Lord Fear (8 page)

He and Josh rarely see each other anymore. It's not like they
had a fight; it's just that Dan began living this life, and Josh began living another one. Dan isn't exactly sure what that life is. For a while, he just assumed that Josh had finally found more interesting people to be around. Dan would call his apartment, and when Josh picked up, he sounded distracted, far away. He said, Dan, I'm working. Or, Dan, I'm writing. Then he mostly stopped picking up.

“Nice candles,” Josh says to Dan's girlfriend, then smirks. “They smell great. What's that smell?”

“Autumn,” she says.

They are silent after this. Dan wants to tell a story about the time he saw Josh onstage at CBGB playing the keyboard, then turn to his girlfriend and say, “You like music, right?” He wants to reconcile two lives. He wants to defend his home and his matching furniture and the woman that he bought it with. But more so, troublingly more so, he wants to defend Josh to her. It is a special loneliness to be flanked by two people who you love who do not like each other, an empty feeling to know that they don't see what you see.

Dan defends nobody and instead goes to piss, walking stiff and hurried out of the room like it's an emergency. For two minutes, he leaves his girlfriend alone on the couch next to Josh, leaning away from the slow breath and dilated eyes that she diagnosed the moment he walked in the door.

Dan returns ready to tell a story about middle school that is too boring to upset anyone, but Josh is at the door, putting his sneakers on and mumbling that he's late for something. Dan stammers out a noise, not a real word. Josh is already opening the door, then already gone. Dan's girlfriend is up, saying, “If he comes in here again, I'm leaving.”

“Wait, why?”

She speaks fast. “He asked me to write him prescriptions and
I said I could lose my job for that, and then he asked again and I said please stop, but he wouldn't so I told him to get out.”

Dan says, “What does he need a prescription for?”

She says, “Oh, Jesus, Daniel, really?”

In bed that night, she asks him what it is about Josh. What's worth caring for in a man like that? Dan stares up at the white ceiling, the fan moving in slow, shaking rotations. He remembers drumsticks and lockers and dim sum and women, each of them the most beautiful woman ever to live. He says nothing. She coaxes him, not in an accusing way, but gently. She wants to understand. He loves her. She says, “I don't get people like that. Who have everything and then screw it up. It doesn't make any sense.” She's right, but Dan has never stopped to judge Josh and doesn't want to now. He wants to say something about Josh's humor and how he could lock his eyes on you, how that felt. He wants to say something about desire, too, about the intoxication of being around somebody who feels like he
deserves
all that he can think to desire. How easy it is to believe that. But everything Dan remembers feels small and shallow as he remembers it, and he thinks the memories might shrink even more if he says them out loud. He stays silent until they fall asleep.

—

Josh never returns to the apartment, but his voice does. He leaves so many messages on the answering machine in his last years. Dan comes home from work, hits the button, hears the beep, and then Josh's voice is in his living room. Dan's now fiancée stands behind him with her arms folded as he listens.
Danny Boy
, Josh begins like old times.
You there? Danny Boy, pick up. Dan? Buddy, where are you?

First it's exciting. Then it's irritating. Then Dan feels himself beginning to dread his friend's voice because to hear it is to pity him, and he doesn't know how to pity Josh, doesn't want to learn.
He agrees to meet up just to make the phone calls stop. Josh gives him an address in Astoria, a few blocks from the 7-train, on a street full of closed auto repair shops. It's a basement apartment. A woman Dan has never met lets him in and says nothing to him. She isn't beautiful. Skin hangs off her as though she was born with extra. She folds in on herself as she walks.

She sits next to Josh. Dan sits on the edge of a kitchen chair and rubs his hands together for no reason. Josh doesn't move, but his eyes fix on Dan. He says that he's happy to see him. Then says it again.

“Danny Boy,” he says. “I want to know about you. Tell me about you.”

This might be the first time in their relationship that Josh has asked outright like that. Dan begins to talk, but stops as Josh grabs a rubber tube off the couch next to him and ties it tight around his biceps.

“I'm listening,” he says, “Talk.”

Dan speaks in quick syllables, only continues when Josh urges him on. He tells him that life is good. It's just life. Job, drinks on the weekends. Other stuff. It's all fine.

As he speaks, he watches Josh and the woman take turns injecting each other. At first, he wonders if this is for his benefit, Josh looking to surprise one last time. But it's not that; he's not looking for a reaction at all. He's just doing what needs doing. Dan watches Josh's fingers, still strong and graceful, as he feels for her vein like it's a note and then slips the needle in, presses down gently with his thumb until the brown stuff is all gone. Dan watches their heads loll back together. He watches their quick eye contact over the shared bliss and then watches their eyes dull into something painted.

Josh offers once; Dan declines. Josh shrugs. Then silence.

The silence extends for the better part of an hour. Dan keeps his eyes on his friend as he moves through strange pulses of
life—sits up, snorts, giggles a little, then sinks back down. Dan looks at Josh's body melting into the scabbed skin of this woman who never told him her name. They breathe together until Dan can't figure out whose breath is whose. He tries to hold his own breath; he's not sure why. Two pigeons fight outside the window and their racket startles him. He listens to that for a while. He stands and debates whether to touch his friend's shoulder, but he doesn't want to feel how that must feel, because then he won't forget it. He walks out fast, shuts the door softly.

Static.

—

Small talk is difficult with Dan. He seems hell-bent on making it but has absolutely no aptitude for it. I'm on my third Pepsi because when he can't think of anything else to say he says, “You want a Pepsi or something? They're free. I'll go get you one.”

“Thanks, man,” I say when he hands them to me.

“Oh, don't worry about it,” he says. “I told you it's not a problem
at all
.”

We're high up in a building somewhere in Midtown. We're in the office of a moderately sized hedge fund. Dan does computer stuff for them, which is why we're in here on a Saturday afternoon, alone.

“You know, you take a nine-month course and you're certified,” he tells me. “It's an option. Everybody needs IT.”

“Oh yeah, totally, thanks, I'm just bad at computers,” I say.

“Yeah, it's not easy,” he says.

He tells me he has an access key for work so he can get in the office anytime, because if something goes wrong, if all this money—and it's some important people's money—gets trapped in a system error, only he can save them from financial ruin. I am impressed by this, though less impressed than I act.

We're at a table meant to seat thirty men in striped suits, not just the two of us, miniature, me in my stubbornly childish jean-shorts
and band T-shirt, Dan with a newish gut hanging over his waist, polo tucked snugly into weekend Dockers. He looks like an avid but horrible golfer, a man whose greatest pleasure is drunk-flirting with strangers at happy hour. That's not fair. But if you talk about another man's beauty for long enough and he's not around to provide a dose of reality, it makes those who remain alive seem even more mundane than they already are.

We're surrounded by windows, a whole building of windows, and across from these windows are other windowed buildings full of empty rooms like this one. I don't like it, the reflection of the same thing back at itself, over and over, no beginning or end. Dan tells me that sometimes, not often, he regrets not seeing Josh much in the last years. I ask him if he's haunted by those final memories, if they stay with him. He says no, nothing like that.

“Josh used to have this joke about me,” he says. “He'd be, like,
Hey, if Dan came in and found you fucking his mom, what would he say?
And the answer was,
Hey, Ma, what's for dinner?
”

Dan laughs at this. It's funny because it's true, he says. He's a pretty mellow guy. Doesn't really like to dwell. And Josh was just crazy, man. Dan reiterates that. Josh could do anything and would do anything. He says each
anything
with this heavy, cartoony, eyebrow-arching quality, I think so that we can share in that sense of wide-eyed dirty talk.

This character, this break-room legend, is the opposite of the boy Philip Goodman remembers. At first, as Dan spoke of him, I felt relief, then goose-bumped curiosity. This was the brother I had wanted to see—bold, grinning, phallic. But now I'm uneasy. The forced glory was short-lived and Josh is still distant. Mostly I feel like we're laughing at his bad jokes.

Dan asks if I'm the same kind of guy as my brother.

“Not the whole, you know, drug addict part, but just being, you know, one of those people?” he says.

I consider lying, but it doesn't seem like a believable lie, so I say no.

“Figured,” he says. “Most people aren't like that. Most people are like me. I got this feeling you were kind of like me.”

This is so simplifying and stupid, yet so simultaneously true, that I can't get a handle on how to be offended by it. I nod at him.

He asks me things.

Do I have a girlfriend? Yes.

Do I love her? Yes.

Uh-oh. Marriage? Oh, well, I mean, who knows.

“It's not so bad,” Dan tells me.

He gestures out, maybe to his wife in Queens, but also to everything around him in his universe. He describes his routines, breaks them down in hour chunks—the commute, the job, the mortgage, a kid, something about buying a grill. He speaks as though he is welcoming me into this, each segment of his life.

It's hard at this empty conference table not to dichotomize real-Dan and remembered-Josh into figureheads—two distinct models for how to grow into a man, with no room for subtlety between them. One did it with slow, unremarkable dedication, plodding progress that was hard for anyone to notice; and one achieved the alternative—he simply didn't do it at all. That's how Josh became a myth. Which can be great for a while—me and Dan laughing at the memories, talking about Josh being a crazy bastard with the kind of head-bobbing emphasis reserved for when the phrase
crazy bastard
is used by the uncrazy. A myth is so much better than a person, but as we repeat the myth again and again, different versions, closely scrutinized, the form doesn't hold. It's
too
inhuman.

My brother, Dan's friend, has become a series of predictable, if reassuring, patterns in our conversation. Even his death feels expected, a variation of burning out instead of fading away, that
old line. I don't think Dan has ever mourned him, just mythologized. Maybe I've done the same.

Dan has to go, he tells me in the middle of another conversation about anal sex that neither of us had. Dinner. It's four p.m. But he has to get home and then shower. Friends are coming over, his wife's work friends. It's one of those dinners that will end up being a whole production. The kind where you almost forget to eat because there's so much to be done, you know? I say I don't know, not really, and he says I will.

We stand and shake hands like one of us just sold the other a car.

Josh, or his memory, the guy who felt nothing but freedom and bliss, then death, is the most interesting character either of us has ever known.

I interrupt Dan mid-story, waiting for the elevator. I want to clarify something.

“So, this was about twenty-two or twenty-three?” I say, trying to confirm the timing of one of Dan's memories.

“Oh, no, it was way more girls than that,” he says.

I start to explain, but stop short.

“With all the stories I've got on that fucker, it's got to be way more,” he says. “I mean, right? And that's just counting the regular girls, not even the whores. Did you know about that?”

He gives a short wince; then it's gone. I didn't know about that. I lie and tell him I did, so he grins.

“I told him, why pay? You can get any girl you want,” Dan says. “And he told me,
Hey, it's cheaper than taking them out to dinner
. That's funny, huh? And pretty true.”

I want to say something combative to give Dan an indication that we're not in on this last joke together. I want to tell him I don't believe him, but I'm not sure if that's true and I'm not sure if it changes anything anyway. Instead, I feed the myth. I hear
myself blurting out a memory of my own, a last dirty anecdote for us to smirk at.

Josh took me to the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square once. It was me and him and an Indian woman who made me blush every time she looked at me. And she brought along her little brother, too, who was my age. I think we were nine.

The boy and I became friends for the evening, staring with one unified gaze. We were old enough to want to know what our siblings did to each other. We were waiting for something to happen. Josh's knuckles brushed her arm. She laughed. He smiled. I liked the accent that she spoke with, how her mouth formed so wide and circular around her vowels when she responded to him, like everything Josh said was a surprise. There was a shining stud in her left nostril, and I kept looking at it, thinking how much it must hurt to pierce your face.

Josh beat out a rhythm on our table, and I watched the ice in my Coke bob in the current he created. He whispered something to her that made her smile. Her teeth were white like they'd been painted.