Luster: A Novel

by Raven Leilani

  * * *

  He is already in costume, and out of all of us, his physique is closest to the material, a supple inverted triangle that is practically canon, though he has gone for the updated costume, the muted ballistic nylon instead of shiny spandex, which feels less patriotic, but along with his whole working-father vibe is maybe the Captain America you get when the country has, relative to the rest of the world, entered its surly teenage years. As he prepares a cup of tea, I imagine our child, Eric’s bone structure, my dysfunctional bowels. I have no doubt that a boy would be beautiful. A girl might have some things to overcome. When Akila is gone, he pours some whiskey into his tea and tries to secure the last component of his costume, a harness he is too drunk to put on. I offer to help and he waves me away, but after a while he gives up and sags into a chair.

  * * *

  He has been this way since his trip to the ER: squirrelly, prone to random displays of machismo, less discreet about how much he drinks. When we met, his drinking always felt situational, a thing he did because we were out. It felt like a necessary preamble, routine, like putting on a sock before a shoe. I should have noticed sooner that some things should not be routine. Looking at him now, it feels impossible that I ever could have missed it. I think about our child again, and this time a slew of predispositions undermine that gorgeous Punnett square. A child with profound narcotic inclinations, with generations of inherited trauma, with questionable brain chemistry and a lifetime of some ceaseless prefrontal seesaw, with my flat, rectangular feet and our mutual taste for disco, which in the year 2045 is likely to be even less cool, Eric’s giant umlaut genes meaning nothing if our child grows up in America and drowns in his or her allotted levels of racism-induced cortisol as the earth’s sun slowly dies. The only reason I want to tell him is because of the improbability of it, this miraculous fluke that has come about even through the severe limitations of our bodies, a fluke that makes me ill but also dreamy, like something can be different, new. It is not so bad to be an incubator. Everything I eat and drink feels like it amounts to something. Oysters, chocolate, mangos drenched in chili oil, all for a purpose and all excused, an education for the palate I am building with the most acute iterations of sugar and salt. But conversely, it is terrible being an incubator. Everything I do feels like it should amount to something.

  * * *

  As I am getting the harness over Eric’s head, Rebecca comes down the stairs in her costume, and like Eric, she has chosen the updated version, fishnets and coochie cutters instead of the jester’s romper, though she has stuck with the mallet instead of the baseball bat. Originally, it was meant to be a couple’s costume, but when Eric put on the clown makeup, for a night, no one in the house could sleep. Either way, Rebecca’s Harley Quinn is so primary, so sullen, it looks best without a counterpart, which is to say that this cosplay does not really suit her, and no cosplay in which she is supposed to be sidekick would. She puts the mallet down on the island, takes a sip of Eric’s tea, and wrinkles her nose. However, she says nothing. She opens the window and sprays pink dye onto the ends of her pigtails.

  * * *

  Outside, the police are interviewing neighbors and the old woman is wandering around the yard in a nightgown. With the window open, the room fills with bleating sirens and neighborhood chatter, but above it all, I hear the old woman wailing. Big, airless sobs that stop Akila as she is coming back down the stairs. She goes over to the window and watches with a knowing reverence. She has mentioned in passing the things that were lost in the storm, that one of these things was a dog. No doubt Rebecca is thinking of this as she steers Akila away from the window and into the car. We are late, and the drive into the city is already looking bad. Eric slings his shield over his shoulder and opens the route on his phone; it is red all the way to Thirty-Fourth Street. When we pile into the car, a police officer is two houses down, talking with the neighbor who, for the entirety of my stay, has never said hello. Rebecca waves to the police on our way out and the officer looks up at her, at the mallet between her knees, and slowly waves back.

  * * *

  On the road, everyone gets a turn with the aux cord. Eric’s French house and his eyes in the mirror seeking recognition for deep cuts, Akila’s dreary Japanese ska, and Rebecca’s mystifying choice of talk radio instead of the music she ostensibly likes, though folkloric thrash is hardly needed when you are on the New Jersey Turnpike in the sideways rain. Akila hands me the aux cord and I go through my phone and try to find something suitable, but all my playlists seem inappropriate—the one I exercise to, the one that is mostly sample-heavy trip-hop I would theoretically have sex to, though most of the time I just end up getting high and looking at unsubtle dystopian memes about how social media is changing the length of the human neck. I flirt briefly with making a statement through my song selection, but I am too old. However, when I see I somehow have half of Phil Collins’s Face Value downloaded to my phone, it turns out I am not. I put on “In the Air Tonight” and savor the studious readjustments that happen in the car, Akila pointedly turning to her phone, Eric’s posture high and rigid as the E-ZPass scans and we cruise through the toll. Of course Rebecca is less obvious, but as we enter the city, she turns to look out of the window and smiles. But after three minutes and fifteen seconds have elapsed, I regret playing the song. It reminds me of how alien their house felt, how quickly it began to feel like mine.

  * * *

  In the city, there is a smell. Hell’s Kitchen, a rotting, fungal fruit. Midtown, smelling of mildew and old pecorino. In the two months I’ve been gone, I forgot that this is what happens in New York when it rains, all the animal and human excretions made into a piping soup. I open the window a little bit and immediately there is a glaze on my face. I have missed it so much, the way the city tilts for all its events. The Puerto Rican Day Parade and the airborne brass of an approaching float. The West Indian Parade and Eastern Parkway’s glitter dunes. SantaCon. But today it is Comic Con, and as we approach the convention center, the founders of social awkwardness are climbing from hot fifteen-dollar double-decker buses, towing cases of hardware down Ninth, coming out of the Skylight Diner in their goggles and crinoline skirts, excited to hear about the processes behind their respective cosplays. A man saunters down Tenth in a ball of tinsel and raw cotton, and half of a Final Fantasy VII party is cheering him on. Akila rolls her window down and takes it all in with big eyes. She adjusts her costume and pins on her Command Division badge, and when we stop at a red light, there is a black girl in the car next to us cosplaying as Geordi La Forge. When she sees us, she lowers her visor, leans out of the window, and reaches for Akila’s hand. But the light turns green and the car turns onto a side street, her frantic scream of Live long and prosper! blunted by city noise.

  * * *

  We have some trouble finding parking. All the garages are full of black SUVs, double-, triple-parked, valets with shiny upper lips coming out with chipped “at capacity” signs, Rebecca navigating the big back end of her truck through midtown with one hand as Eric campaigns for one of three mythic parking spots that were always open between the years of 2002 and 2008. We go to one of the spots and there is a fire hydrant there. Akila leans in between them, her hair already high and wild, and says the first panel starts in ten minutes. Rebecca pulls up to the convention center and tells us to get out, and that she will find a parking spot and catch up later, and I have this feeling, which is 78 percent nausea but 22 percent the dark city ozone opening up to let in a single frond of sun, as Rebecca beckons me over and adjusts the top of my iron bikini, which has been hanging on one hook. She presses her hand into the center of my back and says, There, and when I look back at her, she has already turned back to the wheel, already begun hunting for a spot farther uptown as Eric, Akila, and I head into the Comic Con holding pen, a one-hundred-yard tunnel to the Javits Center where a Gundam is Juuling and two pink Power Rangers are pulling cigarettes out of their boots.

  * * *

  At my heigh
t, the holding pen is principally a parade of armpits and old CO2, every mage in sight regretting their cape, the city’s moisture pooling into these few dank square feet, everyone rouged and slathered in unicorn spit, a Mario and Luigi arguing about something that happened in Paris and someone’s damp scapula pressing against my cheek. You get the feeling that the crowd has become so large and intertwined that the physics are intricate and deeply interior, as if a single load-bearing Darth Maul is holding the whole thing upright. Inside the convention center, the humidity changes form, becomes more human, that specific feeling of smelling a new friend’s house quadrupled and condensed, attendees moving to the walls to peel off their ponchos and snap jeweled bracers and web-shooters to their wrists, everywhere you turn someone putting on stockings and rifling through bags full of swag.

  * * *

  It is Saturday. Some hard-core, purple-badged fans have been here since Thursday, and a pair of such fans carve through the crowd with ease, their faces not sleepy so much as smoothed by some profound pleasure that we, as one- to three-day pass holders, see and take as an indication to move aside. There are also babies. A toddler is held above the crowd, Simba-like, and he yawns and pulls at what I assume are noise-canceling headphones. Then he is gone, and as I am trying to find him, for no reason but to see that Space Ghost onesie again, Eric lifts me off my feet and turns me around so that I am facing him, and while this is annoying, I’m also going to miss this when I’m gone, how he used to do this when we were out and about and I wasn’t paying enough attention to him—a more rude iteration of snapping one’s fingers, forgivable only for the initial jolt, when I am just there in midair. He brings out a Ziploc bag and tells me he is going on a trip. He asks if I want to join, and I decline. He shrugs and eats the gold caps when Akila’s back is turned, and then she leads us to the first panel on her schedule. We join hands and move through the crowd as a single, unbalanced chain, Akila at the front, Eric at the back, chewing and holding his shield above his head.

  Halfway there, everything is pudding and hands keep coming out of the dark. Because Eric is Captain America. Kids want to take pictures with him, and saying no feels very against the spirit of the thing. He lifts someone’s child into his arms, and in the moment before the flash, the kid looks at him and seems uncertain, aware of the pretend, that the eyes behind the mask belong to an archivist from New Jersey. Akila stands off to the side and looks at her watch, which she borrowed from Rebecca specifically for this day. Against the polyester of her Starfleet uniform, the watch is conspicuous, a grown-up piece of jewelry that makes her seem younger, but also like she has the right to be managing us, though Eric is enjoying the attention too much to care. When we get to the panel, we are fifteen minutes late. We stand in the back as an exclusive clip is coming to a close, and Akila pulls one of her eyelashes out. I want to tell her it’s okay, but I don’t know how to interact with her at this level of frenzy. I thought I had gotten the gist of it the previous week, after someone left an unkind review of her fan fiction regarding some point of canon she’d gotten wrong, and she was, for two days, too depressed to eat, but within this unique environment, her fandom is so violent it feels combustible.

  * * *

  Every person in the room is shiny and taut, breathing through their mouths and looking toward the stage, where the actors, writers, or producers are either very excited or very put off by the energy of the room. It’s my first time, a voice actor says, and everyone else on the panel laughs. I watch this show with my mom and I wondered how a lycanthrope can carry a robotic fetus to term, a fan says, and the room is silent. There is the feeling of conspiracy, glitches in the matrix abundant and kept like an inside joke, the same eight fans who make it to the mics, the villains who gather to admire themselves, universes flattened and set beside each other, long anime sagas truncated by the overlap, nine Gokus and three Kid Flashes, some costumes so professional that for a moment you believe a bandicoot might be able to wear jeans. And all the Harley Quinns. I keep thinking I see Rebecca, but none of them are her. I tap one on the shoulder and when she turns around, she is juggling three grenades filled with laughing gas. An associate at a VR booth wipes a headset down with an antimicrobial napkin and hands it to Akila, and Eric and I look over some paperwork. We confirm that Akila does not have epilepsy or paroxysmal positional vertigo, and Eric makes a show of reading the fine print, which says the VR company isn’t liable should something go wrong. When the game has started, Eric turns to me and his pupils are enormous.

  “It isn’t what you thought it would be,” he says, raking his fingers through his hair.

  “No,” I answer, and he nods and becomes preoccupied with a pretty VR tech who is standing by with a blue bucket until someone yells Veronica! and she rushes off with the bucket in tow. As we watch Akila play, it feels like we are witnessing half of a private conversation, the exaggerated physicality that is meant to compensate for what is not actually there, a little daffy, but kind of sweet when you see the moment she truly surrenders to this suspension of disbelief. A VR tech places a gun into her hands, and she shoots it into the air. Around us, the con is still seething, stormtroopers and wizards and gems funneling in from the street and bringing in that copper city air, the body positivity so palpable it feels boastful, like everyone has, for a moment, become the old man in the gym locker room whose scrotum you cannot avoid, though you feel the anxiety in it, that like Akila and her chunky, borrowed watch, everyone is sensitive to the time, a little worried about how Sunday is slowly closing in and so in the throes of a frantic, temporary state, high on some unseen communal steroid and trying to make the most of the day.

  * * *

  A few feet away, the silicon torso of a robot is open to the glittering transistors that form its heart. A robot’s heart is the brain, Eric mutters into my ear. Someone’s baby is crying. An antiseptic male voice comes from the ceiling and says willkommen! A reaper emerges from the crowd with glossy, black wings, and Akila takes off her headset and runs dizzily over. She puts her arms around me and says, I am so happy right now. I do my best to be cool about this contact, but it has never happened before, and I pat her awkwardly on the shoulder, terrified that a too-enthusiastic reciprocation will alert her to her error, like the way a white person might raise a jungle cat from birth and be pals for a time until the cat turns five and realizes it is, in fact, a carnivore. If I’m honest, all my relationships have been like this, parsing the intent of the jaws that lock around my head. Like, is he kidding, or is he hungry? In other words, all of it, even the love, is a violence.

  * * *

  Before I go into the booth, I ask Akila to keep an eye on her father. I put on my headset, and at first the only sensation is the warmth of the cushion on my forehead, like a toilet seat that has only recently been vacated, but then I am standing in someone’s living room, and then there is a prompt that asks if I would like to watch TV. So I sit on a crudely rendered couch and watch three minutes of Law & Order: SVU in a vacated house where there are flowers on the coffee table that I can actually tear apart, which is more thrilling than Mariska Hargitay and Ice-T in the Hamptons interviewing a yuppie who almost certainly put all these women’s heads on sticks. In the next demo, I walk around an empty monochrome hospital, and some kind of mist is coming in through the vents. I go into the surgery theater, and a monkey in a blood-spattered apron is taking a Bing Crosby record out of a sleeve. When “White Christmas” comes on, I turn and run. I initiate the last demo, a space walk where I move between six of Jupiter’s seventy-nine moons. On the second moon, Europa, which is covered in ice, another explorer emerges from the dark and begins to walk toward me. Above my head, some kind of stellar void is developing. When the explorer reaches me, the sequence ends and when I take the headset off, Rebecca is there with her own headset in her hands. She looks rough, her makeup runny around the eyes.

  “Eric is sick,” she says dryly, and when I turn, Eric is a few booths down, puking into one of those blue buckets. Whi
le he retches, Akila holds his shield and checks her watch.

  “Shrooms,” I say, and Rebecca nods. Her hands are shaking. “Are you okay?”

  “Perfect,” she says, as Akila hands off the shield. She and Akila slip wordlessly into the crowd, and I go over to Eric, who is in the recovery area having some juice. I find some loose Tums in my purse and give them to him.

  “What, you don’t like me anymore?” he says after a long silence. The way he says it, it’s as if some nicer half of a conversation has already occurred, and now we are here. He gets up to go to the bathroom and I follow him inside. He turns and gives me a look, but his privacy, and the privacy of the Aquaman at the urinal, means nothing to me.

  “I don’t know if I ever liked you,” I say, and bathroom acoustics being what they are, the declaration is magnified and that much more unkind, which makes me feel bad until I see that he is missing a shoe, and I feel it anew, this terrible disappointment in myself that I am happy to take out on him. He is the most obvious thing that has ever happened to me, and all around the city it is happening to other silly, half-formed women excited by men who’ve simply met the prerequisite of living a little more life, a terribly unspecial thing that is just what happens when you keep on getting up and brushing your teeth and going to work and ignoring the whisper that comes to you at night and tells you it would be easier to be dead. So, sure, an older man is a wonder because he has paid thirty-eight years of Con Ed bills and suffered food poisoning and seen the climate reports and still not killed himself, but somehow, after being a woman for twenty-three years, after the ovarian torsion and student loans and newfangled Nazis in button-downs, I too am still alive, and actually this is the more remarkable feat. Instead I let myself be awed by his middling command of the wine list.