Lord Fear by Lucas Mann Read Free Book Online Page A

groans under him. His legs, still boyish, elastic and thin, step around and over a life’s worth of sentimental debris. There are records with loved, worn covers. There are books, too, stacks of them that would ordinarily render me grudgingly impressed, and I can see once-bright Post-its sticking out above the pages that he wants to remember most. I find only smugness in the warmth of this place, the years that he has lived within these walls and will continue to do so, the art he has accumulated, the smiling expanse of pictures on every countertop, the satisfied routine of his existence.
    I hear Philip drop a mug and stumble around in his kitchen. I hear him say, “Shit, shit.” When he comes back, he eases down onto the couch with a sigh. I try to look at him hard. I have more questions lined up. Possibilities include: Do you think he thought that all great artists get high? And, Are there times when you think of him the most? Why? And, Do you remember what you said at the funeral? Do you remember what I said?
    I ask none of these and instead ask a question that I know will be my last. If we were boxing, and it feels a little as though we are, this would be a haymaker thrown rounds too early by a fighter who is tired and just wants to hear the sound of something heavy connect.
    “Do you think you loved him?” I ask, looking past Philip at the cat who has fallen asleep, face pressed into its own stomach.
    I ask him only because the answer will be yes, and, sure, it’s an aggressive, manipulative use of the word
love
, but really, whatisn’t? I want, at least, some agreement, so I can end this fumbling interview on my terms, terms that happen to be widely accepted terms for all people, and thus are irrefutable. Love is so much better than any alternative, and so we say it.
    Philip digs his hands into the fur on his cat’s head until everything but his wrist has disappeared, and still it doesn’t wake.
    “For me, he was impossible to love,” he says. He stares at me and then blinks. “You have to know somebody if you’re going to love them, or else to say you do is bullshit. I don’t want to bullshit you.”
    He keeps staring, looking for agreement. I nod for him, regret it.
    “Some people aren’t meant for that,” he says. “You and I have been sitting here for a few hours, and I just connected with you more than I ever did with him.”
    —
    My favorite part of Nabokov’s autobiography,
Speak, Memory
, is the way he nestles the idea of memory into so many different images. There isn’t one central metaphor; memory is not merely an ocean or an ever-splendored thing. Instead the whole book reaches for metaphor again and again, always with a new image to put to a word that is invisible and ineffable on its own. He writes of the hand of memory, the horizon of memory, the way memory can crumble. Memory as a backdrop, an eye, a glass cell, an entire city, an engraved stone, a stack of books. He settles on none of these, never seems to reuse or even refer back to an old metaphor when trying out a new one.
    Memory is a fight. That is what I believe in this moment.
    Memory is the back-and-forth pull between Philip and me, the struggle that hangs over his coffee table, each of us with a quiet need to be right. The problem is that no memory is entirely right, just as the meaning of the word can always change. Andwhat I’m trying to do, let my memory of one life meet and mingle with others, is a flawed endeavor, pretending that a peace exists within acts that are not peaceful.
    Josh was a boy who inspired, who deserved, love. No, he never was.
    I get up to leave fast, and soon Philip and I are at the door to his building, shaking hands. He grips tight and tells me that I’m starting to look like my father. I mumble something about how, yeah, people have said that, and then something else, funny I think, about how there are worse things to hear but not many.
    He stands in the doorway and watches me leave. I turn back