Luster: A Novel

by Raven Leilani

  * * *

  In the morning, I feel sick. I lie in bed all day and get up only to dry heave. At night Rebecca lets herself into my room and tells me to get dressed. She doesn’t say where we are going, so I put on a sequin dress and the highest heels I own. When I climb into her truck, she asks me if I’m cold. It is not a question. It is a commentary, but so is this dress. It is meant to say, your ambiguity is tiring. It is meant to say, this is what happens when you leave it up to my interpretation. She puts on the heat and turns the radio to Top 40, and the rotation is always the same, digressive low-frequency capitalism, commercials for tax assistance and sofas and farewell concert promos for the old heads of R&B and quiet storm, but as for the actual music, I don’t recognize a single thing. It occurs to me that I have been in Jersey too long. We are in midtown before I realize we are back in the city, and when I look down Sixth, the city actually feels like an island, besieged by hard, yellow water, receding slowly into the loam. And then we are at the hospital. As we take the elevator down to the morgue, I do feel a little stupid about my clothes. When Rebecca offers me a hazmat suit, I am grateful, but determined to remain impassive. Then she opens her locker and brings out an easel, a blank canvas, a steel palette, three paintbrushes, a palette knife, and some yellow, magenta, and cyan. I turn the brush around in my hand and look at the gold lettering on the stem. She opens the door to the morgue.

  “The brushes are badger hair. Is that okay?”

  “Yes,” I breathe, looking at the paints, which are as beautiful as the brushes. Pure, saturated linseed oils. As I’m looking through the supplies, she circles the cadaver and wrings her hands. She already looks like she is tired, but then she puts the radio on and gets her saw. She glances at me a little impatiently, and I realize I, too, am meant to start. I open the easel and set up my canvas. I mix some tertiary colors and make all of them hot, the magenta such a buttery high pigment that I can’t bring myself to cool it down. But after the initial rush of establishing my palette, I look at the cadaver and my stomach turns. It isn’t the body. It’s the audience. Rebecca proceeds as if I am not there, but when I turn to my canvas, I feel her eyes. She tells me to come closer and says to no one in particular: White, male, eighty-seven, coronary occlusion. Then she opens the chest and brings out the heart, which is shiny and large and weeping yellow plaque. I do my initial sketch of the body in watered-down cyan, and as I go to fill in the flesh, I find she works faster than I can accommodate. One moment the body is whole, and the next it is turned out like a rind.

  * * *

  The painting is muddy and full of nerves, but inside there is something exact, and after she showers and we drive home, there is a trail of sequins leading to my room. Next time, I put on a T-shirt and jeans. I bring some graphite and a jar of turpentine. I program the radio with a few of my own presets, and Rebecca doesn’t protest. As we enter the Holland Tunnel the lights on her dashboard flare. She tells me to ignore it, that her truck has been crying wolf for two years, but as we pull into the hospital, the engine makes a human sound. We put on our suits and I unpack my supplies. She opens the door, and as I’m mixing, she is collecting the large intestine into a silver pan. I get close and she says: White, male, eighty-nine, prostate cancer. I do my best not to think too much about it, but it is hard not to take the point of the surgery scars between the rectum and bladder, which is that he tried, and he failed. Of course, this is what Rebecca loves about the work, the stories the bodies tell. She believes the best way to see how a thing is made is to take it apart. She says she was a kid who dismantled all her toys, that it disturbed her mother but her father understood and started buying her things she could assemble from scratch—clocks and cars and model airplanes.

  * * *

  Rebecca smiles at my depiction of a brain that she cuts in half, which, from an aerial view, looks like a spaceship, or a root vegetable. We listen to the radio, and during commercial breaks she tells me more stories in her terse, non sequitur way. Like this: There was an explosion at the crematorium. Someone forgot to take the pacemaker out. Or this: Da Vinci injected molten wax into the cavities of the brain and put the negative image down in ink. However, I am not inventing the MRI. I am grappling with the tendons of the hand. The masters were masters because their anatomical vocabularies were large, because they understood the lateral, posterior, and anterior aspects of the shoulder, which ultimately helped them depict how Jesus might actually hang on the cross, but there is more language within even the respiratory system than I could ever understand. A week later, Rebecca has an obese Vietnam vet with hyper-inflated lungs (white, male, sixty-three, asthma attack), and while she is as strong as a woman who regularly heaves postmortem weight would need to be, she can’t move him by herself. I leave my canvas and at her instruction I take the legs, and we move him as one might move a couch up the stairs.

  * * *

  Beyond this, all my joy is underneath my palette knife, the folds of the body more pronounced and so more fun to paint, the palette overwhelmingly Caucasian, and so a little tedious, though inside the body there is room to experiment with blues and dark, cool reds. The cadavers in Rembrandt’s paintings were all criminals. The subjects are really the learned men around the corpse. Within my paintings, there is always a half-articulated form of a woman, too mobile to be opaque, craned over the body with forceps in her hand. If she sees herself there, she doesn’t mention it. But there are moments when she looks over my shoulder and hums her approval, which of course I resent, but also, a little bit, love.

  * * *

  The second leading cause of death for veterans is suicide, and this is what Rebecca says to me when the next body is young. I bring out my paints, and Rebecca leaves the radio off. After, we both take a shower and we sit in the car with wet hair. We share a cigarette, and two miles from home, we get stranded on the side of the road. While she is on the phone with AAA, she takes a gun out of the glove compartment and asks me to put it in her bag. I turn it over in my hands and try to seem like I haven’t seen it before, though because she has seen my paintings, I know she must be aware of the extent to which I have cataloged everything in the house. As it was when I first held it, the gun is crude and prototypical, the barrel thick and square. I unload the cartridge and slide it into her bag. When the tow truck comes, we stand on the shoulder and her hair keeps blowing into her face.

  “The painting of your mother is your best one,” she says, and I think of the Polaroid camera, of my excitement to capture an unwilling subject while she slept. I think of the photo and its swift revision of a sleeping woman into a dead one. Because in the last days of her life, my mother didn’t sleep. There were only prayer circles and essential oils in Tupperware, Seventh-day Adventists with handbells in the living room playing “Power in the Blood” as my father, who wanted to be watching the Yankees game, dabbed myrrh on my mother’s skinny brown wrists. The night before my mother killed herself, a deaconess coerced me into taking the F-sharp handbell, and during the segue from “Amazing Grace” to “How Great Thou Art,” I looked at my mom and saw clearly her desire to die. As some tone-deaf person began to tell the story of Lazarus, the World Series was playing on a TV upstairs. A ball disappeared in the Bronx and a dead man came forth, and the story always ends there, optimistically, in the middle, with a miracle so high-profile it becomes the catalyst for the Crucifixion, which is technically a fair exchange, man for man, though three days before his death Jesus visited Lazarus again and you have to wonder what he said, if he looked at what Lazarus had done in the meantime and began to question what he was dying for.

  * * *

  When Rebecca and I get home, we start to take off our shoes and we both have kind of a hard time of it, which at first seems coincidental until I feel my own effort to extend this task, and I see that she is doing the same, the silence in the house such a sobering shift from the side of the road that I feel embarrassed just to look at her. Before it becomes ridiculous, she steps out of her shoes. She busies her
self with the mail, and I go over and take it out of her hands, though when I look down at it and see that it is Con Ed I don’t know what to do. I look at her face and see her irritation, but underneath it something curious and more fixed, and I wrap my arms around her and regret it until she reciprocates, which she takes her time to do, her body shockingly hard as she pulls me in and runs her fingers through my hair, all her ingredients—the formalin and ash and under-eye cream—clarified at close range.

  * * *

  The next afternoon, Eric and I check into a Days Inn. We are both tired and there is something wrong with his back. When we get up to our room, a NARA associate calls him and he spends a while talking about the integrity of a Polynesian tapestry, which apparently has been beset by archival moths. Initially, these phone calls didn’t bother me, but as they increase in frequency, I feel these are conversations I am meant to hear, which make apparent his busy-ness and my fortune, to be worthy of this interruption to his day. When he ends the call, we share a four-ounce bottle of gin and I walk on his back for a while and consider the blueprint for the rest of our stay. It occurs to me that maybe he is not interesting and is just older than me, someone who has blown through his budget for failure and landed on the other side with a 401(k). When we have sex it lasts so long that in the middle of it, when it has become less about feeling and more about ETA, we look at each other and call it. I get dressed and tell him I’m going to get some ice, but instead I go to the gym center and lift the barbell as many times as I can. When I return to the room, he is unresponsive on the bathroom floor.

  * * *

  I call reception and an associate comes up and says that it happens all the time. When I climb into the ambulance, I see the EMTs trying to parse our asymmetry. They ask how we are acquainted, what we were doing, and if there were any drugs involved. When they ask for his birthday, I take a stab in the dark. At the hospital, he starts to regain consciousness. I have no choice but to call Rebecca, and when Rebecca arrives, she won’t look at me. She asks the nurse a handful of questions in a jargon I don’t understand. We stand outside the curtain while Eric provides a urine sample, and the doctor comes around and says syncope is very common, and that because of Eric’s low heart rate, he should be careful about rising up too abruptly, which he can do by counting to five before he gets to his feet. After we return to the house, there is no doting. Eric gets out of the car, and Rebecca looks at me in the rearview and tells me that she is going straight to work.

  “I didn’t mean for this to happen,” I say.

  “Is there anything that you do mean?”

  “This isn’t my fault.”

  “The slogan of your generation.”

  “Why does it have to be my generation? Why can’t it be me, specifically?”

  “Because you are not specific,” she says. “All of this, it has been done.” She looks at me through the mirror and taps a cigarette out of the carton and into her hand. “This isn’t serving me anymore.”

  “What?”

  “You have a month, and then I want you out,” she says, and then she turns the radio on, and it is a song that we listen to often in the morgue, but there is no recognition on her face. When I get out and watch her drive away, her truck is still making that sound. Inside, Eric and Akila are playing Mario Kart. It is unsurprising that he chooses to be Mario and can’t stay on Rainbow Road. As he benefits not at all from Mario Kart’s affirmative action and disappears into the dark, I look over at him and I think about the American Library Association certification I found next to his insurance card. I think about the way he looked on the bathroom floor, his open mouth and soft genitals and the veins underneath his pale Lutheran skin, and as a computer-generated Peach and Luigi roll through Moo Moo Farm, I think of how keenly I’ve been wrong. I think of all the gods I have made out of feeble men. I go to my room and get stuck in a Wikipedia hole about religion on Tatooine. I finish my costume and sit in the dark in my metal bikini, and in the morning I stumble to the bathroom and take the pregnancy test. I am inclined to pray, but on principle, I don’t. God is not for women. He is for the fruit. He makes you want and he makes you wicked, and while you sleep, he plants a seed in your womb that will be born just to die.

  8

  On the morning of Comic Con, Eric comes in from a run and says that the neighbor’s dog has been shot. The block is inundated with police. The old woman stands in the street with an upturned doghouse in her arms, and an officer tries to wrestle it away. Beyond them, the dog is covered with a sheet. I watch from my window, and the top of Rebecca’s head is briefly visible as she steps outside to retrieve the paper. When I go downstairs, she is removing the sections she doesn’t want to read—politics, sports, the horoscope. I take the horoscope and there is a conjunction between Venus and Mars that only the East Coast can see. Outside, a garbage truck tries to maneuver around the police. A harried garbageman dismounts and an officer tells him that he cannot collect the trash today.

  * * *

  Rebecca smoothes a crease from the entertainment section. A starlet is dead. A starlet is breastfeeding on the beach. Her mouth is open and her eyes are closed. Since she asked me to leave, moments come when I think there will be some final, significant word that passes between us, but there is nothing. I want to tell her that I have been painting. I have not made any headway in finding a job or a place to stay, but something is happening on my canvas, whatever soft, human calculus makes a thing alive, gives a painted eye roots and retina and makes it look like it can see. I stay up with a secondhand edition of Human Anatomy for Artists, and I start with the cranial bones and keep going until I make it to the teeth. Of course, it isn’t the same. I watch her drive off to work, and I think of the damp end of our shared cigarette, of the tiny morgue shower stall and her dainty feet below the curtain, of her bone saw, a discontinued edition designed specifically for a woman’s hand. I wake up from a dream where she is trying to put a lung into a jar that is too small, and all day everything smells pickled, though this is probably just the turpentine. I look at cheap studios in Newark and Bensonhurst, but I only have enough money for two months. I only have enough money for a month and an abortion, though on this I go back and forth. I feel unlike myself, spry and nocturnal and inclined to believe that this pregnancy is part of the reason my paintings are any good. Because I can’t sleep knowing what is happening inside my body, and when I don’t sleep, I paint. I have never been so tired. I have never been so prolific. What if I make the appointment and they ask if I’ve done it before? What if I am a woman who has to do this twice?

  * * *

  I go to my room and put on the iron bikini and secure the chain around my neck. I look at my stomach in the mirror and feel like there is something inside me already trying to make its way out. Though it is the size of a lentil, I feel a monstrous new level of abdominal antagonism that I cannot solve with ginger root. Rebecca comes into my room with Windex and newspaper. She is half in, half out of her costume, one eye heavily shadowed. Since she asked me to leave, Rebecca lets herself into my room more frequently. Never during the moments I’d like. Acrid, early-morning hours when I haven’t yet brushed my teeth. I leave my paintings out, hoping she will see, but she doesn’t say anything. Now she comes into the bathroom and begins to clean the mirror. She is careful not to meet my eyes.

  * * *

  I think I could have this baby out of spite. My parents made me on purpose and look what happened. Spite is more sustainable. It gives you something to prove, and what better way to prove yourself than through a child, my personal failure amended by such heroic child-rearing that my kid recognizes patterns even before his skull has fused. A genius child born out of a functional grudge who will accompany me to Eric’s funeral, where Rebecca will be shriveled and veiled. When I begin to braid my hair, she watches me, and I try to remain aloof, but I am a little preoccupied with the memory of my first abortion, which I don’t think about regularly and occasionally even forget until I open Twitter and have
a run-in with a Young Republican. I was sixteen. I could not have been a mother. The women in my family maybe should not have been mothers. This is not so much a judgment as a fact. They were dying inside their own bodies, and now all these dead components are my inheritance.

  * * *

  When the neighbors have all returned to their houses and one of the officers has finally pried the doghouse from the old woman’s arms, Akila comes into my room with a hot comb and lets down her hair, which in a month has grown thick and kinky. She is already in her Starfleet uniform, which we purchased from the Party Supply store at the eleventh hour, and which she is not particularly happy about, though as I turn on the stove and put the hot comb to the flame, Akila summons Uhura, practices words in Tamarian, Ferengi, and, of course, Klingon. Over the last couple of months, we have updated her hair care through careful trial and error, even as we were routinely waylaid by suburban convenience stores stocked exclusively with Caucasian shampoos. Once, in Hoboken, we discovered a single bottom shelf with old pomade and congealed Cantu. There were a few trips to Brooklyn, one for oils and one for butters, the homemade and saran-wrapped, the saditty and petroleum-free, Akila’s sopping twist-outs transformed by a half percentage point of fall humidity until we forwent the apple cider vinegar and just cracked a few eggs over her head. Now we have a routine: coconut oil, manuka honey, and two firm Bantu knots before bed. As I go through her hair with the hot comb, I imagine its future iterations—the five-dollar ponies and mangled yaki and rainbow Kanekalon and the certainty of a post-breakup big chop, and I wonder where inside this spectrum she will ultimately land. As we are finishing up, Eric comes down the stairs and comments on the smell, but when he sees the source, he seems to gather that it is Something Black, and he is contrite.