Luster(24)

“Why did you call me?” I ask, mostly for something to do with my mouth.

“I don’t know. I think I was trying to understand it.”

“What?”

“Why he would choose you,” she answers quietly, most of her attention directed toward the task of positioning her hands underneath the brain. And when the brain comes out it is both smaller and less pink than I expected. She lingers, presses her finger against the seam. But from here she is all muscle memory, a moving artillery in a hazmat suit, the bone cutters and chisels and enterotomes moving in and out of her hands. Inside my suit, my body is vapor, but I don’t know how to leave. I might miss something. Because of an invisible suture along an eyelid, and the damp hair against Rebecca’s neck. Because in an hour, a man without a brain will be a man who looks like he can dream. We don’t speak but I know I am wanted exactly where I am, holding the radio, turning it up and down against her sounds of consent, Rebecca’s love for “Rich Girl” apparent in the soft tapping of her foot. We listen to the same commercials over and over again, and after she finishes, we go back into the other room. I take off my suit and change the channel to an AM station while she is showering. A voice says accept the lord Jesus as your true and she throws on her jacket and turns the radio off. Outside, most of the cars are gone. We share a single cigarette because she says it makes her feel like it doesn’t count. She says she is aware of the irony of being a medical examiner who smokes, but that for all the blackened lungs she’s seen, it is more disturbing to open the chest cavity of a veteran and find that it is pristine.

“Imagine living life so carefully that there are no signs you lived at all,” she says. “I thought I was going to be a surgeon. Then my first year of med school, we got our first cadavers, and there was so much data inside. You can be sure a patient will lie about how much they drink or how much they smoke, but with a cadaver, all the information is there.” She lights another cigarette and sighs. “It’s like walking through a stranger’s house and touching all their things.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, and she laughs.

“No, you’re not.” She looks at me for a while and starts her car from a remote on her key. I follow the headlights to a silver SUV. “You noticed our daughter. When you came to the house,” she finally says, and in this moment it becomes clear to me that despite this evening-long conspiracy, she is moving toward her most natural conclusion, which is to engage me not as a person who has just watched her dissect a man but as a person who is black, and who is, because of that, available for her support.

“Yes.”

“What did you think of her?”

“I don’t know. She seemed fine,” I say, though of course she did not seem fine. She seemed alone, like it had been years since anyone had done her hair.

“She doesn’t have any friends,” she says, the cigarette forgotten between her fingers.

“Oh,” I say, trying to show my disinterest, but the principle of the thing doesn’t prevent it from bothering me, this thing Eric failed to mention, the look in Akila’s eyes as she climbed the stairs. My desire to deny Rebecca this attempt to create a link where there is none is less pressing than my embarrassment for their daughter, who may or may not be the kind of kid who wants friends, but who almost certainly would hate her mother talking about it. But then I look at Rebecca’s face, and I look at her crooked cigarette, and it seems possible that the woman who chased me down the stairs and the woman who sawed through eight millimeters of skull are one and the same, a woman inclined to problem-solve by any means, so competent that any adjacent failure becomes her own. Obviously, I don’t relate. I take a moment to revel in the schadenfreude, but mostly I feel suckered into admitting it, that it matters, that I have thought about it, the apparent isolation of their child, a thing immediately recognizable to me for being myself that thing which is both hypervisible and invisible: black and alone. But at the same time I resent it, I feel competitive about our respective levels of despair, and so I tell her I have nowhere to go, which I mean to say matter-of-factly, but which comes out of my mouth as a hideous and sopping thing, the bisque underneath my toenails suddenly emblematic of my serial embarrassment, which Rebecca meets unflinchingly and without a single word of condolence, smoking her cigarette and inspecting her nails. She hangs in the silence, much like the way she did post-karaoke, and then she tosses the cigarette and tells me to get in the car.



* * *



So I put the bike in the trunk and we drive in silence toward the nearest docking station. We head out of the city and I am smitten with the AC, the soft orange lights along the dash, the Freon and wild cherry at the center of the new car smell. The spasm of the radio frequency around Rebecca’s FM preset and the long, sulfuric miles of sky beyond Weehawken, opening my eyes just as we pass through the tunnel, halfway into REM as Rebecca parks the car and walks up to the mailbox with Walker on the side, the act of her getting the mail such a sweet, quotidian thing that I pretend to be asleep.



* * *



She leads me up the stairs and into a guest room, where she does some business with a sheet, muttering about amenities and organic toothpaste and a neighbor’s dog. I offer a dutiful laugh that comes out dry and loud, exacerbating the spectacle of our mutual effort to be casual. Because I’m aware of the breadth of the house, even as I try to take up as little space as possible. I’m aware that the room is owned, each square foot considered and likely free of mice. In this room that no one sleeps in, there is still evidence of life. Department store stills of wet cobblestone and pitted fruit, moody Helmut Newtons of smoking women, drapes the same shade of mauve my mom used to paint the kitchen the day she killed herself, furniture with the too-balanced stretch marks of the deliberately distressed, this willingness to pay for degradation something I want to hate but actually relate to, the ficus, wicker, and ornamental glass all cherries on top, a cohesive domesticity that I find weird and a little threatening, but that fills me with the yearning to retrieve my toaster oven from storage and find a place to plug it in.