Lord Fear by Lucas Mann Read Free Book Online Page B

and wave, he reciprocates, and then I’m gone. It’s only once I get around the corner on my way to the F-train that I realize we never spoke of needles or death. The only part of the story that I’d been sure we would cover, we didn’t. That should be a good thing. The character he gave me, the version of my brother that he made and I took and then wanted to give back, was not a dying junkie. But the death
was
there. It didn’t have to be spoken. It loomed, the result that all of Philip’s anecdotes about the things broken in Josh served to explain, so that he could never be just a young boy frightened or a teen overcompensating. Maybe it really was that way when Philip lived it, this awareness of the cracks, or maybe it came later, after Josh died the way he died, and all the details in Philip’s mind lined up to prove that he had known something all along, that he hadn’t been fooled at all.
    Memory desires, above all, to be right.
[POEM, UNDATED, “THE DREAM OF 4/17”]:
    Train tracks. Trying to jump the train, can’t
.
    Trying to shower (naked), public place (Lincoln Center)
.
    Warnings about those after us in the train yard (Father figure?)
    Signs of yesterday refuse to give up. I must think of it like this.It seems so real but that is only the physical appearance, an incorrect one at that. Psychological mistakes. Under it (or above it) is reality. Not bad. Not good. But not what dreams speak of. Rational
.
    I am in a Chinese restaurant on Sixth Avenue. I am four years old, or maybe I’m five. I am young enough to kick my feet in my chair and feel them swinging high above the floor. Josh and I are alone because he’s my babysitter, and that makes this night take on a hazy, buzzing quality, every atom in the air, on my skin, electric. He’s wearing sunglasses, yellow-tinted aviators, even though it’s nighttime and we’re indoors. We’re eating crunchy noodles as loud as we can, and he sees me staring at the glasses so he lets me wear them. I put them on, and I can’t see anything, hardly, just the outline of his cheeks and his teeth smiling into the dark yellow. He takes them back, and I ask him,
How can you see; how is that possible?
He shrugs and I watch his shoulders move, and I think of watching boats on the river when it’s choppy, the way they heave up and settle themselves down so perfectly with each wave. I think everybody else in the restaurant is looking at us, looking at him, and seeing the same thing.
    “You want to hear a joke?” he asks me, hunching forward.
    The way I remember it, this is the first joke I have ever been told. I nod my head that I want to hear it. He whispers and we lean closer to each other.
    “So there was a faggot who was on a football team,” he begins. “But he didn’t realize that he was a faggot yet.”
    I don’t know what
faggot
means, but I like football and I can tell by his face, his grin every time he says the word, that it’s a word of consequence, dangerous in a way that I cannot articulate my desire for. He says it quieter than the other words, but louder somehow.
    “He always played tight end when he was in the closet,” Josh continues. “But what do you think happened when he came out of the closet?”
    The question doesn’t resonate with me at all. I don’t know what closets have to do with football, or why he would have been in one and not on a field. And when Josh answers the question, “He switched from tight end to wide receiver,” I am no closer to understanding but I have no wish to understand because now he’s laughing and his laugh sounds like applause, or it doesn’t sound like it but it feels like it. I laugh with him and my laugh is higher, but I like the way our laughs sound together, careening off the walls and the tables, building force as he asks, gasping, if I get it, and I tell him yes.
    I ask him to carry me home on his shoulders because I’m exhausted and I know that he can do it. I bob through New York, and I think of