Lord Fear (7 page)

Daniel Chang is in the back, watching Josh over the top of his seat. Daniel is newly immigrated, still friendless. Watching Josh provides him with a rare feeling of inclusion. Everyone else seems to be watching—the boys that try to hide it, the popular girls that seem to move and lust in a pack. Daniel sees what they see, and thinks that if Josh turned and looked back at him, his whole life might be different. The bus stops in front of Josh's building, and he's up, two bouncing strides toward the door, and then he's gone until tomorrow. Exhale.

—

By November, it's already freezing cold at dusk. Daniel is standing on the bike path along the East River, and he's shivering because this is the cusp of his first New York winter and he doesn't yet own a jacket. In thin jeans and a sweatshirt, he tries to stop shaking and thinks he can feel his newly descended testicles rising back into him like the lotto numbers that his mother watches sucked into tubes every evening. He's here because his first friend has brought him with the promise that others will be
here. One of those others is Josh, leaning over the metal railing, spitting into the water. As a pinkish, polluted sunset shimmers across midtown Manhattan, Daniel Chang is introduced to Josh. They face each other, and Daniel wills himself to say, “Hi, I'm Dan,” because he has decided Dan sounds better than Daniel.

Josh looks him up and down, more down since Dan is nearly a head shorter than him. Time is, of course, slow. Maybe they can hear water like a tongue slapping the pylons below them.

“Danny Boy,” Josh says finally. Then he smiles, so Dan smiles, too, until his teeth get cold and he knows he's held it too long. He jerks his head down to look at his Keds like he's never noticed them before.

—

A relationship develops like whirring 16mm footage, uncut but sped up. They aren't best friends, but they're around each other more and more—a bigger boy and a smaller boy walking along the East River as the sun sets and rises and sets again. In Dan's apartment, the air is quiet and stale, both his parents either working or worrying. He hurries back out into the city, where Josh is, and motion returns as they explore a New York that has the gritty swagger and grayed color palette of a Cassavetes film. Dan watches Josh as they mature together, remembers the details.

They are seventeen now, maybe eighteen, and he has followed Josh to a party full of kids with famous parents and paint on their pants. Dan goes to the local public high school, but Josh goes to the magnet art school to play the drums every day. Dan has no affinity for art of any kind, but he likes the word and the word works for Josh, with his pouting lips, his all-black wardrobe, his seeming detachment from responsibility.

The party is in a Manhattan apartment overlooking Central Park, and Dan scans the walls speculating on the value of everything. It's one of those apartments that was built at the turn of
the century, with a maze of extra rooms once meant for cooks and maids and sets of grandparents. Now it's a place to get high and then get lost looking for the bathroom. Dan walks past a room full of nude African statues, watches two pasty strangers making out, unable to look away until one of them sees him and stares back. Dan shoves his palms into his blue jean pockets and wanders on. He feels two crumpled bills and what he briefly hopes is a quarter but soon realizes is a nickel. Everyone around him is talking about beauty—the beautiful feeling of a drug he's never tried, the beautiful sound of the keyboard on a record he hasn't heard of, the beautiful way light functions in some movie with a French name. He thinks of the conversations that Josh must have during the long school days when Dan isn't present, every word a reference to something else, a language that one needs to be initiated into.

Dan enters the living room. He hears his sneakers squelch in spilled wine, panics, and then finds Josh. Josh is standing in the center of the room, and if he isn't bigger than everyone else, he at least seems to be. He has begun to devour weight-lifting handbooks and drink protein shakes. He writes workout plans, laminates them, shows them to all his still-scrawny friends. They, too, seem to be written in an alien tongue. A shield of muscles tugs at a shirt that Dan remembers being loose once.

The lifting was a brilliant decision. Dan can see that. What's more avant-garde, in a room full of the concave, self-titled avant-garde, than looking like the hypothetical bullies they're rebelling against? Sure enough, Dan sees clusters of these too-hip skeletons edging toward Josh, curious, wanting to be near him, to brush a shoulder of that bulging shape just to see what it feels like.

Josh is holding a beer that he hasn't sipped from in hours. Beer is all carbs and the loss of control. The loss of purity, really, both mental and physical. Josh is pure. Dan watches Josh's free hand, where there is all the evidence of sober concentration. He keeps
up a steady, complicated rhythm on the arm of the velvet couch in front of him, something that could appear to be a fidget if you weren't looking closely enough.

A girl interrupts Dan's sight line. She walks up to Josh and offers him a cigarette. He scoffs and says something shitty about how he prefers air. Dan thinks that this might be the most beautiful girl he's ever seen, and though that's something he thinks often, he is ready to stand by his assessment in this case. Her hair is somewhere between red and brown and her lips are red. Her jeans are tight, tight from the ankle to the crease of her knee to the controlled swell of her ass. David Bowie is on her T-shirt, bright blond hair, bright blue makeup. Josh wears makeup. He doesn't talk about it but Dan sees it. Does she know that? Does she like it? Is it a Bowie thing?

Dan tries to catch his friend's eye to give a look that says,
Holy shit, that's the most beautiful girl I've ever seen
. He begins a little wave, but feels his hand suspended up by his shoulder and aborts. Hands back in pockets, he watches the girl ask Josh questions.
Are you having fun?
Leaning closer.
Do you ever smile?
Fingertips on his unresponsive arm.
Take me somewhere quiet?

Dan is still, like if he moves it might ruin something. Josh whispers an excuse in her ear, and she has the look of someone rejected for the very first time. She pulls her fingers back from his elbow. Josh smiles over her head at Dan and makes a face like he's nauseated by her presence. Dan is furious at the injustice of the world and the different ways that different people are allowed to experience it. Josh struts over to him.

“Nothing worse than a drunk chick,” he says. “That's a woman without dignity.”

“Yeah,” Dan says.

Josh surveys the room, says something about weakness. We are too good for this place, he tells Dan, and Dan is no longer angry. Together they strut to the elevator, then out onto the
street. They walk through Central Park. It's black and there's scuffling in the shadows. Dan thinks he can see people, thinks he hears running footsteps, but he's not sure. The park at night is a prime example of the kind of place Dan's parents have told him not to be, all shadow. Josh walks fast, steps loudly, doesn't care who hears him. Dan hurries to keep up.

—

Four years later, they are still friends, more so than ever, if only because of proximity. Other friends have moved far away to college, and so Josh and Dan are left together, always a pair now.

They're in Chinatown at a dim sum joint with tiny wooden tables and tiny plastic chairs, where Josh is the only white guy. He seems to enjoy that; it's a scenario he cultivates often. He sits splayed and satisfied, the whole restaurant reflected in the curved glass of his aviators. A waitress, young, walks over. Josh tries to order for the two of them in Chinese; he mangles it, but she likes the effort and giggles down at him.

“Very good,” she says.

“I'm a linguist,” he says.

She walks away, and Josh says she has a pretty nice rack for a Chinese girl. Dan agrees. Josh leans back, his left arm stretched across the empty chair next to him. Dan imagines Josh's mouth on the waitress's nipples, sucking, the sound that would make.

“Depp is the man,” Josh says.

21 Jump Street
has sort of become their thing.
21 Jump Street
on Thursday, a party on Friday, dim sum on Saturday morning to recap the conquests of the night before.

“Freeze,”
Josh screams across the table, pointing a finger gun at Dan, face perfectly Depp-ish.
“Freeze.”

Dan throws his hands up and tries to say,
Ah, c'mon man
, like a pimp just caught. They laugh together.

Josh has a girlfriend, a new one, and he starts talking about her. Her name is Naya, and she's Indian or Bangladeshi, Dan
never gets it right. Sometimes she goes out with them on Fridays. She doesn't say much. Josh leaves her next to Dan, goes off somewhere to talk to other people, returns after too long. She asks Dan,
Where
is
he?
She loves him, loves him to the point of stinging tears and gnawing stomach pain when she can't see him. When Josh returns home after dim sum, Dan knows there will be messages on his mother's answering machine, aching messages. Josh will call Dan, say listen, and then hit Play, and Dan will hear him laughing into his protein shake as Naya's recorded voice whines,
Where are you?
, yet again, trying so hard to sound nonchalant, which makes it sound the opposite.
Are you screening? Pick up if you're there. Hello?

“She fucks crazy,” Josh says, leaning over the table. “These Indian girls, they're proper, they're not supposed to, so it's like they're dying for it.”

Dan is silent as he tries to imagine what
dying for it
means, and what it might look like. He imagines the sound of struggling breath, hair yanked back, eyes wide in a perfect ratio of pleasure and pain. A few months ago, it had been another girl. At the same table over dim sum, Josh had told Dan all about her family, so overprotective that she'd been brainwashed away from sex until marriage. Which was bullshit. But Josh, the pull of him, his insistence, it was all too much. She agreed to anal as a compromise, whispered that in his ear, and then Josh relayed the message to Dan in more of a yell, talking about the
tightness
of it. All Dan could say was,
How tight? How tight?

The waitress is standing over the front counter by the mints looking at their table.

“You like her?” Josh says.

“Well, yeah,” Dan says.

“Do you want her?”

“Sure, but—”

“That's it. Shut up. I just asked you if you wanted her.”

The moment slows down after this. Josh stands, winks, strides across the little restaurant. The waitress sees him coming and tries to pretend like she doesn't. Dan watches the distance between them close and feels the weight of inevitability. He doesn't hear any of the exchange. He sees Josh move in, lean over, and speak.

Josh returns with her name and number written on a blank ticket. He slides it to his friend, a gift, a kindness, and he gives a little bow.

—

The next time Dan sees him bow is for real, a bow to a roomful of people. The people are clapping and so he's bowing. He's on a professional stage for the first time. Not just any professional stage; this is CBGB, as real a setting for a rock star as exists in the world. Fucking CBGB, and he's being watched like this is a school bus on Roosevelt Island and everyone else is a twelve-year-old girl. It feels like a scene that Dan will remember as a beginning. He will be able to tell people, anybody, years from now, I was in the
first
crowd.

Josh is standing behind the keyboard that he taught himself to play. He doesn't look nervous and he doesn't look to anyone for validation. He looks down at his own fingers, and then out over the crowd at some point beyond. Dan sees him at an angle reserved for concert documentaries, lots of crotch and chin.

The club isn't full. It's a Wednesday, after all, and Josh is not Joe Strummer. Dan recognizes almost every person in the room. Josh's parents are in the front, beaming, his father clicking a newly bought camera like a zinc-faced whale watcher. Dave is in the back sulking into a soda. Friends are in the crowd, old classmates from Roosevelt Island who stand around Dan in a jealous pack, shy immigrant girls he's met at Josh's college parties. Yeah, you could see it like a talent-show crowd, and you could see how
poorly that fits the surroundings—proud parents taking mantel photos in the place where Iggy Pop used to cut his skin to let fans lick his blood.

But Josh is backlit onstage, and he looks the part. There is a red glow coming from behind his neck. His body is pulsing with breath. His arms are like snakes snapping at the keys. His mouth is open and his eyes are closed as he sings a low harmony. Dan is standing as tall as he has ever stood, right in the middle of the front row, fists raised, metal buckles jangling on his leather jacket, howling at my brother engulfed in a spotlight as the first song begins its crescendo.

—

Static. Then the downfall.

Six years later, Dan's leather jacket is folded up tight and rests in a plastic box in a hall closet at his mother's apartment. The motorcycle that he bought with his first string of paychecks, that even Josh was jealous of, is packed up, too, covered in an old sheet. The bike makes his girlfriend nervous. She's a nurse and she has pulled metal shards out of bloody holes in a triage unit, so danger carries no awesomeness for her. She works all day, comes home with sore feet, and likes to lie on the couch with Dan in their starter apartment in Queens, with the news on, feeding each other lo mein.

Josh is in their apartment now for the first time, and just his presence, his insincere compliments about their taste in furniture, is making her nervous. Dan is busy staring at Josh's sweaty face, the ring of new flesh that submerges his once lean jawline. Dan is trying to remember what Josh's jaw used to look like. He wants to take his fingers and frame Josh's head, to cut out all the excess from the image and remind himself. Then he wants to put his girlfriend's face behind his finger frame and say,
See?