* * *
I take the elevator down with two publicists, my hand pressed into a work slipper. They are craned over a list of pub dates, talking about a galley at the center of the third scandal of the year. It is a highly designed editorial nightmare from a boutique imprint experimenting with pomo cookbooks, formerly an imprint that specialized in Crock-Pot tips and a series on pies that employed the authority of a titular Presbyterian Grandma. To sex up the brand, they invited a popular chef, known for his radical liquid nitrogen ice cream, to write a cookbook. Except then his wife went missing and someone found her frozen foot.
* * *
In the lobby, there is a Diversity Giveaway. I go up to the table and scan the books, and there are a few new ones: a slave narrative about a mixed-race house girl fighting for a piece of her father’s estate; a slave narrative about a runaway’s friendship with the white schoolteacher who selflessly teaches her how to read; a slave narrative about a tragic mulatto who raises the dead with her magic chitlin pies; a domestic drama about a black maid who, like Schrödinger’s cat, is both alive and dead, an unseen, nurturing presence who exists only within the bounds of her employer’s four walls; an “urban” romance where everybody dies by gang violence; and a book about a Cantonese restaurant, which may or may not have been written by a white woman from Utah, whose descriptions of her characters rely primarily on rice-based foods. I take the book by the white woman and head outside, where Aria is leaning against the building, smoking a cigarette. She casts a bored glance in my direction, reaches into her bag and pulls out another cigarette. I take it, accept her light.
“They’re giving me your job,” she says, smoke streaming from her nose.
“I know,” I say, even though it is only now that I look at her soft, dark profile and feel that I have been swapped out for a prettier, more docile model.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she says, and around her eyes is the residue of old mascara, which against her usual prim white cardigan is more disturbing to me than the homeless man who is urinating next to us. “You think I’m a coon.”
“I don’t think that.” Of course I do think that, but now that she’s said it out loud and I see the look on her face, I feel bad.
“We could’ve been friends. I really needed a friend here,” she says, turning to toss the cigarette. I can see the clips mounting her synthetic yaki ponytail. Though I have in the past taken such poor care of my hair I’ve had to shave my head to preempt inevitable baldness, I want to take her face into my hands and point her in the direction of a good wig store. I would prefer to be upset with her, but my hand is bleeding profusely, and this is precisely her charm, the reason the professional whites talk openly to her about their fiscal conservatism—her lovely brown doll face, her full mouth and kind, carefully empty eyes.
I don’t know if there is any good way to admit my own desire without seeming deranged, because this hypothetical in which we were friends was never purely hypothetical to me. The blossoming and immediate kibosh of our friendship had in fact taken me months of half-written emails to get over. Because it is impossible to see another black woman on her way up, impossible to see that meticulous, polyglottal origami and not, as a black woman yourself, fall a little bit in love. But we had nothing at all in common.
“Please. I was a liability to you,” I say, holding the smoke in the back of my throat.
“Well. Yes.” She lights another cigarette, smiles. “But not like you think.”
“You’re going to tell me again what I think?”
“You think because you slack and express no impulse control that you’re like, black power. Sticking it to the white man or whatever. But you’re just exactly what they expect. Like, I understand wanting to resist their demands. But they can be mediocre. We can’t.”
“Mediocre?”
“I can’t be associated with it. Like, there is actually a brief window where they don’t know to what extent you’re black, and you have to get in there. You have to get in the room. And if I have to, I will shuck and jive until the room I’m in is at the top.”
* * *
It is only once I am underground that the arteries in my hand truly begin to weep. It is one of those early August days where the oxygen in the air is uncoupled, dense with Drakkar Noir, old pollen, and reheated Spam. It is one of those days where the M is full of Italian tourists energized from a full day at Banana Republic, and three stops in, my sweat is their sweat, the pores on Federico’s neck emptying into my mouth. There is blood everywhere, and I can at least count on my city not to notice, though a baby by the door is pointing at me, so I turn away and try to look involved with my phone. Then, in the brief window of service between Manhattan and Brooklyn, Eric sends me a photo of a friar fleeing a baboon. He writes, at this archival conference in toronto and saw this illuminated text. pages are swollen, binding is beyond reinforcement. this thing is nearing the end of its life. you can practically smell the rot.
* * *
Having already been in the process of filing him away, burying him with the other men who evaporate after pulverizing my cervix, I am relieved, and yes, I am ashamed. I want to say that I am not that kind of girl. Portable, contorting herself over an inaccessible, possibly disinterested man, but what if I am? There are worse things—factory farming and Christian rock and the three-dimensional animation of Mr. Clean. Because maybe I don’t want to be cool. Maybe I want to be all-purpose. Maybe I can’t pretend to be aloof to men who are aloof to me. So I text him two hundred words’ worth of things I know about baboons and I play Rebecca’s voicemail again with this exchange still fresh.
* * *
When I arrive home I can’t extend my fingers, and the floor moves when I open the door. By that I mean we have roaches and they scatter as I search for some peroxide and gauze. But of course we don’t have these things. We don’t even have a smoke detector. For instance, we have a big general pill bottle where we keep some old ibuprofen, Xanax, and Alka-Seltzer, we have some coconut oil we use for bacon and our hair, and for cutlery, three butter knives, one of which keeps showing up in the shower. Neither I nor my roommate is very prepared, which is why we get along and then have huge fights in the case of there being an actual emergency, usually re: the mice.
* * *
So I rinse my hand after washing it with a little Irish Spring, and I look for some toilet paper, but we are out. I look for a T-shirt to wrap my hand in, but I have no clean clothes and have been putting off doing laundry by wearing my bathing suit as underwear. So I find some raw canvas in the back of my closet, wrap it around my hand, and take my paintings out with the trash.
* * *
I stop at the corner grocery, spend $5.65 on a package of good, soft toilet paper and $3.89 on a large, store-brand carrot cake. I consider buying a box of Band-Aids, but even the generic brand costs more than I want to spend. I strip down to my bikini and stop by the laundromat, where I spend $3.25 on a standard wash and dry and make a few calls about my student loans. I portion out my last paychecks on the back of my hand with a Sharpie while the rinse cycle goes, and something about how this arithmetic sprawls down my arm makes me feel like I can make it work. When I return home, a mouse has started on my carrot cake, so I make some instant oatmeal and retreat to my room, where I listen to my roommate and her feminist boyfriend having very sweet communicative sex.
* * *
I work on my résumé, slip in a vague communications role peddling paraben-free dog shampoo, and, to show I have character, I stick to the facts regarding my month at Murray’s, where I mongered an array of soft cheese. I throw in some blatant lies and make sure any inconsistencies are small enough to explain away once I have a foot in the door and am armed with enough recon on my interviewer to either have talking points on the company culture or a five-point plan to suck dry any available reservoirs of white guilt. I interview well despite my nerves, and while I wish I could take credit for that, my ability to maintain human form and make a good im
pression is all about my skin. The expectations of me in these settings are frequently so low, it would be impossible not to surpass them. I send a few applications out, wrap my hand in some fresh toilet paper, and for a few hours I manage to sleep.
* * *
I have a dream about the bones in my skull liquefying, and when I wake up and see my laundry basket, something about the inevitability of dirty clothes, of the sebum and discharge, of a finite number of quarters, fills me with panic. And this is not so bad. Some nights I lie awake and the sky presents an entire anatomy that makes me feel hopeless and sometimes like a spider is crawling across my face, but tonight feels different. Tonight I am suspended in a lurid hypnagogic loop in which the ground is always rushing upward, the Japanese demon squatting on my chest lengthening to its full height, peeling back its long buttocks to reveal a fully functioning eye.
* * *
I think of my parents, not because I miss them, but because sometimes you see a black person above the age of fifty walking down the street, and you just know that they have seen some shit. You know that they are masters of the double consciousness, of the discreet management of fury under the tight surveillance and casual violence of the outside world. You know that they said thank you as they bled, and that despite the roaches and the instant oatmeal and the bruise on your face, you are still luckier than they have ever been, such that losing a bottom-tier job in publishing is not only ridiculous but offensive.
* * *
In the morning, no jobs have contacted me, but there is a text from Eric accompanied by a photo of a fully erect seraphim. He writes, take a look at that grass. the color is called verdigris and they used to make it by boiling copper in vinegar, and I don’t respond because I can’t bring myself to do anything but get up to go to the bathroom, and even that is something I have to convince myself to do, because I have not once wet myself in adulthood and I think perhaps I’m due. A couple of days after that, I put some water in a glass and drink it, and Eric sends me a picture of a chimera with a star-shaped tongue. He writes, in the tradition of grotteschi. the art of the grotesque. But how cool is this. in the beginning grotteschi just meant ornate, and I send out a few more job applications and take a shower. I start to shave my legs, but on the second leg the lights turn off and I stand there in the dark with the razor, feeling like the universe is suggesting something. Eric texts me more photos of gargoyles and vagina dentata and no jobs call back even when I revise my résumé daily and spend $28.09 at Marshalls on a pantsuit.
* * *
By the time I feel able to contribute to our conversation, it becomes obvious that it is not a conversation. It becomes obvious that he does not intend to acknowledge punching me in the face or the terrible, revelatory night I spent at his home. The texts come intermittently and without any prompting, though Eric usually sends them at around noon and midnight, which tells me that I occur to him during lunch and perhaps while he is still in bed. In between these texts, I want to ask him what he’s eating. I want to ask him why he is awake. But then I worry he’ll remember I’m on the other end and the texts will stop. This is the way it was when our relationship only existed online. We told each other things so awful that by necessity we adopted the posture of speaking in jest, though we had gone through the trouble to create a language, and the effort of this alone betrayed our seriousness. And then we met. Then I got into his car and had to recalibrate, give him eyelashes and veins under his hands and a freckle on his chin, and suddenly it seemed indecent to acknowledge any of the things we’d said. And so when he texts a photo of a satyr being skinned and says, dig the saffron and gold leaf. we use a synthetic compound to counteract the pores, I say nothing.
* * *
Some days later I snag an interview for a corporate gig in Long Island City, but when I get there, it is just a staffing firm and the woman I meet with tells me she has a client looking for a waste management associate. When I show up to the dump, the mid-August heat is so relentless that the creases I ironed into my pants melt away. By the time I arrive in the main office I’ve reverted to a liquid state, my interviewer asking me how much I can haul, to which I respond with an overestimation of about fifty pounds, the vibe in the room a little bit Ku Klux until I go to the bathroom and see that for the length of the interview my mascara has been running and there are big black tears still making their way down my cheeks. This is something I want to tell Eric, but because of our gaping economic disparity, I don’t know how to express myself without it seeming like I’m asking for help.
* * *
So I send my social security number to an email linked to an office in Silicon Valley where a popular in-app delivery system is based. In three days they send me a hat and a carrier bag with thermal insulation to keep the deliveries warm. They grant me access to a map that shows the areas of the city with the highest demand. Heavily populated areas show up dark red, and less populated areas tend to remain pink, until lunchtime, when demand is high even in the sleepy hamlets of Queens. I ride my bike to an address in Sunset Park and when the customer comes to the door, she snatches the bag of waffle fries and doesn’t tip. Most of the time, I stay in Brooklyn. I get the first orders of no-pulp orange juice and champagne out of the way. Make pit stops for vanilla Juul pods, small orders of LaCroix and Pampers. I make my home base Holy Cross Cemetery so I can hydrate in relative peace, and also because it’s smack-dab in the middle of Flatbush, the orders come in from all sides. Technically, I’m not allowed to transport anything that qualifies as a drug, but there are prep school kids who need bubble tea and Marlboros, dog walkers who need boxed wine and leave detailed instructions about where in Prospect to make the drop, pump-and-dumping mommies who emerge from the Grand Army market, desperate for gin. Everyone is excited to see me, and I am sort of excited to see them, the habitual Bensonhurst McFlurries, the Gen X brownstoners who, for some reason, use the app to order pizza, Coney Islanders looking to indulge in brunch from afar and are just happy you came out, the West Indian pockets of Eastern Parkway and their cash-only ackee and coco bread, beaucoup tips on the days I wear the company hat and beat the average time, though occasionally I take the bridge over and field requests by Canal, where I try to protect orders of squid from all that direct sun.
* * *
But for all the visits I make, they never go beyond hello. I try to segue from light observations about the weather, and in the few who are receptive, between my strict schedule of work and sleep, I find I don’t have the bandwidth to offer anything more. So I listen to NPR on my route to try to get some talking points. I find a segment about a journalist who received a string of violent emails in 2009. The journalist reads part of one email and laughs. He wrote to me on the first of every month, and he would say these things, like you
* * *
If I go home, it is usually for the bathroom I know and love, though there is a mom-and-pop Thai joint in Gravesend with a sterling private restroom, and they are so grateful for how much geng kheaw wan gai I move that they let me use it for free. I try not to take any deliveries with a high probability of soup, and I try to obey traffic laws, though sometimes there is a wedding, a parade, or a murder that forces me to rush and leave my bike in an illegal place. With a new diet of pear baby food and Top Ramen, I make almost enough money to live, though some of that is due to my payout from the publisher. Then I receive news that my rent is going up. The news comes in a brown, grease-stained envelope, and because usually I only receive mail from student loan consolidation scams and instant-approval credit card companies that use old rap icons to target low-income blacks, I almost miss it. My roommate calls a meeting while I’m out falling from my bike into a customer’s cheesecake, and as soon as I climb the stairs she is there with a suitcase, saying she’s moving t
o a gut-renovated building in Harlem with her boyfriend as send me a picture of your pussy pings onto my screen.
* * *
As I watch my roommate leave, the idea that I have a pussy seems preposterous. I move through the apartment and try to reconcile the existence of the clitoris with the broccoli smell my roommate left behind. I rinse the cheesecake from my hair and get back out on my route, where the men who line the street remind me that technically yes, I do have a pussy, and that I will live with the terror of protecting it for the rest of my life. But after a big haul of spices from Halal Food I go ahead and take a picture of it in the bathroom of an Au Bon Pain. Then I go back to my newly empty apartment, google utility-free SROs in the Bronx, and introduce some saline to my anal cavity. I watch Seinfeld, comb Jason Alexander’s IMDb, and head to Manhattan to make a little more cash. I bike the Queensboro Bridge, and mop my face and armpits in the bathroom of a Pret. I check the delivery map and uptown is already deep red, a swath of demand from Harlem to Fifty-Ninth and Lex for the matcha, mylk, and hemp offerings of corporate, quirky, or decidedly snide coffee giants, the bike lanes in Manhattan already terrifying at 11:00 a.m., filled with delivery boys and girls who jet into traffic with fried rice and no reason to live, along with the sentient abdominals who do this for fun, foreign pedestrians standing right in the way, taking selfies and checking their luggage for pigeon shit.
Luster: A Novel Page 7