* * *
As far as Eric is concerned, there is no genital reciprocity. He sends a photo of himself holding a vial of powdered silver, and despite his general old man-ness regarding the art of the selfie and his dorky archival gloves, I want him. I have been waiting for a reason to rescind my attraction. I hoped in the two weeks we have been apart, I could be objective and find something wrong with him. But after this month, all I want is to be kissed. I ask my customers to confirm my name, at times to be sure I have the right address, but mostly just to hear the sound.
* * *
Five bundles of kale for a customer in an eighth-floor walkup in Flatiron. A vial of rosewater for a customer in Greenwich Village whose labradoodle humps me down the stairs. Band-Aids and cigarillos for a customer who runs out of the Strand with a stiletto clutched in each hand. Chipotle every which way and always with no beans. Three black wigs made of virgin Malaysian hair for a half-human, half-turquoise customer on Bowery, soggy Chelsea mailwomen with their tired, roving eyes, white drug dealers in Sperrys waving to the NYPD, delivery people properly affiliated with pizza parlors and flower shops all hooked into the peripheral intuition that keeps us all from falling into the city’s bounty of open holes. Though now I walk over a subway grate and am excited by the possibility of its giving way, because despite the city’s breakneck, multilingual carousel, despite the businessmen marching into my path and the elliptical assault of glass and steel and scary wooden trains in Upper East Side toy stores, I don’t feel like I’m moving even while I’m on my feet, up and down and in and out and pressing a dollar slice directly into my large intestine, my parking jobs incrementally more careless as the orders come one, two, six, as I exit a sad Central Park studio at 12:53 a.m. and find my bike not gone per se but divorced from both its wheels. So I take my basket and my bell and hold them in my lap on the F, the L, and the posthumous fart that is the B60 bus, asleep before I fall into bed and then rise to my landlord-cum-yogi sucking an appetite-suppressant lollipop in my doorway, asking me to pay up or get out, and also namaste, before I take a cold shower and pay for one of those gargantuan Citi Bikes, which tend not to be made for girls under five foot two and so tend not to be conducive to punctual deliveries or preventing you from careening into someone’s gazpacho or sprawling into a four-way intersection, ready to surrender the part of yourself that M train mariachi hasn’t already killed.
* * *
I wake up to a group of surly Elmhurst Slavs putting my stuff out on the curb and find myself, at 7:00 a.m., embroiled in an argument over my toaster oven, which necessitates that I take a Lyft to a storage facility in Bedford Park. The city is coming up pink on my map, all tapped out despite a torrential downpour that has cleared the streets. A lone woman darts from the subway with a plastic bag over her head, an umbrella salesman looks over his table and sucks his teeth, and a river cuts down Great Jones, but otherwise it is one of those rare nights where everyone is inside with all the right condiments and drugs, and I am obsolete. I go a little lower to try to get some work. I stand in front of a few popular pickup spots and wait. I go inside for some water, and because the waitstaff know me, they give me some gnocchi alla vodka on the house. They treat me like a customer. I get a folded cloth napkin, and they come around with the parmesan. It is sort of a joke, because I still have my helmet on and my map open. But then I look at the food, and I look around the empty restaurant, and I lose my appetite. I apologize and take the Citi Bike a little ways uptown to get some air, but it doesn’t help. I feel like I’m wearing a lead apron, like each of my limbs, one by one, is falling asleep. On my map, I note two bridges within biking distance. Then the first order of the day comes in. It is a standard supermarket run, though when I get to the store and scroll down the list (cotton balls, crunchy peanut butter, lobster bisque from the hot bar) I see there is a request that I go to a second location, an army navy on Forty-Fifth, and purchase a small Stryker bone saw.
* * *
In the grocery store, there are only three other people, and one of them is a cashier. I pass a woman in the seafood section, and she smiles at me, but beneath her smile I see her wondering where everyone is. I feel our silliness, my reliance on the city’s density, which I have spent so much time hating but proves to be the last barrier between me and some inconceivable boss-level of concentrated loneliness. As I ladle the bisque into a cup, I try to focus solely on the soup and not on my teeth, my skin, and the gradual breakdown of my body into dust. At the army navy store, the salesman doesn’t ask any questions, and I don’t regret the purchase until I’m halfway to my destination, which turns out to be a hospital. But a quarter mile out, a car speeds through a stop sign and I stop short and spill all the bisque. At this point in my career, I can deliver almost any bad news about soup, but when I get to the entrance, I notice that some of the lobster has gotten into my shoes, just as Rebecca comes jogging out of the hospital in scrubs and rubber boots. For a moment I think maybe I can wring out my socks before she reaches me, but it is too late. If she is shocked, I see no sign of it on her face. She takes off her gloves and looks through the bags. She inspects the saw and sighs. She asks me to come inside. So I go with her through the waiting room, every bodily fluid already detectable in the air despite the pineapple air freshener at the reception desk, where a man with a prosthetic arm begs for Percocet and a colossal goldfish hangs suspended in its own waste. We step into the elevator and Rebecca puts her hand up when I try to broach the subject of the soup.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says as we head into the cafeteria, where she pulls out a chair and asks me to sit down. She settles down across from me, brings out the peanut butter. She takes a spoon out of her coat and cleans it on her lapel. “Why didn’t you call? I left you a voicemail,” she says, opening the peanut butter, hooking her finger into the oil collecting at the top.
“I’ve been busy,” I answer, but as I say this I think about her message, about the huskiness underneath the words, the suspicion I have that she may have been smiling. The voice she has now is different. It sounds like a voice anyone might have. “In the app it said Becky Abramov.”
“Maiden name.” She sucks her finger, frowns into the jar. “This is dangerous work for a woman. How can you know who’ll be on the other side of the door?”
“This city isn’t really dangerous anymore.” As I say this, I relish the feeling of a vintage lie. A thing I would say to my father when he was alive and trying to make an effort to call. “I lost my job,” I say, thinking it will feel cathartic and realizing immediately that I am wrong.
“I’m sorry about that.” She pushes the peanut butter over to me, extends her spoon.
“What’s the saw for?” I turn the spoon around to look at my reflection, and even though I know how the image will refract, it still takes me aback.
“I work here at the VA, as a medical examiner. The guy I have today has the hardest skull I’ve ever seen. My husband didn’t tell you what I do?”
“We don’t talk about you,” I say, wondering if it will hurt her. I resent her presumption that we would talk about her at all until I see her disappointment.
“We talk about you,” she says, and I get the feeling that I’m meant to ask what about, so I don’t. But I want to know. I want to know what he’s said, and when she smiles I know she can see it on my face.
“And you like that? Hearing about what we do?”
“It’s not that I like it. But I like to be informed. Control for variables. I know that’s not your thing.”
“How would you know?”
“Because you don’t care who’s on the other side of the door.” She pauses and looks at me, her eyes distant, studious. “Let me show you something,” she says, screwing the top back on the jar and striding to the elevator, which is papered in flyers that say things like: Need Help? Did the war come back home with you?
* * *
We go to the floor below basement parking. We step into a room awash with fluorescent light, a
nd it looks like the pre-owned section of Ikea, everything straightforward but a little lopsided, a small desk strewn with sheaves of that pink, perforated paper, a lone computer chair with no arms, a small calcified shower in the corner. She rifles through a plastic bin and brings out a gray Tyvek suit. “Here, put this on,” she says, shrugging off her white coat. She ties up her hair with a plain rubber band, takes off her clothes, and steps into a suit of her own. As she does this, I notice a tattoo on the base of her neck that says the grateful. “You don’t have to take your clothes off. I just can’t tolerate the heat.” It’s not that I’m threatened by her body, but I am uncomfortable undressing in front of her now that I’ve seen it, the marbled flesh of her thighs, which, even without the assistance of clothes, appear to go all the way up to her neck, her depressing beige bra and high-waisted underwear with Wednesday on the back. Her complete nonchalance at being seen like this. I’ve exposed my body for nothing. For a tip, for lunch, for a hand attached to a man I couldn’t see. But now I take the suit and feel it is insufficient to have hand-washed my underwear. I feel her taking inventory of where her husband has been. I keep my clothes on and step into the suit. She hands me a mask, says, “Activated charcoal,” and pops two batteries into a transistor radio. She washes her hands and pulls on a pair of purple gloves. She tells me to take the radio, and when I turn up the dial a silky voice says nothing but Hall and Oates, and in a few, we’ll take some calls. When she rolls her neck and marches toward the metal door, I want to tell her to stop.
“Have you ever seen a cadaver?” she asks, opening the door and sweeping into the room, where the body of a black man is splayed, his scalp peeled neatly away from his skull.
“Yes, my mother,” I say before I can stop it, and she pauses, somehow already deeply involved in a task that involves looping some blue rubber tubing around her arm.
“I didn’t know that,” she says, turning back to her task. “Does Eric know that?”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“That’s good,” she says, heaving the body to the side, clearing the waste collecting around his legs. “Keep something for yourself.” She takes the cotton balls and presses them into the cadaver’s anus. I try to look at the body directly. I tell myself that this is ordinary, that within me there is already a catalog of men just like this, supine, darkening the pavement, disappearing into shareable content. But it is too much to see his open mouth and genitals, the pallid bottoms of his feet.
“How did he die?”
“He got hit by a car. Family lost track of him. Dementia.” She unravels the cord for the saw. “Turn the radio up, will you?” When I turn up the volume, the same voice says a successful white ethnostate. This one is for Gerta in Williamsburg. Buckle in for “Private Eyes.” As the song starts up, she palms what is exposed of the skull. She starts the saw, lowers it to the bone.
“Why did you call me?” I ask, mostly for something to do with my mouth.
“I don’t know. I think I was trying to understand it.”
“What?”
“Why he would choose you,” she answers quietly, most of her attention directed toward the task of positioning her hands underneath the brain. And when the brain comes out it is both smaller and less pink than I expected. She lingers, presses her finger against the seam. But from here she is all muscle memory, a moving artillery in a hazmat suit, the bone cutters and chisels and enterotomes moving in and out of her hands. Inside my suit, my body is vapor, but I don’t know how to leave. I might miss something. Because of an invisible suture along an eyelid, and the damp hair against Rebecca’s neck. Because in an hour, a man without a brain will be a man who looks like he can dream. We don’t speak but I know I am wanted exactly where I am, holding the radio, turning it up and down against her sounds of consent, Rebecca’s love for “Rich Girl” apparent in the soft tapping of her foot. We listen to the same commercials over and over again, and after she finishes, we go back into the other room. I take off my suit and change the channel to an AM station while she is showering. A voice says accept the lord Jesus as your true and she throws on her jacket and turns the radio off. Outside, most of the cars are gone. We share a single cigarette because she says it makes her feel like it doesn’t count. She says she is aware of the irony of being a medical examiner who smokes, but that for all the blackened lungs she’s seen, it is more disturbing to open the chest cavity of a veteran and find that it is pristine.
“Imagine living life so carefully that there are no signs you lived at all,” she says. “I thought I was going to be a surgeon. Then my first year of med school, we got our first cadavers, and there was so much data inside. You can be sure a patient will lie about how much they drink or how much they smoke, but with a cadaver, all the information is there.” She lights another cigarette and sighs. “It’s like walking through a stranger’s house and touching all their things.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, and she laughs.
“No, you’re not.” She looks at me for a while and starts her car from a remote on her key. I follow the headlights to a silver SUV. “You noticed our daughter. When you came to the house,” she finally says, and in this moment it becomes clear to me that despite this evening-long conspiracy, she is moving toward her most natural conclusion, which is to engage me not as a person who has just watched her dissect a man but as a person who is black, and who is, because of that, available for her support.
“Yes.”
“What did you think of her?”
“I don’t know. She seemed fine,” I say, though of course she did not seem fine. She seemed alone, like it had been years since anyone had done her hair.
“She doesn’t have any friends,” she says, the cigarette forgotten between her fingers.
“Oh,” I say, trying to show my disinterest, but the principle of the thing doesn’t prevent it from bothering me, this thing Eric failed to mention, the look in Akila’s eyes as she climbed the stairs. My desire to deny Rebecca this attempt to create a link where there is none is less pressing than my embarrassment for their daughter, who may or may not be the kind of kid who wants friends, but who almost certainly would hate her mother talking about it. But then I look at Rebecca’s face, and I look at her crooked cigarette, and it seems possible that the woman who chased me down the stairs and the woman who sawed through eight millimeters of skull are one and the same, a woman inclined to problem-solve by any means, so competent that any adjacent failure becomes her own. Obviously, I don’t relate. I take a moment to revel in the schadenfreude, but mostly I feel suckered into admitting it, that it matters, that I have thought about it, the apparent isolation of their child, a thing immediately recognizable to me for being myself that thing which is both hypervisible and invisible: black and alone. But at the same time I resent it, I feel competitive about our respective levels of despair, and so I tell her I have nowhere to go, which I mean to say matter-of-factly, but which comes out of my mouth as a hideous and sopping thing, the bisque underneath my toenails suddenly emblematic of my serial embarrassment, which Rebecca meets unflinchingly and without a single word of condolence, smoking her cigarette and inspecting her nails. She hangs in the silence, much like the way she did post-karaoke, and then she tosses the cigarette and tells me to get in the car.
* * *
So I put the bike in the trunk and we drive in silence toward the nearest docking station. We head out of the city and I am smitten with the AC, the soft orange lights along the dash, the Freon and wild cherry at the center of the new car smell. The spasm of the radio frequency around Rebecca’s FM preset and the long, sulfuric miles of sky beyond Weehawken, opening my eyes just as we pass through the tunnel, halfway into REM as Rebecca parks the car and walks up to the mailbox with Walker on the side, the act of her getting the mail such a sweet, quotidian thing that I pretend to be asleep.
* * *
She leads me up the stairs and into a guest room, where she does some business with a sheet, muttering about amenities and organic
toothpaste and a neighbor’s dog. I offer a dutiful laugh that comes out dry and loud, exacerbating the spectacle of our mutual effort to be casual. Because I’m aware of the breadth of the house, even as I try to take up as little space as possible. I’m aware that the room is owned, each square foot considered and likely free of mice. In this room that no one sleeps in, there is still evidence of life. Department store stills of wet cobblestone and pitted fruit, moody Helmut Newtons of smoking women, drapes the same shade of mauve my mom used to paint the kitchen the day she killed herself, furniture with the too-balanced stretch marks of the deliberately distressed, this willingness to pay for degradation something I want to hate but actually relate to, the ficus, wicker, and ornamental glass all cherries on top, a cohesive domesticity that I find weird and a little threatening, but that fills me with the yearning to retrieve my toaster oven from storage and find a place to plug it in.
* * *
Luster: A Novel Page 8