Lord Fear (15 page)

He sees me and doesn't say anything. I give a big smile-wave combination like this is visiting day at summer camp. I sit next to him and tell him my task is done. I think of Paul Newman eating eggs in
Cool Hand Luke
and fight the urge to laugh. He thanks me and says the food is horrible. He runs a plastic spork through mashed potatoes like he's raking a Zen garden. His ex-wife had a mini–Zen garden. I watched them rake it together, him looking up and saying,
I swear it really calms you, no bullshit
. We sit next to one another in a crowded room where nobody speaks. I ask if he wants his fruit cup; he says no, and I begin to eat.

I think that whenever somebody writes about an addict, the narrative is ready-made for them in stencil form if they want to take it—either the former addict writes memories of their past as though detached from it, with wry, wise regret, or a loving observer writes about their loved addict in isolation, as one person who fell into one hole, and if or when the hole closed around them it was tragic but there were no implications for anyone who knew them, just the tragedy. The bad-luck anomaly. That's the story we've been telling, all of us, from a sturdy, safe place we made up, from the quiet of lives that have settled around his absence.

But Josh is in the thick air of the messy moments of all the years that have passed without him. He is here with us, in this room where nobody wants to be, where anybody has the capacity to be. There is a face, his face, transposed onto all the faces that I look at and am frightened by, slurping fast dinners before waiting in line for the pay phone and hustling back to their cots. There are his eyes; I think I remember those clearly now, deep,
layered brown and a little hidden. And there are his words, the ones that Dave spoke to me not long ago, words that feel like they underlie so much of what came next:
Lord Fear is frightened of what has never been
.

—

Like me
.

This is the first thing that Lena Milam thinks when she faces Josh. She is on Tommy Parker's bed in his mother's apartment on Roosevelt Island—on top of the sheets; they haven't yet been under together. Tommy is sitting next to her, close. He is narrow and gentle, gentler than any other fifteen-year-old boy Lena has ever encountered. He's holding her hand, and that makes her feel lucky. Lena is fourteen, and she, too, is narrow and gentle. Tommy is fit to her. She thinks of them like two parts of one machine that works.

Josh is the other part to Tommy. When they stand together, there is no similarity, just comedy, a mismatched buddy-cop vibe. Josh is tan and broad, and when he speaks it's meant for everyone to hear. Tommy is often at his elbow, pale and concave, a perfect straight man. Before Lena, they were always together. Now they are together less, so there's tension.

Josh walks into the bedroom and doesn't say anything. He looks at Lena and Tommy on the bed. Lena feels as though she's been caught, though she's not sure doing what. She pulls her hand away from Tommy's, and Josh laughs at that. She presses her fingers together like a steeple. She keeps her legs crossed at the ankles, and squeezes something invisible between her calf muscles. She rocks her torso just a little, the motion only noticeable to anyone who might be staring at her.

Josh is staring. He leans down, right in Lena's face. He
reaches forward, and the muscles on his forearms make little valleys where skin settles around strained sinew. His fingertips, calloused from drumstick wood, are pointed at her ribs, and she imagines that he might play her bones like he is a xylophonist and she is a pirate skeleton from a Saturday morning cartoon. Right before the moment when her body would have decided to flinch, Josh veers his hands away and grabs Tommy's arm, the intended goal from the beginning.

“Thomas,” he says, fake-stern. “Thomas, it's time.”

“No, man,” Tommy says in a way that makes Lena think this protest has been planned. “No, hey, come on, man, it's embarrassing.”

“Thomas, the lady paid for a show, and goddamnit, she's going to get one.”

Josh winks at Lena. She feels queasy in a good way.

Josh has Tommy by the elbow and he yanks him up, escorts him into the space that has just been ordained a stage, the little square of blue carpet in between bed and door. Lena watches.

The show begins. It's mediocre, but spirited.

Josh is John Belushi. Tommy, theoretically, is Dan Aykroyd. They do
Blues Brothers
bits. They order four fried chickens and a Coke. They talk about Illinois Nazis. They call Lena a penguin. The accents are terrible. These are New York boys, and New York boys can only do New York accents.

Tommy stops after a while, his face adorably ashamed.

He says, “Okay, that's enough, I think she's seen the movie anyway.”

She has.

“Get your ass back up here, my brother,” Josh says, still in the bad accent.

He tugs on Tommy, somewhere between fun and threatening.

“Dance with me,” he yells.

Tommy tries to make himself heavier, unmovable, but Josh kicks at his shins to get him stepping. It's funny. The effort is, at least, even if the impressions aren't. Lena begins to laugh, a surprised, gasping sound, holding her steepled fingers up over her lips. Josh seems nourished by this. He points at her, triumphant, and smiles. He has the most geometric smile that Lena has ever seen. Every feature is so large and defined that it has its own shape—rectangle teeth in a row, sharp diamond eyes, lips opening as wide as possible so that his mouth is stretched into a full trapezoid.

He begins to force Tommy to shake his tail feathers. He makes him dance like Ray Charles is playing an electric keyboard in the corner and they're surrounded by black extras. Josh dances, too, with abandon rarely seen in a straight male teenager. He dances up close to Lena, puts his face right in front of hers. She sees all the things he wants her to see, things hard to define—his force, his burgeoning beauty. Teeth, he wants her to see his teeth as he smiles. But she sees something else, too, equally hard to define. Maybe the best way to put it is
need
. For all the ways that Josh's body forms a physical command—
laugh, laugh now
—his eyes are begging.
Laugh, please. I need you to laugh
.

This is an important moment.

It is intoxicating to be fourteen and needed. Overwhelming, yet impossible to confirm. Lena scolds herself against Judy Blume self-importance, that joy of identifying as the kid who gets the
insides
of people when her peers see only a shell. But there is Josh dancing, and there are his insides shivering, she thinks, in need of someone's cupped hands and breath for warmth.

The show ends. Josh releases Tommy, shoves him, actually, back next to Lena on the bed. Tommy is breathing hard. He holds her hand again, palm now damp.

“How was that?” he says.

It's a loaded question, and Lena is still thinking of fear like a birthmark on Josh's face, so she just says,
“Great.”

She looks up at Josh, his chest heaving, unconvinced. There's a moment of panic, and then she laughs again. It starts forced, but it catches on inside her, and Lena laughs until her ribs hurt and she is hoarse, laughs until she snorts, clapping her hands like a zoo seal during a public feeding. Josh smiles.

“She's all right, man,” he says to Tommy, like the only thing that has transpired in the past fifteen minutes is Lena looking to pass inspection. Lena swears to herself that she can see him slacken into momentary peace, as though he has finally exhaled.

—

Josh is waiting for her on the street before her first day of high school. She hasn't asked him to do this. She's hardly even seen him all summer. He looks like he feels as though he should be thanked.

“Thanks,” Lena says. “You didn't have to do this.”

Josh shakes his head with vigor. He says he will not entertain thank-yous, says it's nothing. She shrugs and they turn to walk together because that's the only thing to do. He doesn't put his arm around her, but it feels like he's been thinking about it. He hangs close, walks slowly so that he doesn't leave her behind. Their sides brush, her shoulder, his biceps.

Lena doesn't date Tommy anymore. She misses him and cries a lot. She feels hugely alone most of the time, alone like there is no matter around her. Then she feels ridiculous, goes to the bathroom sink and splashes cold water on her face until it's numb, which is also, she thinks, kind of ridiculous.

It seems like a long time since she has walked next to somebody. She decides that it's a nice feeling, and that Josh is nice for giving it to her. He's the only other person she knows who goes to the High School of Music and Art. She thought of him at her flute audition, and in her pre-September panics she has had only
his presence to imagine, a school full of Joshes, their shoulders and laughter filling up the hallways.

He's wearing sunglasses, even though the sky is gray. He's wearing old Keds that squeak as he walks. He walks like a goddamned horse. Even as she feels him slowing for her, she is doubling her steps to keep up and make it casual.

“You're
slow
,” he says to her after a block. “No wonder you're always late.”

“How do you know I'm always late?” she says.

“A guess.”

“You know, it doesn't make sense to wear sunglasses on a cloudy day.”

He stops and looks down at her with a grave face. “There's glare,” he says. “Off the clouds. The sun is
stronger
on days like this. You're squinting right now. You don't even realize it, but I see you squinting.”

He looks satisfied.

“You don't have to slow down for me,” she says.

“Yes, I do.”

They walk to the tram, the only way for a kid without a driver's license to get off the Island until the subway tunnel is finished. Ahead, Lena can see the metal pods creaking back and forth over the river on thick cables. The wind is angled straight at their faces, blowing Lena's hair into her eyes, ruining whatever her morning mirror time had intended to accomplish.

When they get on, the tram shakes in the wind. Lena is afraid, like always, of the fitful jolts of creaking metal. They can see all of New York City below them, and she imagines the feeling of falling into it, the sound of that crash. Josh looks down at her. He tells her that when he was a kid he used to be scared whenever he crossed a bridge. Not anymore, but he remembers the feeling.

On the uptown bus, it's like they stop at every corner, vibrating in idle, waiting for old women on their grocery runs. A man
is standing over Lena's seat, rocking with each stop, zipper at eyeball level. Lena feels Josh next to her, ready to spring. Lena doesn't want to like that feeling, but this is a big bus full of strangers and she is small, and Josh is here with her.

They don't talk. He has his headphones on and she can hear music leaking out. She wants to lean in closer to see if she can recognize the songs. His drumsticks are in his hands, pattering on his jeans. She is pretty sure he's looking down at the top of her head. Their sides touch again.
This is mutual
, Lena tells herself.
We both need this
.

At the gates of the school, he doesn't say good-bye. He disappears into the mass of people who all seem to know him, and she is alone again.

—

“Comb your fucking hair,” Josh tells her when she opens the door to her building. Lena isn't offended. It's always like this. A year of it now, their ritual repeated but never addressed. His waiting for her, her lateness, his running monologues about her hair needing a fucking combing, her clothes needing a fucking wash, her face needing, well, something, something to improve it. It makes him happy to admonish her, and it doesn't make her unhappy.

Lena steps out into hard drizzle, unprepared. She runs to Josh and he raises his coat up above the two of them. She nestles into the dryness. He smiles, embarrassed by his own chivalry. The coat is new, a black trench, too warm for the season, but it's a look that he has committed to and he does not commit to looks lightly. She tells him, “I like the look,” and he says, “What are you even talking about?”

Lena slept through her alarm this morning and then woke in a panic, scrambling out of bed, stubbing her toe while scrounging for clean underwear. She said no to breakfast, pushing through
the kitchen while her mother yelled something about nutrition and her sister sucked her teeth in judgment.

“You're not even late,” Sister said.

“You sure you're not hungry?” Mother said.

“She just wants to be early for that boy. Can't keep
him
waiting.”

Lena's sister doesn't understand. She assumes they're sleeping together because that's how she sees the world, as one big petri dish of people doing the deed and trying to keep it from her. But Lena and Josh aren't doing that, and even the thought is infuriating. They are just together in the mornings, on time. They shepherd each other through New York City at rush hour. It feels good. All fall it felt good, and in the winter, too, when they left mismatched footprints in the snow. And now in the spring, when he wears tank tops on sunny days, like the Roosevelt Island tram is Venice Beach.

Yesterday he wasn't there waiting for her and it ached. This is another thing she could never explain to her sister—how she paced waiting for him, then walked to his building, looked high up at a window that might be his, imagined him alone up there, watching her. How when she hurried out of the apartment this morning and saw him, she felt relief. He wasn't mad at her. He was okay. You can't explain a platonic longing like that. The steady weight of one promised hour each weekday.

“We have to stop,” Lena says at the corner deli. “Breakfast.”

She runs in and returns with a two-pack of Twinkies and a Coke. She holds them out, one in each hand, grinning, an offering—
Go ahead, Josh, tell me
.