She is relieved that he's gentle when she says no.

“I'm sorry,” he says.

“I love you,” she says, surprised at how blunt it sounds, how true it is. “I love you, but this is not us.”

They exist together only as what they want to be and what they were. That's the gift that they give each other. Josh looks at Sima, his eyes wet and red. He places his hands, palms down, back on the table.

“We don't have to go to India,” he says. “You already know
that part of the world. Paris. I can't believe you've never seen Paris. I want to show you Paris.”

He means it. She is overwhelmed by how much he means it. She asks him what the Seine looks like at night so he has the chance to describe it. He tells her it's like living inside starlight.

—

When he calls late, she snatches the phone up midway through the first ring so that nobody wakes up. When she whispers hello, he says, I love you, I love you, and that is enough. He's breathing heavy into the line.

“I pray for you,” she whispers into the phone.

It's true, and why should care be a secret? She wants good things for his soul; that is nothing to hide. And he is speaking slowly, breathing heavily enough to let her know that he is way too high to squabble with her about God. When he's sober, he likes to ask her what could possibly make her think that there is something strong and good up there, something that cares about us. Then she says, How could it not be so? And he says, Prove it, over and over until he gives up and they both start laughing.

She hears a happy sigh into the phone, his tongue muffling the sound.

“I do,” she says. “I pray for you every night.”

She imagines him with his eyes closed, savoring.

“You know there are only three people I really love,” he tells her. She waits for him to say it. “I love you because you love me. You forgive me. You, Sima. And my mother. And Luke. I like the way you all look at me.”