Lord Fear (4 page)

It was the first time I learned to look for explanations in characters. My father sat next to me, and his arm was around me, I think. Outside, there was no moon. He spoke of how nothing is Gollum's fault, or Sméagol's for that matter—Gollum
is
fault and Sméagol is helpless. He asked if I understood, and I said I thought so.

Josh's voice on tape is not that moonless memory or that wilted character. There are funny bits to what he wrote and spoke. The part about haddock, that was good, the specificity of it. Josh was funny. I remember that, and the haddock line confirms it, at least a little. Also the part about Toco Lewis, how he just says the name like anybody should know who Toco Lewis is. I laughed at that.

On my last birthday when Josh was alive, he didn't see me and he didn't call, and my father, in lieu of giving me a talk on the birds and the bees, handed me a paperback copy of Roth's
Portnoy's Complaint
. I read the first chapter. Portnoy masturbates in a movie theater, into his sister's bra after school, into a piece of raw liver. I remember that part the most. I read it in bed and tried to imagine what it would look like. I wondered about the pleasure of it, smooth, raw meat on me, moving at my own direction. I thought for the first time of my father's lust. I asked him if Portnoy's childhood was his own. He laughed and said, “Sort of, you?”

It lent continuity, the grossness of knowing that once my father had the same shrill questions and unfulfilled desires that defined me. We were of the same type. Now, for a moment, I can see Josh as that type, as well, one with only petty shames and many questions to ask. This is an exhilarating semi-fantasy. It
feels as though something, a part, has been reclaimed. He moves, briefly, away from a Tolkien brother, all morality tale and inhuman broad strokes. He fades, briefly, into a Roth brother that has to be at least a little bit closer to the truth of him.

—

The next night, Sofia and I have dinner with my parents, and when we leave I'm still thinking of Josh's voice.

We like walking through the city at night. We walk on quiet blocks, lined with old trees. We pass thick, square buildings and talk about the bones of them, how the beams have lasted for so long with interchangeable people moving in and out. We talk about ourselves as those people. A man moves toward us, leading a schnauzer that prances along the curb, sniffing. We crouch and it stops for us, licks my palm. We tell the man
so cute
, and he thanks us and looks really proud. He tells me that the dog likes me, that he rarely licks a stranger's hand, and now I am proud. When the man moves down the block, we talk about owning a dog, and that dog curling at our feet on the hardwood floor of our hypothetical apartment in one of these looming buildings with potted plants on the fire escapes.

This is a new way to experience New York, the place where I've always been a child. Years ago, I spent nights at Josh's apartment on the East Side, and it felt like the only time I ever really lived here, in this whole city. He lived on the second floor, and we'd crawl out his window together onto the fire escape, watch all the strangers moving beneath us. The scope overwhelmed me, so many people. It helped me to think of every one of them as him. I used to think about him walking, neighborhood to neighborhood, unafraid, the top of his head floating below all the eyes on all the fire escapes in the city.

Sofia and I stop by the river and listen to it. I tell her about that image of Josh that I used to have, the one from the fire escape. I tell her how everybody used to move like him from a
distance, how every face in New York was his until right when they passed by me. She smiles at that.

The noise of a motor rumbles from the south and then a police boat passes slowly, spotlight reaching out onto black water, looking for someone. I watch the light, and I know that we'll go home tonight and lie in bed together, windows open for some breeze, music, faint and broken, coming from below. I will put my headphones on and crawl onto our fire escape. I will see the tops of heads moving, and I will think of being a child. I will listen again, grinning as my brother, a child unencumbered, bombards Philip Goodman with his questions. I will wake up wanting more.

—

[NOTEBOOK, AUGUST, “MY BANE BECOMES MY POWER”]:

Those who have had happy childhoods—me not being one of them—are the ones who do not ask larger questions. When you grow up a sickening wretch with CHRONIC anxiety, you develop the means to eschew foolishness
.

[NOTEBOOK, UNDATED, “DREAM NARRATIVES”]:

When I was a little boy, I was afraid of the dark
.

[NOTEBOOK, UNDATED, “MANIFESTO”]:

In my childhood, I studied warfare
.

A long time ago, in a bright, over-cluttered apartment, Philip Goodman watches my brother prepare to torture his pet cat. Philip loves all cats, and this one, Wuzzy, is so old and pitiful that he provokes extra care. Philip is angry as he watches. He grips a pillow on the couch until it feels like he's going to rip the fabric.

“Hey, come on, quit it,” he says.

But Josh's body is already coiled. Wuzzy is sleeping on the TV console, and Josh is watching him inflate and deflate. He's taken off one shoe, and now he holds it like a rock and assumes a sprinter's starting crouch, ready. He is smirking under his soft David Cassidy bob.

Wuzzy apparently does not remember, but this is what always happens when he falls asleep on the TV. Josh likes to hurl things at him. He can't throw for shit, so usually he misses and the projectile smashes into the wall behind Wuzzy, sending the cat into a panic, screeching. Which is still, Philip thinks, a kind of emotional torture.

The shoe is a brand-new Adidas, the one every kid wants. The shoe is irritating enough on its own—parents shelling out money for flashy artifice. It's easy to get frustrated. To think about how, if a kid is shown no limits, only rewards, of course he's going to use overpriced sneakers to torture creatures that are smaller than him.

Today, shockingly, Josh's aim is true. The Adidas flies as though an invisible foot far more coordinated than its owner's is controlling it. It strikes Wuzzy in the ribs, and Philip watches orange eyes open in cartoonish horror, watches the body fly into the white wall. The cat makes a feeble sound, something between a mew and a real child's cry, then falls. Josh's laughter is high-pitched. He runs toward the cat, ready to kick with his now-bare foot, really get some elevation, but Wuzzy is already hurtling himself desperately under the radiator and Josh has to settle for the pleasure of seeing him hide. He lies flat on the floor, and he pokes at his cat's face to hear the hiss. He is eleven years old, almost twelve.

Philip explodes.

“Is this the kind of person you want to be?” he says. He hears his voice rising, feels his neck hot. “You want to be a little shit?”

He is standing and pointing in Josh's face.

The boy stares back at him. He smiles. It's a hard smile, or at least it wants to be. Philip has the feeling that it's a practiced smile, something copied from hours watching TV villains with narrow mustaches and getaway choppers and cleavaged Russian mistresses. Josh shrugs.
I should smack the shit out of him
, Philip thinks. He imagines a pimpled cheek jiggling with the force of his smack.

Friends often ask Philip why he spends so many afternoons on Roosevelt Island, this quiet, homogenous cluster of middle-class high-rises. Why he is so willing to sit on a creaky floral-print couch babysitting a petulant loser while everyone else is perfectly high, lying in a circle on a carpeted floor in Brooklyn, listening to Zeppelin and drumming on their chests. The answer is complicated. Philip is loyal and he's known this family for most of his life. He grew up in Midwood, best friends with Beth's youngest brother, and remembers the feeling of being welcomed into their home, of Beth's mothering kindness toward him long before she was ever a mother. And he comes to protect Dave, too, to stop the bullying for as many afternoons as possible. Dave is a gentle child, and Philip has always felt the call to protect those who need protection.

What he tells his friends is that this is the right thing to do. Josh is fragile; his parents crave a break. It's the right thing to do to help. And there is definitely a satisfaction in feeling essential. In hearing about his essentialness, too, like he's the keystone to a building that would crash into a pile of unrelated stones without him. He can see the strain in Beth's neck when she tells him sincerely that he's the only one to get through to Josh.
He loves you, he wants to be you, he will listen, he needs you
.

And it's true. This cat-torturing boy does need.

A couple of months ago, Philip watched him stamp his rich-kid
sneakers and weep, the kind of ugly weeping where your eyes almost close and your mouth twists in on itself like you're about to puke. Philip stood in the doorway of the apartment. It was wintertime. It was snowing. My father and Beth, after all the awkward silences and the nasty whispers, were going to take a vacation. They were going to salvage things and leave the boys with Philip so that he could provide his own kind of salvaging.

The phone rang from the airport—all the flights were canceled because of the snow; the parents would be stuck at home. My father went to put his coat away. Beth sat on the couch, turned on the television, and tried hard not to look anyone in the eyes. Philip was silent but relieved, already thinking of a weekend free of forced father-figure bullshit. Dave gave a disappointed shrug and sat down next to his mother, asked for the remote.

Plans had been changed; everybody would go on living.

But when Philip looked at Josh, there was darkness. He really thought that word,
darkness
, a metaphorical shadow on the kid's face, so apparent that it became visibly real. It felt too big and melodramatic a word to describe a cranky preteen, but what else? He was like an old clock spring, winding tighter, tighter.

Josh began to howl, a strange mimic of the wind outside as the storm picked up. When he ran out of breath, it seemed like it might be over, but then he gasped and howled again.

Stop
, Philip thought.
For everyone's sake, don't be embarrassing. Realize how embarrassing you're being and then stop it
.

Josh did not stop. He kicked at the coffee table as he ran to his bedroom. The family trailed him. Philip watched. He watched Josh writhe on his bed, screaming the word
no
until it sounded like he had a stutter. It was the kind of gutted repetition that actors utilize in movies when something
awful
, like genocide awful, has happened, and even then you wonder if they're overdoing it. Philip always preferred subtlety on-screen, in general.
There should be some correlation between the seismic effect of an event and a person's reaction to it. Looking at Josh, Philip didn't see a logical correlation to anything.

Beth tried to move in on her son, to love him, wrap him up. It was a sweet impulse, but Josh was too big for the moment to look sweet. He was a broad-shouldered boy, a bit chubby, larger already than his mother as she tried to hold him in small, shaking hands. She wanted to swaddle him, her baby, but he wasn't a baby and she couldn't. Philip watched her roll off, then sit next to him on the bed, reaching out every few seconds to touch him on his heaving back and see if he felt it. Josh hid his face in a pillow, but he kept screaming. It looked like the sound was escaping through his ears.

Dave lingered by Philip's leg like the cat. He reached up, pawed him, and wanted to know why all of this was happening.
What's wrong with him?
is what he said. Philip didn't answer. He patted Dave's head. He wondered what strange feat of genetics could make one boy so solid, so right, and send another shrieking and babyish into puberty. It felt important to let Dave know, in some way, that he wasn't implicated in this. That Josh was the kind of flawed that provides no lineage or explanation.

My father stood over the bed for a while, palms up like he was asking a question. His shoulders, broad like his son's, were tense, almost at his earlobes. He coughed and shook his head, and then walked past Philip out of the room. Philip watched his measured steps down the hallway to the closet, where he retrieved his winter coat. He put the hood up over his ears and walked out into the snowstorm. Josh didn't notice, didn't hear anything but his own volume. How long was he going to scream?

Josh wanted to be with Philip. That's where the tantrum came from, and Philip was keenly aware of it in the moment. Josh wanted his parents gone. He wanted to sit next to Philip and feel his essence, his coolness, as though some osmosis could
happen there in the apartment and Josh could become him, an instant solution to the problems of growing up. That's what all twelve-year-old boys desire, right? To not be themselves and not be their parents; to instead be something mercifully in between? Philip could relate to the impulse. It was the way that Josh went about his desire that lurched past pitiable into repulsive. Desire is only desirable when muted, the way Philip had learned to look at women, restraining himself enough for them to notice the restraint and grow curious.

Josh's hand began to bleed.

Maybe his knuckles had scraped his bed frame or the plaster of the wall. There were tear streaks on his Kiss sheets, snot stains across Gene Simmons's scowling face. And now smeared drops of blood. Philip thought of Beth. He pictured her later that night, after he'd been blissfully relieved of his charge, cleaning her boy's fluid like he was an infant, while my father high-stepped through the snowdrifts until the embarrassment was over. It was a triptych that Philip wouldn't forget, that he would relay in detail to anybody who ever asked about Josh, the defining images: A boy writhing. His mother cleaning. His father ashamed.