Lord Fear (25 page)

My father doesn't want to argue. He opts for humor instead.

“Jesus Christ, it's going to be awkward at Passover this year,” he says.

Josh laughs and that makes my father laugh because Josh sounds the way he has always sounded laughing and my father never thinks about how much he loves that sound until he hears it. They are comfortable with laughter. They both understand it and let it linger, a truce.

—

They don't speak for a long time. Or, if they do, none of the speaking made it to my father's memory, which has streamlined,
looking for major plot points and at least semi-plausible symbolism. Their relationship picks up again when Beth calls.

My father answers and she says, “Your son just came home. He was in rehab at Beth Israel. Did you know?”

She says it without any emotion; she's just reporting the latest. My father answers, “Oh,” and then says, “I'll come over,” to which Beth does not protest, so he goes to get his jacket.

He walks to the F-train at West Fourth and plans emotions to express, but he doesn't feel any of those emotions. He walks downstairs to the tracks. He remembers riding the subway with Josh and holding his hand. He remembers the acute awareness of how close the third rail was, remembers putting his body in between his son and the danger. He remembers Josh at his legs watching strangers pass in train cars, watching his own face reflected and blurred in each window.

At the end of the platform, a withered man, chalky pale with matted white hair running from his chest up his neck to his face, plays Neil Young on an acoustic guitar. It's “The Needle and the Damage Done.” He sings that line about junkies being like setting suns and his voice catches. My father thinks that this must be a hallucination. He puts five dollars in the man's coffee cup and the man is real. The man looks up and says thank you with the flat tone of someone who is always thanking and never has cause to be thanked. He closes his eyes and sings on.

Josh is on the balcony at Beth's apartment, looking out at the East River.

My father takes a breath like he's about to go underwater, then walks up and puts his hand on his son's shoulder.

“Why'd you do that?” he says.

Josh looks up. He snarls. His face is feral.

“I'm a bad guy, Dad,” he says.

What does that kind of shit even mean?

“You want to be a junkie for your life?” my father says.

The correct answer is no. Josh says nothing. My father begins to say something nagging, but Josh interrupts him.

“I want to be a thief,” he says. “I want to be a criminal.”

They watch the river together. A ferry full of tourists ambles through the water. My father sees a flashbulb go off.

There is no more beautiful place in the world than New York from a distance, when you can't make out any people and when you can't hear any noise, but there it is, rising out of the water, stacks of gold light outlined by dusk. Everything else is disappointment.

“What?” Josh says, chiding.

“Nothing.”

“I'm a bad guy,” he says again.

When he first bought this place, my father would bring Josh out on the balcony. Josh would look down and get scared, and my father would tell him don't look down, look out. They would watch the skyline and try to imagine everything they couldn't see: Who lives there? Who is standing on that roof right now? What are they doing?

My father isn't sure if this is a memory or a wish.

He wants to ask his son for a lot of details, but he doesn't ask anything.

“You're not bad,” he says, and Josh sneers.

They are telling two different stories about two different men and maybe neither one exists, but they don't care. This is the conversation that will happen too often from now on. Once you have this conversation, it feels like the only conversation to have.

I am bad
.

No, you're not. You're good, I swear, I see it
.

Until those are the only two options.

My father leaves.

He retraces his steps to the subway, rides back to Manhattan. A homeless couple sits across from him and they slump into each other. He breathes through his mouth and doesn't look at them. He has always been quick to look away. Smells make him retch easily. If alone, he has to sleep with all the lights on.

When he was a boy, his mother wouldn't let him in the house while she cleaned. She tied string around a paper bag holding his lunch and dangled it down for him. He smiles at that memory, the routine. He whistles to himself, wet and tuneless. That's what he does when there is something he'd rather not say or see. He never noticed it until Josh began making fun of him on a beach, one summer. He started whistling in the middle of conversations and everyone would laugh. Then, for years, Josh would say something ridiculous and my father would ask,
What?
Or,
Why?
And Josh would say, “I'm just trying to make you whistle.”

When was that?

Where was that?

The junkie with the guitar is gone from the station when my father exits, and there is no more music. He wonders where a man like that goes when he's done playing his song.

—

My father came to me today from West Fourth, and soon he will ride back there, but now he's in my kitchen eyeing the roach motels I have lining the walls. He's complaining about the Internet.

“So many websites,” he says.

“What?” I say.

“I mean, the problem with the Internet,” he says, “is that everybody has a story that they feel like you should be reading, and they're all there, so you read them.”

He's still sweating from the tennis. He smells the way he always smells when he sweats. He isn't looking at me, but past
me, out the window at the brick wall of the building across the alley.

“I used to read all the literature on all these rehab websites,” he says. “That's what I did that first night I found out, after I got home from the train. I just kept doing it. I hated all of it. I thought all the stories and all the promises were so stupid, you know? But then I read more.”

I like this idea, the effort he made to understand in the best way he knew how.

“Did you know Boz Scaggs had a son who overdosed?” he says.

“Who's Boz Scaggs?” I say.

“Are you serious?”

He tries to hum a Boz Scaggs song, wet and tuneless, then stops.

He says, “Boz Scaggs wrote this thing after his son died, and he called him
fine, beautiful, sweet
. I remember that. This was maybe a year before Josh died, and I remember thinking, if somebody asked me, what words would I use?”

Mostly, he just looked for rehab centers and survivors who swore they knew something that nobody else had figured out yet.

How often?

“Every night,” he tells me, like it's really important that I believe that detail.

He would lie next to my mother and wait until she fell asleep, and then he would slide down the hall to the computer, not wanting to lift his feet and put them down again on creaking wood. He would look into the screen and feel the blue light stinging his eyes. He would see himself reflected in the window, pale from the light, and old. He would let the platitudes wash over him.

Are you losing somebody you love? Find them again
.

We are offering a 92% success rate!

Recover your sense of spiritual meaning, purpose, belonging, and personal fulfillment
.

Allow God to rid your life of addiction's grasp
.

“All of that bullshit,” my father says. He gives a dismissive wave.

The issue, I think, is the assumption that logic can be imposed on the illogical. He was supposed to buy that basic, flawed concept. That a story with a complete narrative could be made out of needles in arms, decisions that become no longer decisions, sickness. That it was a matter of strategy and will.

“Josh believed,” my father says. “He would tell me,
Now
I know what I need to do. He would talk to me about self-reliance and transformation. It was the same shit I was reading every night, like he read it, too, and internalized it. He'd say, Trust me, this is working, why do you worry like that?
Why do I worry?
”

My father is angry at someone who no longer exists. He's asking a rhetorical question of a man who is in no position to answer it. Josh promised him until the end that the end wasn't coming, and then the end came and he never had to acknowledge how ridiculous it was, all those things he expected his father to believe.

He wants to know if I see that. The end was inevitable, certainly from the time when he stood with Josh on the balcony on Roosevelt Island, probably from before then. Something was set in motion, something in the marrow of how his son was, not bad, not undeserving, just cracked. When you tell the story of an addict, it's so easy for everything to become about potential triumph, and triumph implies change and change implies a choice.

“I believed that he was trying,” my father says. “But that was never the point.”

Now I see Josh's face, as clear as any memory of him I've ever had. He's in this cramped kitchen of mine next to the fridge covered in party Polaroids. He's the size that he really was, which
is to say pretty average, but he's older in this memory so he's fat. He is looking at me and our father. He is waving.

This is a very specific memory, the way he looked at both of us together, the way he waved with a heavy right hand, held it by his ear and then dropped it quickly. He's smiling and his eyes are narrowed into pinched crescents. His face is racked. He is holding it so tight, and his skin doesn't move from that wide smile because he's forcing it to stay. This strain is not something I've ever remembered on his face. I want to place the memory, but I can't yet.

“I used to sit in his apartment the way I'm sitting in yours now,” my father says. “Remember that big captain-of-industry desk he had? He would sit behind it and try to tell me all the things he was going to do. He always did that, even before he was using. He had all these pads of paper in the desk drawers, and these nice pens. He would pitch me ideas—movies, novels, businesses. You know what he told me one time? He was sitting behind that silly fucking desk, and he said, Dad, right now, if I got my body back to where it was, if I practiced, I could be a Major League Baseball player. I could be anything. I really believe that.”

He looks at me and begins to laugh, then stops. He leans back in his chair and raises both hands, palms up.

“Isn't that what you want someone to think?” I ask softly.

“I wanted him to make
sense
,” my father says. His voice catches.

I remember where the memory is from. It's from the last time I saw Josh, a sunny afternoon a couple of weeks, maybe, before he died.

The scene begins in Sima's memory, a moment with him that she described to me that I have stolen and blown up in my imagination.

They were in a café, talking. Josh had been clean for nearly a
month, which had happened a few times since she'd known him, but he said this time was different, something about how unfiltered the sunlight felt, the warmth of spring air. He'd been staying at Beth's, sleeping in his childhood twin bed. He was letting his mother be kind to him, he swore it. He let her bring him soup during the night shivers, let her sit outside the door and ask him if he was okay, as he lay in a lukewarm bath because the water didn't sting as much as the air. Finally, the air stopped stinging.

Josh was trying to tell Sima just how
vivid
the world was when withdrawal stopped. He described it like lying under one of those lead X-ray blankets and then feeling the technician take it off, so for a moment you're nearly floating.

“Look at my eyes,” he told her. She did; they were clear. They both smiled.

Their coffees were empty and she had to leave. When she stood up, he grabbed her hand and said, “The next time you see me, I will still look like this. I want to take you to dinner. I know the place already. You'll love it.”

They hugged good-bye and he squeezed her and she smelled him.

He walked downtown. I imagine his walk.

He passed Fourteenth Street, that corner with all the card tables displaying bootlegged DVDs. Like always, the DVD men whispered to him:
Smoke? Snort? Shoot?
He moved on, eyes at his shoelaces. He passed the basketball court at West Fourth Street and again, from men leaning against trees, standing shadowed on the top step of the subway entrance:
Smoke? Snort? Shoot?

Josh told himself a story: I am not that man.

I opened the front door and he was standing there. My father made a startled sound behind me. We hadn't seen Josh for a while. I wanted to ask how long he'd been standing there debating whether to ring the doorbell, but I didn't.

“Hi,” he said. “Is this a bad time?”

My father and I were holding baseball gloves and heading to an asphalt park down the street. My father told him he could come with us, he could watch if he wanted, and he said, “I'd like that.”

I remember that I hugged Josh, but then he fell back, walked a step or two behind us on the narrow sidewalk. I remember now, more than I recognized it then, that my father didn't turn around to him, kept his neck stiff as we crossed Sixth Avenue. When I turned around, Josh's eyes were on the back of my father's head, and his lips were moving around words.

They stood next to each other, facing me, as my father and I threw. Josh leaned into my father's ear and spoke. I think he was telling him what he told Sima—
I am clean, I have been clean, look at my eyes, the next time you see me they'll be exactly the same
. My father smiled, resisted looking, threw. I threw back as hard as I could, wanting to impress.

We walked home together from the park, and Josh draped a heavy arm over my shoulders. I stiffened, then slackened.