Luster: A Novel

by Raven Leilani

  * * *

  At the end of the exhibit, I realize Special Collections is in the basement. I take the elevator down and my hands are shaking. I take off the fentanyl patch and put it in my purse. In the basement, I look through a thick pane of glass and count a dozen archivists. All of them are women. They don’t wear uniforms but they move uniformly, the microfilm and glass plate negatives poised in the hand without contact of the palm, the flatbed scanners and DSLRs splashing their faces with light. Beyond them, Eric removes his mask, pulls on a cotton glove. He opens a book underneath a mounted light, and when he lifts the page it is almost translucent, like onion skin. He beckons over the archivist closest to him, motions to the binding. She removes her mask and smiles. He puts his hand on her shoulder and how great is that, that in this shabby library basement, he is warm and involved, apparently the kind of boss who is also your friend.

  * * *

  When I turn around there is a woman sitting at what a moment ago was a vacant desk. She is a natural black girl, bright and woowoo, a cluster of cloudy amethyst around her neck. She asks me if I need help. I tell her that I need to speak with Eric, but when I turn and look through the glass, he is gone. I tell her I brought him a sandwich, and she looks me up and down and tells me he is out.

  * * *

  I take the sandwich and stop at a Duane Reade. I buy a Snapple and small bottle of Dr. Schulze’s Intestinal Formula #2, which boasts thirty-five million active cultures, and I ask for cash back. I check my email and there is a message from Panera Bread that reads, While there are currently no open positions as this time, we encourage you to apply in the future, a message from the Department of Education, from Bank of America, from my landlord, who has bad news about the security deposit, from a Nigerian prince, and from Blue Cross Blue Shield, which would like to remind me that per my firing, I will be uninsured in eleven days. On the bus back, I watch the road. The rain is heavy and there is a man running along the shoulder with a gas can in his hand. I think of my mother, who was sympathetic to a lot of things, to brown spider plants, to cats with alopecia, and most especially to car trouble. There was no hitchhiker she did not indulge, no man with a smoking Saab she was unwilling to help. Whenever I was in the car, I pleaded with her to keep going. I felt anxious around these men, and I struggled with what to say. But during her time as a dealer, an addict, and then a fervent Seventh-day Adventist, she was mellowed by the cosmic and by her prolonged chemical abuse, brimming with the grade of charisma you see in septuagenarian rock stars whose tepid late-career albums remind everyone they’re still alive, charisma that exists at the end of a liver, that has to do with acceptance, which incidentally is a tenet of Narcotics Anonymous and the SDA faith, wherein death is inevitable and complete. Except as a pious child, I could not feel casual about death. I had read Ecclesiastes, and the idea of death as nothingness terrified me. We picked up a man and he had a Bible in his hands. My mom was thrilled by the synchrony, but a mile away from the exit, I looked in the back seat and he was touching himself.

  * * *

  I return to the house by noon and sit in the garden. I dig a hole and find a smooth gray stone. I wash it in the bathroom and hold it inside my mouth. In the end, I put it on the windowsill. I go to my room and masturbate angrily to that picture of Eric in Greece, and when it doesn’t make me feel any better I wander around the house. Rebecca is asleep with the door open, and for a while I stand there and watch her. I take pictures of different items around the house—the KitchenAid, a bowl of nuts that are primarily nigger toes, a drawer of old duck sauce packets and pens. I take a few of the ballpoints and a couple of pieces of paper from the printer that has, for the length of my stay, remained unplugged. I retreat to my room and try to render the photos as realistically as I can. At three, I hear Akila come home from school and run up to her room. By the time Eric comes home, I have the KitchenAid down, though the beater looks a little weird. The house is quiet. When Eric was away, the house was filled with sound, Akila’s and Rebecca’s routines textured and discordant, water and glass, sticky sounds of trash and sparring gear and doorjambs swollen with heat, the mailman and the democratic socialist at the door, all the toilets at the mercy of a houseful of women, the sensory meridian of tangled jewelry, of bobby pins and linoleum, of dubbed anime and the neighbor’s dog, otherwise a soft cosine of electricity and digital noise. With Eric home, there is none of that. I listen for any movement in the house, but none of it is distinct. There are no running faucets or noisy floorboards that precede feet. We all just materialize. Halfway through a long shower, through the curtain, I see Eric’s silhouette. I don’t hear him come in, but I hear him lock the door. He stands there silently as I wash my hair. When I get out of the shower, he is gone.

  * * *

  The mornings are still and all the nights feel like Friday night, by which I mean they feel like the Sabbath, which, despite my hedonism, remains my body’s central quartz. When I kept the Sabbath, I did not yet have breasts. There were VHS tapes of devout animated cucumbers and my mother’s drawings of Lucifer, which bothered me until I had the vocabulary to know I was aroused. I was excited to explain the tenets of SDA to the kids in my new public school. I conceded that one of our early leaders invented cornflakes to treat masturbation, but asserted meditation on the natural environment as a form of self-love. It took a year before I realized my classmates’ questions were a sport. I didn’t take it personally. I tried harder, came to school with arguments already formed. A boy from the companion high school, an atheist who was four years my senior, pointed out my contradictions, and I went home and prepared more notes. The Sabbath itself was pristine. Of course I indulged loopholes. Sometimes I slept it away so I could avoid the boredom, sometimes I spent the day curating twelve-hour mixtapes of Christian rock. But most of the time, though I wasn’t allowed to dance and knew that everyone was having fun without me, I liked the quiet, the languor of a single hour, of a day when you are deliberate, thankful for what was made deliberately, retina and turnips and densely coiled stars, things so complex I could barely render them in paint. Though some things are not complex. Some things are accidents, and this is how it was filed with the insurance company when my mother wrecked the car. She didn’t come out of her room for four days. When I went inside, it smelled bad and she said that God was dead. My father took me to Friendly’s. A waitress dropped a tray of sundaes while he was holding my hand, and he crushed my fingers at the noise. He referred to my mother’s periods of catatonia as moods. He did not dare suggest we lift her up in prayer. Though he regaled each moony deaconess with stories of the work he’d done abroad, he did not pretend with me. My father did not believe in anything, and I was the only one who knew. To everyone else, my father was a God-fearing man. A charismatic servant with a troubled wife and a way of making women feel heard. On Friday nights such women would file into our home, and his office door would shut.

  * * *

  I talked to the atheist on the phone, at first about homework but then about other things. When I went to his house, he played King Crimson and I told him my mother did not believe in God. I kissed him on the mouth and he didn’t kiss me back. I understood that I had engaged seriously with someone who only engaged theoretically, and I was so humiliated by this that we never spoke again.

  * * *

  Now I am different. I have learned not to be surprised by a man’s sudden withdrawal. It is a tradition that men like Mark and Eric and my father have helped uphold. So I endure Eric’s silence, even as our paths cross in the morning and in the middle of the night. I don’t attempt to break it, though the longer it persists, the more it mutates. For a day or so, it becomes hilarious, and then a little erotic, a seething, suffocating thing that makes me aware of how long it’s been since I’ve been touched. I could find a local man to tide me over, but it feels like too much work. I’ve already done the work with Eric. He knows when I got my first period and I know he is decent to waitstaff, and I’m not interested in sucking the c
ock of a stranger who has potentially made a waitress cry. There is only so much I can do to save face. I am living in their house and eating their food. I am running out of money and I don’t know how long they will let this go on.

  * * *

  I try to be scarce. I spend my days making small still lifes of items in their house and playing video games with Akila, who favors console-based fighting where women disembowel each other with their bare hands. During these sessions, she is instructional but pitiless, adamant that I earn my win. We customize our costumes and weaponry and then she rips out my spine. In a week, I have calluses on my thumbs. I take the booklet and read through the character bios, each story originating with a single unlockable character who appears in the booklet as a silhouette. While we are in pursuit of this silhouette, Akila tells me that she does not like September, and in Louisiana, it is a big month for hurricanes. She says her mother was swept away in a flood. There is a FEMA jacket hanging in her closet and she used to wear it all the time, but after going to therapy for a while, she wears it only once a year.

  * * *

  I walk around the cul-de-sac, take long calls with Sallie Mae. I defer my student loans, schedule an appointment with a gastroenterologist in Hackensack. In the waiting room, I scan through the requirements for public assistance, and when I see the doctor he puts his finger in my asshole and tells me that he thinks we should run more tests. When I tell him my insurance expires in four days, he prescribes an OTC osmotic laxative that I can stir into tea. He asks that I come back once I have insurance again, and the plea is so sincere that when I visit the pharmacy to pick up my prescription, I wander the vitamin aisle and cry.

  * * *

  I am relieved to find that there are no family dinners. It reminds me of home, how everyone eats in a different room. Akila downstairs in front of the TV. Rebecca in the kitchen, standing up. A few times I see Eric make his plate and disappear into the basement, which is the only place in the house that is locked. Rebecca joins me for coffee in the morning but doesn’t talk. Most of the time she is either sleeping or in the morgue. With Eric in the house she is dimmer, more exact, her circuit brief and preordained, this clockwork so particular it feels precarious, vulnerable to a single, badly chosen word. I want to talk about how things were before Eric came back. How it has been two weeks since I rinsed the dye from her hair, and there are still traces of it between the bathroom tiles.

  * * *

  When the house is empty I take more photos of her things. With the last thirty dollars in my account I buy a twelve-count tin of Prismacolors and thick vellum bristol board. At night I open my window and work from the pictures, from the procession of glass and alloy and silk, textures defined principally by their fickle relationship to light and so as difficult to render as digital joints, her perfume a cold, narrow palette, her jewelry warm and wide, her clothes a little bit of both, the expression of weft and grain not dissimilar to hair. In between these sketches, there is a house. Clapboard and brass and turf, and even in this I see them, but I cannot see myself. For the first time I can capture knuckles and plastic, but there is the issue of my face. I still can’t manage a self-portrait. When I try, there is a miscommunication, some synaptic failure between my brain and my hand. I try to find another way toward the self-portrait. I close my door and destroy my room and take a picture of the mess. I approach the drawing optimistically, but I am not there. The next time the house is clear, I take an opposite tack and clean. I take out the garbage and then I take a picture of the bags on the curb. I clean the bathroom and take a picture of the tongue of hair I pull from the drain, and at night I render these pictures, hoping to see myself. When I don’t, when I have completed a series on folded laundry and grout and still am not there, I keep cleaning. And then one morning while I am shining the faucets, Rebecca tells me she is planning a party and she would like me to help. It is a party for Akila that Akila does not want. Akila says this explicitly as we are making our way through a new game, a turn-based RPG where the protagonist is an army mail clerk with amnesia. His only memory is of a boy from a small mountain town. As we draw closer to the first conflict of the war, the base is flanked by a long, alpine shadow. The non-playable characters are not subtle about it. A colonel whose pockets we emptied earlier in the game points to the shadow and says, Was that there before? As we climb the mountain, Akila says that Rebecca is throwing her a birthday party. She says that she would rather spend it alone. The controller vibrates in her hand. The vibration indicates the genesis of a new memory, a woman who is trying to put out a fire.

  * * *

  But Rebecca cannot be dissuaded. On Sunday we pile in the truck and drive to the skating rink. We park at the back entrance and bring the decorations inside. The rink appears to be owned by a happy family. Not one of them is over five feet tall. The father tries to be friendly as Eric is calibrating the helium tank, but this task has become so complicated that Eric’s laughter, which is meant to be polite, comes out more as an honest indication that he would like the man to go away. Though this was her idea, Rebecca is not much better. She bites her nails as one of the family’s teenage children explains the regulations of the party room. While I set out the napkins and paper plates, she is on the phone. She is talking in a low, threatening voice with the mothers of Akila’s guests, who all seem to have called with last-minute news. All the while, Akila is there, helping with the crepe and streamers. Her wig shifts when she bends down to put on her skates. Eric goes over to her and helps her tie them, and though my relationship with my father was not ideal, I recognize the look that passes between them, a look that is conspiratorial, that temporarily eschews the boundary between parent and child for the recognition of some mutual misery, in this case, a birthday party that neither of them wants to attend. The by-product of this alliance is that it often throws the other parent under the bus as a matter of course, though as a kid, this is what makes it great. When I was young, I didn’t understand it was cruel. My father’s remarks about my mother’s moods and Bible studies felt innocuous and brought some air in the room, his ambivalence about God appearing to be a welcome bit of levity as opposed to what it really was—a profound vacuum in the place where God used to go. During the years he killed for his country, he’d killed God, too, and he came back home inspired to make one of his own.

  * * *

  Only two kids show up. They arrive at the same time and look at each other as it dawns on them that they are the only ones. And they are late. Rebecca runs out of the party room with bloody fingernails and confetti in her hair and ushers them into the room where Akila is waiting in a blue party hat. There is another party across the hall composed entirely of senior citizens, and they are extremely loud. When Rebecca goes over to ask if they can keep it down, they say that no, they cannot. Members from the happy family keep popping in to ask if we are expecting more guests, and after a query from the smallest son, Eric emerges from his dark corner and says This is it, okay, and he doesn’t yell, but he is large and the optics are not great. The two guests make a valiant effort to talk to Akila, but the conversation always seems to fizzle out. The guests begin talking only to each other. And no one can tell what the piñata is supposed to be. Akila spends three minutes making direct contact, and though I have watched her break through boards with ease, the piñata won’t give. Eventually Rebecca just rips it down from the ceiling and tears it open with her hands. As she is doing this, the mother from the happy family comes in with the cake and the number of candles is wrong. At this point, everyone in the room has become so attuned to Rebecca’s growing fury that, upon the revelation about the candles, the room holds its collective breath. Rebecca stands motionless before the cake. For a while nothing happens, and then Eric laughs. And then Akila laughs and the room follows suit. High on having dodged that particular bullet, we all put on our skates and head out into the rink. The neighboring party is already out and having a time. It is three in the afternoon and they are all drunk. Akila goes out and skate
s by herself, and I roll up beside her so she won’t be alone, but she feels my charity and skates away. The neighboring party keeps giving the DJ candy bars, and so between the Spice Girls and Drake there is Paul Anka and Nat King Cole. Rebecca is making a show of having fun. She skates circles around Eric and tries to get him to play along, but he is very unstable and sticks to the sides. And of course, there is disco. The big ones—“YMCA” and “Bad Girls” and “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now,” songs that have transcended genre into concept, songs you don’t so much listen to as project your memory onto the wax, songs so fascistically joyful that when “That’s the Way” comes on I have no choice but to look at Eric to see if he is remembering with me, and he is not. He is on the side of the rink, looking at something on his phone. As “Whip It” emerges out of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” a chipped disco ball descends from the ceiling. But something is wrong. The motorized arm strains, and when I look over to the happy family, they are all craned over the dashboard by the register, readjusting the dials. Everyone pauses to watch, and so when the chain snaps, it does not feel like a technical failure so much as a deference to our collective will. Akila is waiting with outstretched arms. The force of it buckles her knees. She cradles the ball against her chest and looks into the glass. A stunned murmur ripples through the crowd, and everyone is still as she moves, her face dappled in the ball’s recycled light. It makes me think of the first time I saw her, the way she seemed slightly unreal, like a glitch, with her dark eyes and shiny, synthetic hair. Now, the dissonance feels dire. It weighs me down as I watch her glide to the edge of the rink, set the ball down, take off her skates, and ask if she can go home.