Lord Fear (22 page)

A week earlier, Sima met Josh's mother. She felt like a teenager then. Josh ushered Beth into the shop, and on her break they sat around a table, Josh saying,
Isn't she pretty? Isn't she sweet?
Beth answering,
Yes, yes
. She watched Beth squeeze his hand and look at both of them with hope. She even said something
like,
I can't wait to see what comes next
, and Sima smiled and Josh smiled, and they sat around the table, none of them relenting and giving the true answer: nothing. Josh said he felt surrounded by goodness.

“I just want to be looked at that way,” he says now. His breathing makes her throat hurt thinking how hard it must be to breathe like that.

“That's nice,” Sima says.

He doesn't respond. She listens to the weighted silence of him nodding off, finally says his name, gently, like he's a little boy and it's morning. He comes back to her, a sharp inhale and then a cough.

“Hi,” he says. “Hi, I'm here. I've been here.”

“I can't believe you've never been to Paris,” he says, forcing out the final
s
sound, slurring it.

“No, Josh, I never have.”

It's a while before he talks again.

“It's so beautiful,” he says finally. “The lights at night. You'll love it so much. You'll see. It will be so…”

She presses the receiver to her ear, willing him to finish. She wonders what a mind on heroin dreams. She hopes it's a better dream than her panicked sober dreams, jolts of warning until she wakes up, then instantly forgettable. She hopes that it's a luscious continuation of his last waking thought, that it's easy and warm. She tries to see it with him, the two of them in Paris at night. All she knows to imagine is the Eiffel Tower lit up, a snapshot from a package of postcards. She and Josh are together at the base of this image. They have nowhere else to be. They linger. Light shines on her face, and he looks at her, and he smiles, content, until the dial tone and then silence.

—

“Have you been to Paris?” she asks me.

I tell her I have. The first time, I was young, too young to remember much. Josh was there; it was his first time in Paris, too, a trip he told her about many times, six days of basic tourism. It was me, my mother, my father, and Josh in a little apartment that smelled like jam that my parents swapped for.

“I knew you were there,” she says. “I don't know why I asked you. I knew that.”

I try to hide how happy it makes me that she knew. It shouldn't be such a big deal. I'm still reveling in the fact that I was spoken of, that he said my name to her when he spoke of love. We're working together here, in our memories. She asks if I remember anything at all from the trip. I do, I say. A little. All I remember is him. I tell her that, and it makes her smile like fingers are pulling her lips back at the edges. She nods, my cue.

I remember buying a gargoyle in a gift shop, a monkey-man with wings and fangs, baring those fangs, crouched. I remember Josh doing an impression of a gargoyle. We were sitting on stone steps, under a stone building that I only remember as old. He had his leather jacket on, or I made that part up. He was leaning over me, baring his fangs the way gargoyles do it. He was making a hissing noise like a snake, and his lips were stretched so wide that I saw the base of his teeth pushing through his gums. I was laughing.

I remember sitting in the apartment, scared of the sound the radiator made when we turned the heat on. It was snowing outside, maybe. We were watching the only video available,
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
dubbed in French. Josh was pretending to be Jessica Rabbit, slinking around the living room, hands caressing his own neck, lips pouted, eyes nearly closed.
Bonjour
, he said, and I was laughing.

I remember visiting Jim Morrison's grave. I stood back and
watched. Josh knelt among the flowers and handmade signs, the poems and rain-warped packs of Marlboros. He was crying. I had no idea who Jim Morrison was, but I liked the visuals—the ancient green trees, the once-bright roses lying scattered. When we left, Josh said he wasn't crying out of sadness. He was, instead, awed by how loved the man had been, how indelible, fresh proof of his worth laid out with each arriving tour bus.

“Yes,” Sima says when I relay the last memory. “He was going to take me to the grave. That was very important. He had a poet's soul.”

I don't cringe at the phrase, though I feel the tug to do so.
Poet's soul
.

On the way back from the grave, Josh put his headphones on me and played “Back Door Man” on cassette. I don't tell Sima that part.

She has dressed for this occasion. Everything on her is starched—black slacks, white blouse, unbuttoned argyle cardigan. Her hair is pulled into a bun, and I look at her neck, its sloped sides. This is job-interview attire, clothing you can't breathe in. I wonder if she works in an office now. I don't ask. She has told me almost nothing about her present, only that she has a daughter, and she looked guilty when she showed me a wallet picture—a kid on class photo day; I can't think of anything else to say about it.

A decade has passed since she knew my brother. Most of her life in America has been spent without him, and so much can change for a person who seeks change. Sima is forward momentum personified, I know that even without filling in the details. I don't want to think about what she has accomplished since he finally couldn't manage breathing. I have a suspicion that if I prodded her through her modesty, I would get to a tale of employee-of-the-month plaques, incremental promotions, night
school, the kind of resolute working motherhood referred to with folksy admiration at the beginning of politicians' speeches. But I don't want to ask for the specifics of how she thrived without him—I only want to know what she lost.

I ask if
she
has ever been to Paris because I know she'll say no.

“That was for us,” she says. “It's expensive. And it takes time. That was a place for him to show me. Paris was his promise to me.”

Promise
is as generous a word as
poet
. What is a promise that is made without a chance of coming true, other than a lie?

I will take you
.

I will be better
.

We will be together
.

There is a place, Paris, that's far from here, and lights glow off the river like lanterns floating in the sky
.

“You didn't believe him, did you?” I say.

There's an undeniable scoff in my voice. I feel cruel. She half-smiles without showing her teeth and tilts her face down.

“I'm sorry,” I say.

“I didn't believe that we would go,” she says, with quiet emphasis. “But I believed in him. I believed that he thought we would. He was not a liar. He was a dreamer.”

He was an addict. Maybe the difference is just semantic.

After talking with Sima, every time I revisit his writing, I will think of her. Because no matter what notebook I pick up, as I flip through pages of detox journals and poems and lists of self-affirmations, so many versions of the
REASONS TO GET CLEAN
heading, I will see the word
Paris
appear, punctuating his thoughts, a refrain that never ends.

[LOOSE-LEAF, OCTOBER 1998, “REASONS”]:

–
Because it is harder every time
.

–
Get your body back!

–
It's either
success
or
this
.

–
Mom is gone. Dad is gone
.

–
I can do three days. It's just three fucking days. A week. I can do a week
.

–
Remember, Paris in January
.

[LOOSE-LEAF, UNDATED, “UNTITLED”]:

What it means, is that I will not lose because I can't. The main thing is that I have an agreement with myself that if I have this (methadone) I will succeed. They will be in tandem, my methadone and my inspiration. They will not compete. Accomplished men say, “I couldn't have done this without my wife,” etc. SAME THING. In two months, I will be in Paris at night. Two months. Paris
.

I see the word repeated at the end of a sentence:
Paris Paris Paris Paris
. Or it's capitalized,
PARIS
, towering over all the little words around it. Or it's the last word written for a while, butted up against blank lines until finally lucidity returns and he begins again with,
I was gone too long
. Coming at the end of sentences, paragraphs, lists, it is often scribbled loosely, and I imagine a hand beginning to let go before the panic or the high, mostly the high, swallows all language.

Comforting
feels like the wrong word, but, yes, it's comforting to think of him rushing to write
Paris
, to put it in pen, unerasable, before the nod takes over, the same way he managed to say it to Sima on the phone before the line went silent. And Paris itself, what he knew of it, was the perfect word to say. A place ideal and far away. Just real enough to be a good hypothetical. A place that can exist in collective cultural imagination, free of urban sprawl and supermarkets and traffic congestion, just lights and river, the Eiffel Tower, good bread. A place to love and make art. I like to think that, above all, that's what he wanted to do.

In college, I traveled to Paris with Sofia, and we watched
children push miniature schooners in the pond where everyone watches children do that. I was running out of my parents' money, so we pretended to be the kind of kids who had to worry about such things, bought a single fresh baguette in the mornings, ripped off hunks all day as we walked until we were lost, talked about how we needed nothing more than this. It was exactly as those moments in a life are supposed to be—better than the moments around them, indulgent, brief, Facebook-logged, and then mostly forgotten.

I read Hemingway, of course, and got really into that whole possessive thing:
You belong to me and all of Paris belongs to me, and I belong to this notebook and this pencil
.

I read James Baldwin's Paris writing, too, and loved the swirling emotion—relief, guilt, longing:
My flight had been dictated by my hope that I could find myself in a place where I would be treated more humanely…where my risks would be more personal, and my fate less austerely sealed. And Paris had done this for me: by leaving me completely alone
.

Baldwin showed up in Paris on the run, wanting to be somebody without history. And Paris, its specifics, didn't matter, only that Paris was not the place that he was running from. I saw Josh in cafés when I read Baldwin, anonymous to everyone but me, reborn clean. If there was anyplace for there to remain an ember of him, the promise of his life still pulsing orange, finally free from all back home that had tried to stamp him out, this was it.

Of course it was a stretch to find Josh in Baldwin because Baldwin was running from hatred and oppression, from unavoidable violence crashing in on him. Addiction is a very self-imposed brand of oppression, but still, it's better to think of the addict as oppressed than wallowing. Oppression doesn't carry inward blame. That has always been the hardest part of remembering
him, the effort not to blame. The effort to believe that he fought it, even if it was him and whatever
fought it
means. To believe that if he had the chance to start over, it wouldn't happen again. Belief.

“I feel that he is alive now, still,” Sima tells me. She leans across the table and her hands almost touch mine. “His spirit, I mean. He is watching us. I believe that.”

I say nothing, so she says, “Maybe I sound cuckoo?”

It's not a question that I want to answer. Because yes, she does. I am not a believer. I was not raised for that. Neither was Josh, but I think he wanted to believe. In the end, he had to believe.

There isn't a language of addiction that takes atheism into account. The NA meetings that Josh quit, the Al-Anon groups my father later tried to find solace in—both required a relinquishing of control to that higher power that wants what is best for us. And really to believe what an addict tells you, tells himself, requires a predisposition for, or at least some experience in, faith. All you have seen is deterioration, but you are being promised regeneration, asked to trust that there remains some divinity, and despite how wholly unbelievable that is, you must believe. There's a reason why Sima was his last friend, the last he made and then the last to stick around. Why she is the only person I've found who knew him as only an addict. She never got to hear him play music, she never read his words, she never saw the muscle lines that ran like shadows across his torso. She only knew a man afflicted, making promises. Even that first time he spoke to her in Hindi in a sandwich shop on Twenty-Sixth Street, she knew something was wrong. He was waiting to be redeemed, and she never let herself say that it wouldn't happen. What a sap, I want to think, believing in the unproven and unlikely.

“No,” I hear myself say. “Not cuckoo at all.”

“I talk to him sometimes,” she says. “I smell him, like he's sitting down next to me. Do you remember how he smelled? I remember how he smelled and how he spoke to me. I speak back.”

I wipe my palms on my jeans, and I hear myself reciprocate with the last promises that Josh ever spoke to me. They may have been the last words he spoke to anybody, two nights before he was found. He called looking for our father, but I was the only one home. I was ready to hang up, but he said, “Wait, let's talk, let's tell each other about next year.”

He talked about baseball because he knew that's what I liked. He told me I would be the star of my high school team, even as a freshman, and he would be standing there watching my exploits on a field in the middle of Central Park, fingers wrapped around the chain-link fence. I would hit a home run, and he'd be there, clear-eyed, real, cheering for me as I crossed the plate.