Lord Fear by Lucas Mann Read Free Book Online

it’s hard. Philip is thirty-three and still trying to make art, pay his rent, be good to a woman for an extended period of time. He still gigs on the drums, sits sore at the bar after his sets, paid in watered-down drinks. He writes songs and scripts, and he hopes that they’ll someday be famous. He auditions for all the small hoodlum parts available to angular, olive-skinned men. Josh has a life planned that looks something like Philip’s. Being creative and being handsome and being a man, a fully developed human being beyond his mother’s apartment. Philip shakes that notion away. Josh, adult, paying bills, making art, not merely imitating the shell of an artist’s presentation—every detail of the idea is insulting to Philip, insulting to his ambition, to the work it takes to be him. It’s a hypothetical that feels like it will always remain one.
    The elevator opens at the lobby, and then Philip is outside in real, dirty New York air. He walks along the river, watches the chop. He thinks about the tapes, about how this will be the last time with the fucking tapes, even if Josh begs him. There will be no more recorded evidence of their time together. Good. The tapes will disappear, like songs do, like poems, and eventually he’ll stop feeling the need to try.
    —
    Philip’s cat hisses at me. It shakes its ash-gray bulk and sends tufts of matted fur up into the air. I sneeze and glare at it.
    “You heard the tapes, right?” Philip is saying. He is sunken into his couch along the back wall of a tiny living room in a rent-controlled apartment near Prospect Park. “You get what I’m talking about, right?”
    I feel myself nodding. Then I sneeze again.
    “Sorry,” I say. “Allergic.”
    Philip nods at this, so I keep the motion going, and we bob our heads at each other for a while. He wears torn black sweatpants and a white T-shirt with faded words written along the chest. He’d just come back from a run when I met him on the stoop. He lives by the maxim that the older you get, the healthier you have to be. I don’t know how true that maxim is, but he assures me that someday I will.
    A decade ago, I watched him conduct my brother’s funeral with his black turtleneck and gentle eyes, and I assumed so much. And in the way that memory can make us so certain about assumptions, I became certain that if we were to meet again, he would be, if not physically the same, on the same emotional pitch, waiting to continue in the sincere, near-reverent manner that I left him in. He was the orchestrator of everyone’s last kind speech about my brother, and whenever I try to find that memory, all those stories with their sweet, melancholy jokes, their assertions of transcendent qualities possessed only by Josh and the absolute shock at the loss of him, Philip’s face is one of just a few sure things. He has refused, all afternoon, all through our hours of talk stretching out in this cat-dandered apartment, to live up to any aspect of how I remember him or, more precisely, how I remember the way he remembers. And why should he? It’s not his responsibility to reshape what he felt, yet I still feel let down.
    There had been a conversation in my head before this meeting, and it was nearly symphonic in its good vibes. I pictured the way my laugh and Philip’s would sound together. They would sync up, is what I thought. They would come easily because Josh made us both laugh. And there would be a familiar quality, because I’ve been told that my laugh echoes my brother’s, and he would surely recognize that. I have actually been waiting for Philip to saysomething funny, so that I could laugh sincerely at what he said and then he could say,
My God, I just heard him, just now, in you
.
    He’s glancing at my notes, willing them to end.
    “I’m not sure what you want,” he says. I hear his feet shuffle on the throw rug beneath him. “You want some more water?”
    He’s up, bounding the corridor to his kitchen. Old wood