Lord Fear (26 page)

“You look good,” I said.

“I am,” he said.

“You do look good,” my father said.

“I am,” he said.

He stood on the stoop when we got home, and I had the realization that all three of us were trying to picture the act of him walking inside.

My father and I stood above him.

My father said, “Well.”

Josh said, “Well.”

When we were about to go in, Josh said, “I'll be back soon. I'll call ahead next time. The three of us can have dinner. Maybe next week?”

I didn't know if I believed him, and I heard that uncertainty in my voice when I said, “Yeah, sounds good.”

That's when he looked up at us, raised his right hand to wave good-bye, held it by his ear, and then dropped it to his side. His eyes were pinched crescents, and he was trying very hard to keep smiling. I think he wanted to say more, but then the door closed.

It's what happened next that my father can't stop thinking about because it's what he can't know.

Josh went back to Beth's after he left us, and at some point in the next week or so he told her that he was ready to be alone, that he could be trusted to be alone. He returned to his apartment, all the faded black leather, the pull-up bar so long unused, his keyboard dusty, his notebooks stacked under the coffee table.

I don't know if the hit that killed him was already in his apartment, a last stash that he hadn't been able to bring himself to flush, or if he got antsy in there alone and went down to Tompkins Square Park to buy from the gutter punks, or if he called a dealer to deliver and there was a stranger who sat with him at the end, impossible now to find. What I do know is that the only piece of writing or correspondence left in Josh's apartment dated within a month of his death was the warning letter from the Supreme Court of New York:
YOU ARE HEREBY ORDERED to appear for a VIOLATION OF PROBATION HEARING
. The one that I found in a torn-up shopping bag on top of a pile of crinkled loose-leaf love letters.

I ask my father what Josh was arrested for. He doesn't know. When? No answer. We speculate about what he might have done. He got kicked out of a methadone program once; did he try to buy it illegally? Or was he selling it? It could have been an old prescription forgery charge. Or credit card fraud; he was good at fraud. A prostitution sting. That's definitely possible, my father says. These are the options that we hope for because they make, at least, a small bit of sense.

“I don't know what he might have done,” my father says. “Whatever he really did, the full extent of it, he didn't want me to know.”

I'm not sure that the original crime matters. What matters is that on the day he died this might well have been the last piece of evidence he saw to tell him the story of who he was. And the voice, official, threatening, inarguable, said,
You are a case number. You have done wrong and you have not atoned, but you will
.

I see Josh fold the letter back into itself, put it in the shopping bag on top of all the other voices, the kind ones, the ones that spoke of the good in him. And that's when the last change of mind enters the scene, and the drug, and the desire to feel outside himself. It's the best approximation I've found to speculate about, anyway. Who was he at the end? What was he seeing? What was he thinking? Maybe he was thinking that there was no story to tell anymore beyond the official one.

A few days later, Beth called my father because Josh wasn't picking up the phone. He met her outside the apartment. Neither spoke; both knew and weren't sure how.

My father opened the door with the spare key. The window was open, and he could hear rain falling on the hardwood floor. He wondered if they should hold hands, him and Beth, like kids in the summer before they jump off rocks into the water. My father never learned how to swim.

There was a tiny staircase, three steps was all, that led from the kitchen into the living room of the apartment. They descended and saw Josh lying by the coffee table. He was in his underwear, white briefs. The elastic cut into his waist. Next to him was a bottle of Formula 409 cleaning spray and a sponge. It had always made him feel relief to clean. My father remembered that and almost smiled.

Beth trembled and held back. My father did what was grotesque and somehow right, paternal at least. He knelt and touched two fingers to his son's flesh. It was cold, so that was it.

The police came. There was an official report. He rode the ambulance to the morgue. There was a death certificate. He went home.

“I'm not saying that would make it a suicide,” my father says, so many years past that night, still reaching. “But, you know, it's a reason. If he saw that summons and it was the last straw…”

There is a morsel of redemption in the notion of a man attempting to rewrite what he is one last time, then coming home, seeing something that can't be changed, deciding to finally close his eyes and stop trying. I'd like to think of him feeling resigned rather than desperate, still guilty and flailing to the very end. But then there's the Formula 409 and the sponge, the implied promise to himself of a new shine when he woke up.

I try not to think about that detail, the broad symbolism that it might hold. Instead, I try to imagine his last thoughts because there's potential in that.

I still have the one book he ever gave me, Rand's
Anthem
. It was a birthday present. He handed it to me and told me not to let the world hold me back. I hope he didn't remember Ayn Rand platitudes as he nodded away.

There's a Baldwin line that says it best, another from “Sonny's Blues”:
It ain't only the bad ones, nor yet the dumb ones that get sucked under
.

I hope he was thinking something like that as he faded, on the scuffed wood floor looking at his ceiling, hearing voices from out on Twenty-Sixth Street like he wasn't alone.

—

I'm at my parents' place now, under the wall of Josh's before-shots. Across from me, my father leans back in his chair and can't figure out when he believed, when he stopped believing. Did he
worry the whole time? Did he know? Was it as inevitable as it seems now? Did anything change at all?

The addiction clouds things. Scenes condense and then they begin to eat their own edges.

The story of addiction is the story of memory, and how we never get it right.

We're still having this conversation.

We're sitting in front of the TV and it's another Sunday.

“When I think back, it's mostly about the death,” my father tells me. “I talk to him sometimes. I yell.
You fucking idiot
. That kind of stuff. I think about things disappearing. His face eroding until it's gone.”

He goes silent after that. He slurps tea and I sip beer, and on the TV in the background men are hitting each other and whistles are blowing. When I leave, he looks like he wants to say something else, but he doesn't.

I get an email from him changing his story again. He remembers Josh's smile, he says, and calls it shy. Josh just wanted to feel better, he says, and why shouldn't he want that? We all want that. He had a shy smile and he wanted to feel better. My father remembers Josh near the end, telling him he understood how hard it was to see him—a conscious gift of acknowledgment, one meant to heal.

Maybe I'm just trying to put a gloss on it, my father says.

[NOTEBOOK, JUNE 16, 1995, “NOTES”]:

And to think, I myself wonder at times why I suck on the sap. As they all torment me. Torment. I won't let the torment in. The red juice even tastes good now
.

[POEM, JUNE 18, 1995, “FATHER'S DAY”]:

Absolution from the sap
.

In the sap, it destroys

All that irks me
.

All the people that desert me
.

And it takes me
,

Yes it makes me
,

At one with all
.

And if the terror, or horror, or ugliness

Calls

It is washed away

In a sea of red
,

The sweet, slow rocking of my head
.

When you see me I'll be fixed
.

For I was broken
.

I was sick
.

The sea of red and what it brought
.

One day soon I will be king
.

I'll shout, rooftops
,

Much I will say
.

How my cares were killed on father's day
.

He writes nothing else until Labor Day, and I yearn to see that summer. It's the closest thing I can find to a beginning of his addiction, that bizarrely reassuring
change
moment, when his original self and his addict self can be last separated. He entered a young man in pain, a young man searching. The red sap rocked him sweetly, slowly, and how necessary that must have felt, to be rocked. The sap was prescription cough syrup; I'm pretty sure. By Labor Day, he's submerged.

I imagine joy in the four months of no writing between these entries. I imagine that he recorded no promises, no vengeance notes, no sad poems, no posturing scripts, because there was no reason to. He was not detached from the sensation of being himself; he was reveling in it instead. There's nothing to say about happiness; you just live it. That's a cliché, yes, but I hope that it's a
true one. He felt joy. From Father's Day on, for a whole summer, his cares were killed. He left no evidence, he just felt it. After all this looking, maybe the best explanation is in the silence.

On Labor Day, his writing is shaky and smudged. He's high, but the joy is gone:

[NOTEBOOK, SEPTEMBER 4, 1995, “LABOR AND ABSOLUTION FOR A JUNKIE”]:

Most of my life was bad. Awful. But the third day of a three day weekend was always the worst. The success and the horror are what I need to write about. How to go from horror to neutral and from neutral to good. The red, sweet sap elevated me to good. But I have a great task before me. Life. And I feel overwhelmed. I blame the sap, but that's not the reason
.

It's illegible after this. There is no reason given, no confession, nothing easy. Just the stories we tell ourselves, and now we're back to the beginning. Now we try again. In his email to me, my father is already trying again. When Josh died, it was rock bottom, he says. And if he'd lived, he would have shown his goodness more, his softness. There wouldn't have been anger; there wouldn't have been shame. I think I believe that, my father says.

—

Time passes.

Time has been passing, and he has been fading, and I have been making phone calls, meeting for coffee, writing, deleting, turning yellowed pages covered in blue ink.

I've moved. From Brooklyn out to the Midwest, back East again to an old industrial city where none of my family has ever been. I have a hard-bodied leather suitcase, and that's where I keep Josh's writing. I've taken the suitcase with me wherever
I've lived, and many nights, always alone, I've opened it and read.

Sofia and I are getting married soon, at a quaint New England inn with white walls. Dave is going to be my best man. I proposed on a hiking trail in the Midwest, kneeling on a damp carpet of fall leaves. Our dog ran around our legs. That's another thing I did, bought a dog. She is harmless and adorable and falls asleep on my belly sometimes.

In the old industrial city back East, I wake up early and take her to shit on a little dirt patch by the edge of a parking lot on the corner. I'm spacing out, and I look down to see her nosing a hypodermic needle that's been javelined into the dirt. There are fresh blood flecks around it. I pull the dog off and hear a motor running. A few feet away, someone parked for the night to get high. The window is cracked just enough so they don't suffocate; the heat is on so they don't freeze to death.

These are the small moments that still mean too much to me, that I have a hard time walking away from quickly. I stand over the car, staring through the cracked window. It's a boy, younger than me. His seat is reclined as far back as possible. At first I can't see him breathing and I don't know what to do, but then his chest moves, just a little, up and down, and then again. Then he shivers in his sleep. I put my hand on the roof of the car and lean closer. He looks ordinary. Everything about this is ordinary.

It's the commonness that's most wrenching
.

This is a good parking lot to get high in; they never tow. When this boy wakes, he will drive away and do this again somewhere else because that's what he does, that's what a lot of people do. Eventually, I assume, he won't wake up. I have this urge to tell him,
Hey, I knew someone who didn't wake up
. Not as a warning or anything, but because maybe he would be interested.

The dog is cold and has finished shitting, so she barks at me. The boy begins to wake. I leave quickly, tugging the leash down the block to my apartment, where it's warm and Sofia is sleeping, curled like an infant, breathing long and full. At home, too, are Josh's journals, hiding under a stack of old comforters in a hallway closet, which is where I always return them after reading, as though my interest is definitively done each time. They're tucked away with my boxing gloves left over from a brief fitness craze and Sofia's plastic, portable Christmas tree.

Toward the end, in his second-to-last notebook, Josh began a memoir. He called it a “true novel.” It is ten handwritten pages and ends mid-sentence. There's a faded pen line running down from the last letter to the end of the page.

[NOTEBOOK, UNDATED, “THE JUNKIE AND THE VISITOR: A TRUE NOVEL,” P. 1]:

Now, I'm not one to say, “Yo, I'm from the streets, G.” Mostly because that isn't me. I'm a rich man's son. But the streets are open to anyone. Be warned
.