Luster: A Novel

by Raven Leilani

  * * *

  We get in the car and don’t speak. She turns the radio to an AM channel where a sleepy voice is talking about submarine acoustics, describing in detail how sound waves carve through leagues of water and function as an eye. She lowers the windows and lets her hair down, and as we pull into a small twenty-four-hour garage, the stars are coming out. After she laces up her boots and presses three studs into the cartilage of her ear, which in descending order appear to be a heart, a fist, and a Star of David, we walk past an ammo depot and a half-lit school bus lot and cut through a shaggy line of trees, the woods truncated and swollen with rain, opening to a field with an elevated soundstage where three men emerge from underneath their hair. She offers me a cup of whiskey and downs her own with a determination that darkens her face, the crowd around us frothy and homogeneous, white men relieved by the idea that they deserve to be angry, though in their spit and lean you can see they are aware of their performance and so to close this gap of enviable trauma by god they better make it good, better get in the pit and extract some teeth.

  * * *

  Rebecca looks disappointed by the crowd. She turns to me and says that everyone is old. She says she doesn’t know when it happened. She offers me a drink that looks like river water and says it’s a martini. I take a sip and it does not taste great, the vermouth and gin dominated entirely by a greasy residue I now realize has come from the olives, which are stuffed with cheese. The paper cup is already giving way. She removes her ring, slides it into her pocket, and tells me not to make a big deal of it. She says not everything Means Something and in fact, a lot of things mean nothing, and technically this is the beauty of music that prioritizes brawn. And by brawn, what she means is force. What she means is speed. There is a curtain of mist around the stage. This is likely due to lighting and a few discreetly placed smoke machines, but as the lead guitarist indulges a brief aside about Helsinki’s transit system, I see the human component of the humidity, the carbon dioxide and salivary thrust, the centrifuge of salt and hair.

  * * *

  As the next song starts, Rebecca says that she used to attend these concerts mostly as a function of being someone’s girlfriend. She was not permitted to have an opinion so much as observe these boyfriends’ exhibitions of taste, which for the particular sect of Hyde Park thrash-lite boys that Rebecca favored, meant maintaining a steady supply of safety pins and gauze, meant Elmer’s glue and DIY tattoos with straight pins and india ink, meant conversations in porta-potties about dragons and the bourgeoisie, critiques on the augmentation of capital in the form of pierced white boys from upstate New York, railing against their parents and the banks and society, which was a word she said so much it began to sound like it was a word they made up. At fifteen Rebecca cleaned the blood out of her Docs and began to feel like she did not actually care about capitalism, like she did not care about authenticity, because at these concerts, which were about the scourge of assimilation, there was somehow still a code of dress, and the only thing that made it good was the brawn, the punch she felt inside her ears, the entropy and crystallized core of communal violence that is impossible to contain. She rakes her hair out of her face and says that Eric was a welcome aberration. A guy who called soda pop, a guy who didn’t like piercings, who listened unironically to the bedazzled canker that is disco. He seemed earnest, not like the rest of her boyfriends, who of course went on to work for the banks. I follow her gaze to the medical tent, where a man is being lowered onto a stretcher. She scoffs and orders another drink at the bar, and then we move into the crowd, where she bares her teeth and rips off her shirt. A man barrels toward us, takes the shirt, and disappears. She doesn’t seem to mind. She drags me into the mosh, removes her bra, and tosses it toward the stage. I try to honor the spirit of the thing and not pay too much attention to her breasts, which are lovely and small and slightly mismatched. These are the sort of breasts you need if you want to mosh, and as the lead guitarist circles his finger and says Grind! Rebecca pulls me in deeper, leading with her cute, unmoving breasts, and everything is crunchy and in a minor key, two walls made of arms careening toward each other, the impact a compression I feel in my uterus, a man in an AARP shirt coming right for me and pulling me down by my hair and into the hard, brown grass, where there are cigarette butts and Band-Aids and crushed Dixie cups. As I claw my way up for air, I look around and realize I’ve lost her, though during my time on the ground someone stepped on the back of my neck with one of those four-pound platform Docs and I did not completely hate it, and though the music is bad—it is bad like a deviated septum, like acid reflux, like a monkey paw—damage is incurred for a necessary indulgence, which is to take a man by the ears and get him down and stomp on his open, consenting face, this glee cut a little short when I see Rebecca is just fine, near the front of the stage with mud caked between her tits. In this moment, maybe we are on the same page. But everything is temporary, and in an hour she buys a new shirt from the merch table, and we walk silently to the car, a chill in the air that reminds me that soon it will be fall.

  “I let Pradeep go,” she says once we’re on the road. “I talked to Akila. I didn’t know. I thought she just hated math.” I look under my fingernails and every single one is caked with dirt. “Can I ask—what was it that you heard? What did he say to her?”

  “He said, a monkey could do this.”

  “Jesus,” she says softly. We travel for a while in silence, take the exit toward Maplewood. “That painting you had. What was that?”

  “A portrait of my mother.”

  We get out of the car, and she shields her face as two headlights come into view. We turn to look as the taxi stops at the curb. I think of how we look, the mud on our faces, the grass in our hair, the crowdsourced blood on our clothes. She looks at me and smiles darkly, and when he steps out of the taxi, for a moment the headlights bloom behind him, and he hangs there in the dark, a whole day early, almost unrecognizable to me, a shadow of a man.

  6

  Inside the house, I see the full extent of what happened to Rebecca in the mosh. There is a bruise with its own set of fingers around her neck, though in the half-light, it looks like residue from costume jewelry. We are all hungry. Eric empties his pockets, but his hands are shaking and a few soft Canadian bills fall to the floor. He stares into the fridge for a while, and then he piles some leftover steak onto a plate. Rebecca pits an avocado and motions for me to leave. On my way up the stairs, I hear Eric say, What did you do to your hair, his refusal to acknowledge me one of the many reminders that I am, in the grand scheme of things, an extremely brief addendum to their mortgage, to their marital bathrobes, to the two cars parked side by side. I sit at the top of the stairs and eavesdrop. When they begin to talk, it is in a very languid, businesslike fashion, their conversation filled with affirmations like yes, I understand you, and yes, that is valid, like they are a couple of aliens who have seen all the invasion agitprop and want to reiterate that they come in peace. This is actually much more unsettling than the alternative. Their hushed tones are polite and inorganic, Eric’s effort so much more apparent than his wife’s, and then in the middle of a digression about his experience with customs, he says, what is she doing here, what are you doing, and that tells me all I need to know, so I go to the guest room and start gathering my things. I look up the hours for my storage unit and scan the fine print for policies on habitation, but none of the language is clear. When I come out with my bag, Akila opens her door and motions for me to come inside. She takes my bag and tells me to take off my shoes.

  “Your feet are horrible,” she says, not looking at me, turning on the TV. I sit down on the floor and try to keep my flat, chronically dry feet out of view. “It’s going to be all night.”

  “What?”

  “Their dialogue,” she says, a little annoyed, like she wishes I would keep up. “It’s this thing they learned in therapy—Radical Candor.” She makes a cross with her fingers. “It’s an axis. There’s also Ruinous Empat
hy, Manipulative Insincerity, and Obnoxious Aggression.”

  “I didn’t know they were in therapy.”

  “Yeah. Sometimes we all go together. It’s terrible.” She mutes the TV and turns to me with a solemn look on her face. “It isn’t perfect here, but it’s fine. Please don’t mess this up.”

  “Listen, I’m not here to ruin your life. This all just happened,” I say, and she picks up her phone, opens Twitter, and gives a short, joyless laugh. She scrolls for a bit before turning her attention back to me.

  “Because if I’m going to have to move again, I just want to know. I have an Insecure Attachment Style, and I just started calling them mom and dad. School is terrible, but I have my own room, and they let me close the door. I know you probably don’t care, but—”

  “I’m not a monster,” I say, and she shrugs.

  “I don’t know that,” she says. “I can’t be sure of that. But I’m sure about this—it literally takes nothing for this all to go away. My last family was really happy. I had this fish tank, and it was inside the wall. So it felt permanent, even though it was probationary. And then Carol went to this residency in the woods and when she came back she didn’t want to be married anymore. I didn’t see it coming, and I usually do.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, and she pauses the stream, turns to look at me.

  “That’s such a weird thing to say. That you’re sorry,” she says. “I just don’t want to have to do that again, okay?”

  “Okay,” I say, and she unpauses the show. It is a subtitled anime, the animation limber and bright, all the characters living in a vaguely Eastern European village that is under siege by nude giants. Everyone is screaming. A giant bounds into the village and puts his foot through a levee. A cavalry made entirely of teenagers takes the offensive, and then a second giant appears and drops a horse down his throat, the whinnying paired with a dramatic upskirt of a female colonel who is suddenly airborne with her double-hilted claymore, the arteries in the giant’s neck spraying the upturned faces of the blacksmith and candlestick maker as I close my eyes.

  Seven hours later, I wake up in a ball on Akila’s floor. Akila is asleep in bed, a video game controller still in her hand. The room is dark but for the blue light of the television, where a save screen is on a loop. I turn off the TV and put the controller on top of the console. I take my bag and my shoes and go downstairs, the light at 5:00 a.m. soft and gray, the key hooks and baby tomatoes and silent digital clocks redefined by the single muddy bootprint on the floor. Rebecca’s actual boots are not much farther off, their relationship to each other preserving the manner in which they were removed, which is without the use of the hands, one foot anchoring the other while it lifts out of the shoe. I take the tongue of the boot between my fingers, and when I pull them away they are coated in dust. I drink a few glasses of water and wander to the downstairs bathroom on the assumption that it will be empty, though when I open the door Eric is there shaving and listening to the weather report.

  * * *

  We look at each other through the mirror, and there are things I want to say, apologies and accusations that all convene into a strangled, inarticulate sound, though when he looks away and flicks the razor into the sink, when he turns up the weather report and continues as if I am not there, it surprises me, and immediately after the surprise comes disappointment for being caught off guard by a completely unsurprising thing, and when I catch my reflection in the mirror, I see how I am breathing through my mouth. I return to the guest bathroom, where I take a scalding shower and try to forget how I looked, the grime from the mosh making the water brown, more grass than seems possible coming out of my hair, the debris around the drain not enough to deter me from lying down in the tub and being dramatic, humiliation being such that it sometimes requires a private performance, which I give myself, and emerge from the shower in the next stage of hurt feelings. For me, this is denial.

  * * *

  I unpack my bag and arrange my belongings around the guest room. I sit at the kitchen table and drink coffee from my Captain Planet mug. Rebecca appears with wet hair. The tips of her ears are still tinted with dye. She fills a Tupperware container with fruit, puts it into a paper bag, and writes 305 Calories on the front. Akila runs down the stairs, takes the bag, and rushes out of the door. Outside I see the old woman who has been watching me. She opens her newspaper and looks up as one of the sheets takes to the air. Eric comes down the stairs with a suitcase and a piece of tissue above his lip. He doesn’t acknowledge me, and I go to my room and apply the fentanyl patch. I take a book from the small library in the living room. Thirty pages in, a duke, the black sheep of a dysfunctional Welsh duchy, is training a nearsighted handmaid in the tenets of aristocracy, crushing her bifocals beneath his boot and drawing her newly beautiful face into his hands. I try to busy myself. I do push-ups, alphabetize the books. I raid the fridge and cobble a few sandwiches from what I can find. I wrap one of the sandwiches in wax paper. I get on a Manhattan-bound train. I arrive at the library full of regret. The fentanyl has upset my stomach, and I need to go to the bathroom. I make it all the way to a limited exhibit on Nile River Valley Linguistics and Gene Flow in Nubia before I realize I’m in the wrong place. I take a moment and look at the collection because I like the smell of the place. There is a large infographic on mtDNA types and population sampling. There is a Nubian drawing of a man, and though the drawing has no perspective, the color of the water around him is carefully preserved, and I think about the resilience of that single pigment, the lapis lazuli, traversing time.

  * * *

  I take a bus to the correct library, and inside, I can smell the natural decay, the fermentation, the glue and twine and leather, paper as it degrades and betrays its origin, reminds you it comes from the trees. The library is mostly empty, though the few people who are around are intent on their work, a group of college students looking through reference section O–P, a woman hunched over a microfiche machine. I circle each floor until I get to an exhibit on Wartime Cognitive Dissonance and the Physiology of Dissent. After a brief dedication to the donors, there is a succession of helmets, cracked, blown out, covered in names of wives, children, and wry condemnations of God, a Vietcong bicycle on display backlit by warm, orange light, photographs of soldiers cleaning their glasses and tuning transistors, the helicopter blades and jungle brush foiling the camera’s aperture with movement and incomplete light, naked children and self-immolation and prisoners of war wilting on tarmacs, a daisy in the barrel of a gun having nothing on the unnatural look of a soldier’s smile, the look of the incomplete synthesis of fight or flight and the limbic system when it cannot compute. My father only ever smiled like this, like every morning he had to put on his skin and adhere to a code of behavior he could no longer understand, a highly functioning collection of pathologies with shrapnel in his back.

  * * *

  He was years removed from his service by the time I was old enough to misplace his Purple Heart, but during prayer meetings and birthday parties, it was apparent he was different, molecularly, like some fundamental human component had either been emptied out or on bad days, cranked up to eleven, the Fourth of July or a person entering his room too silently grounds for a survival response so disproportionate that as a kid you struggle to understand the blind anger and periods of profound withdrawal, though when you go to see the fireworks with your mother and he isn’t there, you understand that whatever keeps him away is scary, that it is sad. When my father was a soldier, his prefrontal cortex wasn’t yet complete. He could not grow a full mustache, and when he came back home he had a cane and a DIY tattoo of a woman’s name. The cane was mostly for show. The woman was his first wife, and my mother was his third.

  * * *

  He’d spent his formative years in various homes in the Bible Belt with grim aunts who could trace their American lineage to the original bill of sale. He kept chickens while his mother, the sibling his aunts didn’t talk about, was in Louisiana slowly going mad. Th
ese were terms of art my father gave to me as I was learning to swim, his old man’s vocabulary having none of the clinical tact of the DSM-5. There were asylums, there was madness, and in the place of Germans, there were Krauts. His mother did not have a chemical imbalance, she had something fickle, something female, and so she returned to him with a severed frontal lobe. He was afraid of her like I would one day be afraid of him, because children, like dogs, are attuned to the signs of an impending storm. He became a man who always had girlfriends but didn’t much like them, a strapping sailor with a dampened drawl and a center part, his unruly hair slicked back with pomade. Then the war, shit and mud and some fusion of the two, the shipwreck’s centrifuge and the axon unraveled to the center of the nerve, my father the civilian, alarming the neighborhood with his midnight walks, shining his medals and trying to fool doctors with a carefully crafted limp. While he collected disability, it was not enough, and he had done it, the thing that most animals do but which only a few animals grieve, he had been up close and found it fetid and strange, killing for his country—a country that, once he was back home, reminded him that patriots could be shell-shocked, could be spangled in Arlington grass, but absolutely could not be black. And after having walked around with a child’s blood underneath his fingernails, at home the banks, the churches, the women, were nothing. He saw that the people at home did not see black men like him among them, that they were unprepared. So he came to New York armed only with confidence, and after two dead wives, my mother appeared before him on Broadway and 143rd, pretty and young and high.