Luster(22)

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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.



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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.



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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.



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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.